Among policy analysts, there is a notion called second-order agreement. Second-order agreement exists when I can explain your side of our argument to a third person in a way you are willing to accept as a reasonably fair statement of what you think, and you in turn are able to explain what I think in a way I will accept.
When we can do that, you and I have second-order agreement. We can now have a useful argument. We have identified our real differences. We are not wasting our time on caricatures of what the other believes or talking at cross-purposes.
As the Communist Party of the Soviet Union opens the most interesting party congress in a quarter-century, the most striking thing about the change in leadership taking place under Mikhail Gorbachev is that it is bringing to power a relatively cosmopolitan group of people who know more about the West, and about the outer world as a whole, than any set of Soviet leaders since the revolutionary generation itself.
The result of this is already evident in so elementary a matter as propaganda and handling the international press. The wooden language of the past has been much less often heard.
A change in style is not, in itself, evidence of a change in substance. Nonetheless, it is a major development that in dealing with Moscow one no longer is addressing a leadership ignorant of the world and closed in on itself, arrogant and defensive precisely because of its ignorance.
On the whole, this clearly is a good thing, even if it makes Soviet diplomacy and propaganda more effective than ever. It reflects a certain success of the West itself, in communicating its own outlook. These new men and women in the Soviet leadership are more effective than their predecessors because, in a significant respect, they have themselves been Westernized.
One must be careful about what this implies. There is a persistent but false notion in the West that to know us is to love us, and that differences between Moscow and Washington are a matter either of misunderstandings, which could be cleared up, given better communication between the two sides, or that they result from deliberate ill-will.
The idea that Americans and Russians would live happily at peace with one another were it not for misunderstandings or the manipulations of power-hungry elites has been a staple of American popular political thought since the days of Henry Wallace and Franklin Roosevelt.
It is shared alike by conservatives of Ronald Reagan`s persuasion and the leftist historians of the Cold War who say that it was Harry Truman and Big Business who started it all.
The thought that Soviet leaders may be clear-headed and informed in rejecting Western arguments, and principled, even idealistic, in their own views, is hard to take. So sophisticated a writer as William Safire of the New York Times devoted a column at the time of the Geneva summit to his astonishment at discovering that Soviet officials actually believe their own arguments.
It clearly is net gain in the relations of the two countries when leaders come to power who possess a more sophisticated understanding of the other side`s positions. This new generation in Moscow at least understands what Westerners are talking about and why. These people may understand the West better than the elected officials and Reagan administration appointees now in Washington understand them.
The United States and the Soviet Union nonetheless both remain intellectually isolated societies. Historically, they have seen themselves as self-sufficient, in the American case assuming invulnerability, in the Soviet case, vulnerability. This has not really changed.
The Soviet Union remains defensive and aloof. Its leaders have to believe in its solitary ideological rectitude, for that is the justification for all that Lenin and his successors have put the nation through since 1918. Americans take for granted that the United States is the norm for the world, and that there is little to be learned from others. The dialogue between these two nations, a true dialogue, will only go so far.
