It's time for a reassessment of U.S.-Russia relations that starts the process of moving from confrontation to cooperation
Jeffrey BURT, James HITCH, Peter PETTIBONE, Thomas SHILLINGLAW
On the Washington Post op-ed page in October 2017, Mikhail Gorbachev urged “reversing the downward spiral in U.S.-Russian relations” that now dangerously imperils world order. He entreated our leaders “to return to sanity” and initiate a “full-scale summit on the entire range of issues,” focusing especially on controlling weapons of mass destruction.
Gorbachev’s clarion call harkened to a very similar plea by President Dwight D. Eisenhower almost sixty-five years ago when U.S. relations with the USSR were even more fraught with danger than they are today with Russia. In a remarkable speech titled The Chance for Peace, which he delivered on April 16, 1953, six weeks after Stalin’s death, Eisenhower urged the two superpowers to radically change direction. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,” Eisenhower declared, “signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He advocated a reduction in “the burden of armaments now weighing upon the world,” and offered to negotiate with the Soviet Union over the size of both countries’ military forces. For Eisenhower, “this [current massing of armaments] was not a way of life at all” and he challenged the Kremlin to wage “a new kind of war,... a total war, not upon any human enemy, but upon the brute forces of poverty and need.”
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