The problems of rhetorical summitry - Reagan's remarks in planning the Moscow Summit discussed

National Review, June 10, 1988 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

THE PROBLEMS OF RHETORICAL SUMMITRY

Although a White House representative was quick to tell the press that Ronald Reagan's posy to Gorbachev was unrelated to the forthcoming Summit conference, the headlines were unambiguous: REAGAN CREDITS GORBACHEV ON HUMAN RIGHTS. An unidentified spokesman for the Administration quickly supplanted the interpretation of the first spokesman to say that, indeed, the speech had been a "conscious attempt" to strike a conciliatory note in advance of the Summit, and it can't reasonably be supposed that the President had any other purpose in mind. Just two weeks ago Reagan accused the Soviets of trying to "prop up their discredited, doomed puppet regime" in Kabul despite Soviet agreement to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. That speech had brought forth from Gorbachev thunderous denunciations of the usual sort.

The diplomatic world winces when occassionally reminded of Mr. Reagan's rhetoric on the subject of Soviet domestic practices in the field of human rights. Two weeks ago, in a public forum at Texas A & M, a former British prime minister was asked how he could account for the poll published six months ago revealing that the majority of Britons deemed Reagan a greater threat to the peace of the world than Gorbachev. He replied that of course it was untrue that Reagan threatened the peace of the world, but that many Europeans were still traumatized "by the President's reference to the Soviet Union's `evil empire' a few years ago." Ten minutes after tendering his explanation for British resentment of Reagan's rhetorical excess, in answer to another question asking what should be the goal of the West in its treatment of the Soviet government, Lord Callaghan ventured that the primary Western concern should be not only with peace, but with human rights. "We have got to tell the Soviet government that we cannot consider it to be civilized until it grants human rights to its citizens."

A participant in the forum observed that Lord Callaghan was evidently attempting to formulate something between an "evil empire" and an uncivilized. An African tribe given, say, to random genocide and wholesale slaughter like Idi Amin's would be (check one, but not both), 1) "evil,"or 2) uncivilized. Hard concentration on the difference between the two propels us to eristic verbal invention. One might say that the Indians who in the eighteenth century insisted on burning the live widow in the course of interring the dead husband were uncivilized--i.e., they did not know better. But the Soviet government is not readily likened to those who are uncivilized as a result of cultural ignorance. The Soviet government is the heir of a body of humane literature merely suggested by the names of Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoi. The Soviet government signed the Helsinki Accords, which promised to enforce those rights the Soviet government ratified in 1973 when it ratified the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, which re-ratified rights guaranteed under the Soviet constitution of 1936. The gentlemen who preside over the Soviet government are not ignorant of the Ten Commandments or of the work of the Biblical prophets, of Locke, Blackstone, and Mill. The Soviet government is barbarous because it chooses to be barbarous.

All of which is intensely relevant to the conduct of international relations, in part because we desire freedom for Soviet citizens, in part because the energizing animus of American foreign policy requires that we focus on Soviet practices, rather than on Soviet conceits. The Soviet government is a credible threat to the American way of life only for so long as we understand the searing differences between life there, and life over here.

None of this disputes Mr. Reagan's cautious commendations of the slight improvements in Soviet life under Gorbachev. But to encourage the illusion that a year or two of glasnost and perestroika alter the basic recognition of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian society is to pour sand into the eyes of the West. The West does poorly enough in its foreign policy when our eyes are fully open, as they were when the Soviet Union declared martial law in Poland, invaded Afghanistan, where it killed over one million people, and subsidized the Hitlerian policies of Fidel Castro and Pol Pot. Mr. Reagan must not go to Moscow ready to stress the showcasing of glasnost by a government (evil? uncivilized?) that disposes of five hundred million times the explosive power of the bomb that went off over Hiroshima, aimed at--us.