Monday, Oct. 01, 1973
What Price the Jackson Amendment?
> The speaker, Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev: "We believe that a new system of international relations can and must be built by honest and consistent observance of the principles of sovereignty and noninterference in internal affairs, and by unswerving implementation of signed treaties and agreements without playing games or engaging in ambiguous maneuvers."
> The public letter writer, Soviet Physicist Andrei Sakharov: "There are tens of thousands of citizens in the Soviet Union ... who want to leave the country and who have been seeking to exercise that right for years and for decades at the cost of endless difficulty and humiliation. You know that prisons, labor camps and mental hospitals are full of people who have sought to exercise this legitimate right. I am appealing to the Congress of the United States to give its support to the Jackson amendment."
Two conflicting views from the Soviet Union, both aimed at influencing an act of the U.S. Congress. A gross interference in U.S. politics? Not really, since the object of this unusual international lobbying is Title Five of the Nixon Administration's Trade Reform Act of 1973. That section of the bill would grant the Soviet Union so-called most-favored-nation status as a trading partner, entitling it to lower tariffs. The amendment to which Sakharov refers, as does Brezhnev indirectly, was first introduced nearly a year ago by Democratic Senator Henry Jackson. It would prevent Nixon from placing the Soviet Union on the list of favored nations unless the Soviet government lifts its restrictions against its citizens who wish to leave, who most notably are Jews who want to live in Israel.
Varied Motives. There is merit to the Brezhnev complaint that the Jackson amendment amounts to interference in the Soviet Union's internal affairs.
Certainly any Soviet demand concerning the way in which the U.S. treats its own citizens would be furiously resented here. The legislation's many supporters do not see it that way. It is so popular, in fact, that it has acquired one of the longest lists of cosponsors in congressional history: 77 Senators and 287 Representatives. If just those supporters alone vote for the measure, it will pass.
A first test could come this week as the House Ways and Means Committee is scheduled to complete closed-door hearings on the subject and vote.
The motives for the widespread support of the amendment are varied, and all have been overshadowed by an issue not directly involved in the legislation:
the new signs of a Soviet crackdown on political dissidents. The Jackson amendment restricts itself to the issue of emigration. Yet the untimely Soviet action against its dissidents has rallied support for the amendment, whose backers range the political spectrum from Democrats Edward Kennedy and George McGovern to Republicans Barry Goldwater and John Tower.
Among the most important reasons for this support is a widespread feeling that the U.S. was stung in its wheat deal with the Russians. Many politicians fault the Nixon Administration for not bargaining more shrewdly and feel that it is time now to get whatever the U.S. can in return for any trade concessions. Then too, Jewish influence can be critical in some urban areas. Jewish organizations have been lobbying intensively. Another factor: what legislators consider to be Nixon's usurpation of power. Since the bill would give Nixon authority to set tariff rates, lawmakers feel inclined to attach conditions.
Jackson himself stresses an idealistic aim but argues that the tactics are practical. Freedom to emigrate, he contends, ought to be a basic individual right. "When people such as those who want to leave the Soviet Union ask for help," he says, "the least we can do is provide the tiniest bit more freedom for them." He has no wish to jeopardize detente but sees the trade bill as a test of whether tough bargaining cannot be a normal condition of detente. In negotiations, he contends, the Russians "respect firmness, fairness and toughness; they hate mush." Since the Russians need trade with the U.S. badly, his argument goes, they may well yield, at least partially, to congressional conditions after a certain amount of propaganda and bluster. The Brezhnev protest, in fact, has been mild so far.
The Administration's position, expressed forcefully by Henry Kissinger at his confirmation hearings as Secretary of State, is that to attach this kind of condition to trade amounts to trying to "transform the domestic structure" of the Soviet Union. If the U.S. tries to apply that principle to every nation with whom it deals, "we will find ourselves massively involved in every country in the world." This view has been shared in the past by many liberals in their warnings against the U.S. being a "global policeman" or moral arbiter.
Moreover, the Soviet-U.S. trade agreement signed last year includes a pledge by Nixon that the Russians will get favored-nation treatment; to put strings on that endangers the agreement, threatens detente itself and this, contends Kissinger, would be "a tragedy." Kissinger explains that the Administration has sought more subtly to persuade the Russians to change their emigration policies through secret diplomacy, which he considers more effective than public pressure. In fact, for whatever reason, there has been a sharp increase in Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union in recent years.
The crux of the argument is just how risky the Jackson amendment is. Its supporters consider the danger of any serious disruption of relations between the two powers to be minimal because, they feel, the amendment is narrowly restricted to emigration and does not deal with political repression in the Soviet Union. Argues Richard Perle, a Jackson staff expert on the amendment: "We don't want to go into the Soviet Union and tell them how to treat the people that remain -- we just want people to be allowed to come out."
That simplistic argument, however, ignores the fact that restrictions on movement are an essential part of closed societies. Allowing completely free movement out of the Soviet Union would, in fact, amount to a significant change of the system. This was dramatically illustrated by the experience of East Germany in the early 1960s when so many professionals and skilled workers began fleeing that it took a Berlin Wall to prevent economic collapse. There is no certainty that Brezhnev views the issue as similarly critical, but if pushed by the U.S., hard-liners within his own government might well attack any Soviet accommodation as too high a price to pay for increased trade.
It is also true that granting favored-nation status is no great concession. All of the U.S. trading partners enjoy that status except Communist nations, and even among them exceptions have already been made for Yugoslavia and Poland. Failing to grant it is, in effect, a discriminatory penalty.
On such a matter of global significance as testing the practical meaning of detente, the Administration and the lawmakers should have been able to work out a mutual approach. They may yet do so.
Compromise between the two world powers is equally urgent, in view of the current stakes, which include related negotiations on nuclear arms, European security and mutual reductions in military forces in Europe. Privately, Soviet officials, as well as many Congressmen, doubt that differences over tariffs or emigration will be permitted to endanger those larger interests.
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