As the Daily Texan reported in its article on the SDI debate, I
did indeed agree with President Reagan that the Soviet Union is an "evil
empire".  However, I also remarked that Reagan, unlike some of his
critics, is capable of keeping two ideas in mind at once - first, that
the Soviet Union is an evil empire, and second, that certain agreements
with it are in the U.S. national interest.

	The Soviet Empire includes both the external countries that it
dominates in Eastern Europe and elsewhere and nations that are part of
the Soviet Union itself.  We know that some of the latter would like to
escape, and some of the others probably would if it seemed possible.

	In my view the Soviet Union is now developing in a favorable
direction - towards democracy and capitalism, but the nearest stable
state is a long way off, and reversals are quite possible.  To the
extent that there is democracy, people in the captive nations will
demonstrate for freedom, and the Soviet imperialists will be tempted to
reverse the democracy in order to suppress the demonstrations, just as
the Chinese imperialists are suppressing the little bit of democracy
they previously allowed in Tibet.  Whether one should speak of Soviet
imperialism or Russian imperialism is a quibble for now.

	The other reason why trends toward democracy in the Soviet Union
may reverse is that freedom will also engender protest against the
Communist Party's monopoly of political power.  For all the
liberalization, no-one has been permitted to say that the Communist
Party's admitted record of blunders and its unadmitted record of crimes
suggest that the people of the Soviet Union might be better off with
some other political system.  Such public protest will surely arise, and
the communists will be sorely tempted to suppress it.

	Against these tendencies to draw back from democracy, there are
only a few favorable facts.

	1. Gorbachev's generation of party leaders were genuinely
disgusted with the corruption, laziness and incompetence of the Brezhnev
regime.  They see it as having led to the relative decline of the Soviet
Union as an important country.  For example, it led to Japan passing the
Soviet Union as the world's second industrial power.  They will go back
to the Brezhnev style only if they see any other course as disastrous to them.

	2. While the Soviet bureaucracy indeed constitutes a new class
that tends to be jealous of its privileges and power, it has no ideology
justifying the privilege, and these privileges, e.g.  the special
stores, are seen as corrupt by the privileged themselves, and especially
by their children.  In some sense, the new class lacks
class-consciousness - to use Marxist jargon.

	3. One can hope they will engage in enough wishful thinking so
that they will allow their power to slip away until it is too late.
Their ideology certainly inhibits clear thinking about this.

	4. Another variant is that the steps toward democracy will
reverse from time to time for the reasons mentioned above, but the
trend away from a totally centralized economy will continue.  This
might convert the Soviet Union into an authoritarian rather than
a totalitarian empire, and an authoritarian state seems to be only
a few succession crises away from democracy.

	What does this mean for the United States and for U.S. policy?

	In the first place we need to be modest about our ability to
influence the situation.  It is almost nil, and anyway we can't agree
about what would even tend to influence them towards democracy.
Liberals often say we should be nice to Gorbachev, e.g. make concessions
in disarmament and trade and stop mentioning the "evil empire" and its
crimes.  Conservatives and emigrants from the Soviet Union say the
reverse, emphasizing the role of Western pressure in getting the Soviet
Union to reform.  However, neither claims that anything the West did is
responsible for the major transitions in Soviet history - from Lenin to
Stalin to Khrushchev to Brezhnev to Gorbachev.  No-one anywhere, whether
in the Soviet Union or the West, has even any record of successfully
predicting the transitions.

	For what it's worth, my one small experience of trying to
influence the Soviets in a human rights matter - permitting a refusenik
to take part in a 1975 international scientific conference in the Soviet
Union - sides with the emigrants and the conservatives.   We won our
point using the threat of a demonstration at the conference.  I think we
won, because the Soviets who thought the refuseniks were being unfairly
treated but didn't dare say so, could state the advantages of appeasing
the Westerners without fear and even exaggerate them.  I don't think
that Western pressure, at least at a level that is politically feasible
in the West, will affect the pace of reform fundamentally, but pressure
is what works at all - not accomodation.

	The Soviet Union remains a danger to world peace as long as it
hasn't become fully democratic, i.e. holding freely competitive
elections in which it is legal to run candidates against the communists.
For the reasons stated above, reversals of democratization are entirely
possible, and any such reversal may be accompanied by increased
aggressiveness.

	Because I started with SDI, I will mention one of its
major merits. Full nuclear disarmament is unlikely and exceedingly
dangerous, because it creates an unstable situation in which a
clandestine nuclear rearmament could be militarily decisive, even if
this rearmament were carried out by a relatively minor power.  On the
other hand, the big powers could safely implement a disarmament
agreement under the shield of strategic defense systems.  This is
because the size of rearmament that could be carried out secretly would
not be decisive, and the threatened country would have time to start its
own re-armament.

	Of course, the Soviets, perhaps taking their cue from the
American liberals, have said that their reaction to SDI will be
increased nuclear weapons.  But remember that at the beginning of the
Reagan Administration they said that their reaction to the Pershing
missiles and cruise missiles we were planning to install in Western
Europe in response to the threat of their SS-20 missiles would be to
increase their missiles.  Now it turns out that they are willing to
withdraw their SS-20s if we withdraw the Pershings and cruise missiles,
and the chances for agreement look excellent.  I'm not about to make a
prediction that they will change their tune on SDI, but liberals dear,
watch out.  The Soviet and Chinese communists have double-crossed you
before by making agreements with conservatives that you predicted were
impossible.

	Finally, I cannot resist making a Marxoid prediction.  In the long run,
socialism will turn out to be an intermediate stage between feudalism
and capitalism but occurring only in certain socially backward countries.