Selective pernicious amnesia is the endemic disease of Establishment politics. Its symptoms are evident whenever the Soviet Union does something awful—like delivering six sophisticated Su-24D bombers to Libya, as it did in March 1988, or excusing the sinking of an advanced Soviet attack submarine in the Norwegian Sea last April, a submarine that, the Soviet Union admitted, carried two torpedoes with nuclear warheads at a time when our Navy was no longer placing nuclear torpedoes on its submarine fleet.

Within days after such peace-endangering outrages, and after a few ritualistic criticisms, a great silence descends, and within a few weeks these Soviet breaches of the peace are forgotten.

At the risk of causing offense I want to recall something that the Soviets unsuccessfully tried to pull off last May and that is already forgotten. The coup needs a little background because it deals with the light-year distance between Soviet rhetoric and Soviet deed that still exists, even in the Gorbachev era. Recall President Gorbachev’s speech at the plenary meeting of the 43rd session of the UN General Assembly, December 7, 1988, in which he demanded—and in Latin yet!—that international treaties must be observed. The crucial paragraph of his speech reads as follows:

The Geneva accords [on Afghanistan], whose fundamental and practical significance has been praised throughout the world, provided a possibility for completing the process of settlement even before the end of this year. That did not happen. This unfortunate fact reminds us again of the political, legal and moral significance of the Roman maxim; Pacta sunt servanda—Treaties must be observed.

The crucial phrase is the Latin one. That “Treaties must be observed” is one of the first principles of international law. Without strict adherence to international commitments, there can be no international law.

International morality being what it is, and journalistic knowledge, especially about Soviet history, being rather limited, there was little concern that at the moment of Gorbachev’s UN address the Soviets were in violation of the 1988 Geneva accords on Afghanistan. Nor was Gorbachev ever asked just what the USSR was doing in Afghanistan in the first place. Or why Soviet treaties that guaranteed the independence of the three Baltic countries, or the Ukraine, or Georgia, were not being observed. Instead, a New York Times editorial (December 8, 1988) went bananas about President Gorbachev’s UN speech:

Perhaps not since Woodrow Wilson presented his fourteen points in 1918 or since Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promulgated the Atlantic Charter in 1941 has a world figure demonstrated the vision Mikhail Gorbachev displayed yesterday at the United Nations . . . Breathtaking. Risky. Bold. Naive. Diversionary. Heroic. All fit.

We come now to May 13, 1989. On that day, Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze announced that the Soviet Union was proposing Soviet violation of a treaty with the US. (The treaty had gone into effect in June 1988. It provided for elimination of Soviet and American nuclear missiles in the 300-to-3,500 mile range.) With no advance notice, Shevardnadze blustered that if the US dared to modernize its vestigial Lance short-range missiles, which the INF treaty allows, the Soviet Union would, despite its solemn obligation, quit dismantling its SS-23 missiles.

Shevardnadze’s threat of Soviet noncompliance with a just concluded arms agreement, said former Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, was “the unscrupulous tactic of unilaterally revising the terms of an agreement by deliberately violating one of its obligations— a tactic easy for the Kremlin, which is unburdened by coalition politics or public opinion, but unthinkable for any Western democracy.” William Safire laid it on the line by describing Shevardnadze’s threat as the same old Soviet “duplicity.” He said that “while the US considers treaties to carry the force of law, Mr. Gorbachev has just vividly demonstrated that he does not consider his nation bound by treaty any more than did his predecessors.”

One could well ask, at hearing Shevardnadze’s threat, whatever happened to President Gorbachev’s cry “Pacta sunt servanda“? Dan Rather didn’t ask. Peter Jennings didn’t ask. Tom Brokaw didn’t ask. And now, like other Soviet outrages which have occurred in the era of Gorbachev the Good, it’s all forgotten and forgiven. Imagine how the nightly news would have denounced President Bush had he issued a treaty-breaking ultimatum similar to Shevardnadze’s. Yet today’s Soviet threat to violate the agreement is long forgotten and/or forgiven, in the interest of world peace.

The Western reception of the Gorbachev UN sermon was another documented case of credence given by Western political elites to Soviet rhetoric—another case of the collective amnesia that afflicts the West and the American media.

Shevardnadze’s (read Gorbachev’s) attempted act of intimidation didn’t work this time. Lucky us. But we have been given fair warning once more. Negotiating treaties with the USSR is the riskiest enterprise in modern treaty diplomacy because the Soviet leadership will use every trick, every stratagem to betray, breach, circumvent, or negate Soviet agreements, yet all their duplicities will be forgotten. The towering dilemma for the West is that in the world today arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union are unavoidable, inevitable, and, above all, potentially detrimental to the security interests of the free world.

Any skepticism regarding my thesis about faith in Soviet treaty promises should be tempered by the following fact: from November 20, 1984, when The Wall Street Journal first called the Krasnoyarsk radar “a clear-cut Soviet violation” of the ABM Treaty, until October 24, 1989, Soviet spokesmen lied about the installation. It took five years for the Soviet Union to admit that the Krasnoyarsk radar was indeed a violation. The confession recalls something Alain Besançon, the French Sovietologist and historian, once said: “In Russia, even the truth is a lie.”