Sanctions as a Symbol

By James Kelly

The U.S. reprisals: perhaps necessary, but far from forceful

"The world simply cannot stand by and permit the Soviet Union to commit this act with impunity . . . Neither the United States nor any other nation can continue to do business as usual with the Soviet Union."

An eerie echo rings through those words. They were not uttered by Ronald Reagan last week when he imposed sanctions against the U.S.S.R. in response to the declaration of martial law in Poland. Rather, they were spoken by Jimmy Carter, almost two years ago to the day, when he levied economic sanctions against the Soviet Union for its invasion of Afghanistan. Although Carter in effect cut nearly all U.S. economic and political ties to the Soviet Union, Reagan lashed out at his predecessor during the presidential campaign for failing to respond aggressively enough to the Soviets: if elected, Reagan promised he would act tougher toward Moscow.

There was thus a certain irony when the sanctions announced by Reagan last week were so mild that they amounted to a gnat's bite. Even more than Carter's reprisals, the new sanctions were symbolic, not substantive; Reagan may have conveyed the Administration's moral outrage at the crackdown on freedom in Poland, but his measures will have almost no impact. And by acting without support from Western allies,

Reagan has risked diminishing what little effect the sanctions might have. Said one Moscow-based Western diplomat: "Face it, the Soviets can buy most of the stuff they need from other countries."

Those who consider Reagan's measured policy wise could offer several plausible defenses. One was that even concerted action by the allies would probably not persuade Warsaw or Moscow to lift martial law, at least for the moment. Another argument was that some gesture had to be made: mere silence would be perceived as acquiescence to an atrocity. More than that, it remained possible that Moscow would see the sanctions as only a first step, which might give the Soviets pause for restraint. Said one senior U.S. diplomat: "If we had come down like a ton of bricks at the outset, we would have no options left."

Finally, if Reagan's initial actions appeared too ineffectual to many, others believed that his verbal responses to the crackdown suitably combined righteous anger with hints of flexibility and a new sense of pragmatism about the realities of foreign policy. For example, in an NBC television interview last week, Reagan emphasized that his actions were not meant to encourage the Poles to "start manning the barricades." Added Reagan: "Talk of that kind led the Hungarians years ago to take to the streets with little more than sticks and stones against Soviet tanks. We didn't want a repeat of that."

In announcing the sanctions, Reagan nevertheless made it clear that he thought the Soviets were the real instigators of martial law in Poland. "The Soviet Union bears a heavy and direct responsibility for the repression in Poland," said Reagan. "Further steps may be necessary, and I will be prepared to take them. American decisions will be determined by Soviet actions."

Among the sanctions that Reagan invoked:

P: Barring new licenses for an expanded list of oil and gas equipment. But all existing export licenses for such products will be honored.

P: Suspending the issuance and renewal of export licenses for electronic equipment, computers and other high-technology items.

P: Postponing negotiations on a new long-term grain treaty to replace an accord that expires next September. Reagan left untouched the current pact, which allows Moscow to buy up to 23 million tons of grain by September 1982.

P: Requiring Soviet ships seeking permission to dock at U.S. ports to give 14 days' notice, instead of four days'.

P: Suspending landing rights in the U.S. for Aeroflot, the Soviet airline. Aeroflot flies from Moscow to Washington twice a week.

P: Closing the Soviet Purchasing Commission, a ten-man Soviet agency in New York City that negotiates trade deals with the U.S.

P: Refusing to renew U.S.-Soviet exchange agreements in the fields of energy, science and technology. These accords, first signed in the early 1970s and due to expire this year, were greatly diminished by the Carter sanctions.

Equally important is what Reagan did not do. He did not embargo the sale of grain to the Soviets, which could have dealt the U.S.S.R. a real economic blow. The Soviet Union is suffering its third poor harvest in a row (this year's grain crop will be the smallest since 1975), and received 50% of its grain imports from the U.S. in 1981. Blocking the sale would have been politically damaging for Reagan: in April he lifted the grain embargo that Carter had imposed after the Afghanistan invasion; the farm bill passed last month might require the Administration to pay as much as $20 billion in support payments to farmers in case a new embargo is ordered. Reagan also refused, wisely, to suspend U.S.-Soviet talks on limiting the number of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, an issue that is of paramount importance to the NATO allies.

The sanctions Reagan did decide upon came as no surprise. When the President announced a set of symbolic measures against the military regime in Poland two weeks ago, he warned that he held the Soviet Union responsible for the crisis and that "business as usual," as he put it, could not go on with the Soviets. He said he had sent a strong letter of protest to Leonid Brezhnev. Reagan's resolve quickened after he received the Soviet President's response on Christmas Day. Though the exact contents of Brezhnev's letter have not been divulged, Reagan publicly described the note as "negative" and told one aide that it offered "no encouragement at all."

TIME has learned that one factor in decision making at the White House was an intelligence report, received before the imposition of martial law in Poland, that the Soviet Union intended to use General Wojciech Jaruzelski to break the back of the independent Polish trade union movement, Solidarity, and to restore order to both the country and Poland's Communist Party. Jaruzelski, so the report went, might be replaced as First Secretary of the party with a reliably pro-Soviet politician. The report cited martial law as one probable option that Jaruzelski might use to restore the party's supremacy in Poland.

On Monday, the Special Situation Group chaired by Vice President George Bush met at the White House for 2 1/2 hours to review some two dozen possible actions against the Soviet Union. After deciding upon which options to recommend to Reagan, Bush and Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese telephoned the President, who was spending the week in California. He approved the chosen steps, and the State Department officially informed the European allies.

During the discussion, little consideration was given to more severe measures: freezing all U.S. exports, including grain, to the Soviet Union, and pressuring Western Europe and Japan to join in a boycott. Meese, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and CIA Director William Casey all shared Reagan's feeling that some action against Moscow was needed now; Haig preferred a more cautious approach until the allies could be persuaded to join in the measures, but he readily agreed to the sanctions.

The allies remained unwilling to join the U.S. in any sanctions against the Soviets (see WORLD). The French and the Italians have taken the hardest line, with the West Germans dismayingly cautious and the British somewhere in between. Haig is convinced that Carter was wrong when he tried to bully the allies into supporting his sanctions in 1980, and he has gently tried to coax them into conformity with the U.S. position--with no success so far. Said Haig: "I am optimistic that if the U.S. is patient and shows good sense, the Europeans will come to share our concern, and we can march together."

As Assistant Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger learned firsthand on a trip through Europe to drum up support for the sanctions, the Europeans are opposed to punishing the Soviet Union unless it openly intervenes in Poland. At the heart of the allied opposition is the belief that sanctions, no matter how well meaning, do not work. As one Italian politician noted cynically, "Carter adopted sanctions against the Soviets to get them out of Afghanistan. They still are in Afghanistan." Said a British trade official: "Trade is a very difficult sanction to apply; like water, it will always find a way through." The best the U.S. may be able to expect from its European partners, one U.S. diplomat conceded glumly, is that "at least they do not take actions to undermine ours."

From Moscow came the harshest attack on the Reagan Administration to date. TASS accused the President of "new acts of blackmail" and of "a deliberate striving to hurl the world back to the dark times of the cold war." Said the official Soviet news agency: "Washington's rulers are in a hurry to whip up a campaign of hatred against socialist countries, to undermine the foundations of Soviet-American relations, and to curtail them to a minimum."

What impact will the U.S. sanctions have on the Soviets? Very little, especially if the European allies and Japan will not go along. During the first eight months of 1981, the U.S. shipped only $1.3 billion worth of goods to the U.S.S.R., and 75% of that was grain.

With little left to buy from the U.S., the Soviet Purchasing Commission will not be missed. Aeroflot carried only 6,000 passengers a year on its Moscow-Washington flights, which could be rerouted to Montreal. In 1981 Soviet ships docked nearly 350 times at 40 U.S. ports. But the new docking restrictions are unlikely to cause the Soviets trouble. Reason: American grain, the major item in U.S.-Soviet trade, is shipped to the U.S.S.R. largely in vessels registered in third countries. The decision not to renew scientific exchange agreements is equally undramatic. As one Western diplomat put it, "What it will mean in practical terms is a shift of Soviet interest from official to nonofficial channels."

The impact of the freeze on new grain talks is harder to evaluate. The Soviets can buy up to 23 million tons of U.S. grain before the present agreement expires next September; in all of 1981 they bought about 11 million tons, but Moscow stopped buying American grain more than two months ago, perhaps because it feared that the worsening situation in Poland might lead to a new U.S. embargo. Though Soviet officials have nearly a year to line up fresh supplies from such countries as Argentina, Brazil and Australia, they apparently remain eager to sign a new, multiyear pact with the U.S., by far the world's largest exporter of grain.

The Soviets can also easily survive the ban on the export of high-technology and oil and gas equipment.

Last year total sales of the prohibited products, which include computers, microchips and machine tools, amounted to only $300 million, and comparable hardware can be readily purchased from West Germany or Japan. A potentially harsher gesture was Reagan's decision to widen an existing ban on the sale of U.S. energy exploration and production equipment. The new sanctions would prohibit the export of 200 pipelaying machines, worth $80 million. But the President did not block delivery of an earlier order of 100 machines.

Officials at Caterpillar Tractor Co. say that their contract with the Soviets for the 200 pipelaying machines was less than 1% of the company's total sales for 1981. But they say the deal might have created as many as 800 new jobs at their Peoria, Ill., plant, and they had hopes the deal would have led to even larger contracts. What really galls Caterpillar, however, is that the Soviets are likely to turn to Komatsu, a Japanese company that battled for the original contract with a virtual copy of Caterpillar's machine. An aide to House Minority Leader Robert Michel of Illinois complains: "You have to get close enough to read the word Komatsu on the side to tell the difference."

Across the country, meanwhile, there was little reaction to Reagan's sanctions except in Polish-American communities, where sentiment was predictably strong. "He is going in the right direction," said Stefan Harvey, president of the Southern California division of the Polish-American Congress. "But he didn't go far enough." Still, even the ethnic Poles recognized, as did many other Americans, that for now about all Washington could do to protest the repression in Poland was brandish symbols of anger and dismay. "It is better than doing nothing, but not much," said Zygmunt Kolicki, a construction worker from Union City, N.J. "But it is only a gesture. At this point, all America can do is gesture."

-- By James Kelly. Reported by Laurence I. Barrett/Los Angeles and Johanna McGeary/Washington, with other bureaus

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Johanna McGeary

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