188 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
implausible claim that the East European leaders had independently
come up with exactly the same proposals about the quantitative reduc-
tion of nuclear weaponry.^55 Evidently he thought it prudent to limit the
number of politicians who were privy to his innovation in Budapest;
for he was less guarded when reporting to the Politburo. While con-
tinuing to hope for a rapprochement with America, he admitted that
the entire ‘world system of socialism’ had become uncompetitive in
technology. Whereas the European Economic Community was under-
going deeper economic integration, Comecon suffered from severe
‘centrifugal’ tendencies – and the reliance of Poland and other coun-
tries on Western credits was having heavy consequences. Romania,
the German Democratic Republic and Hungary were pursuing their
‘national ambitions’ without thought for an agreed common foreign
policy, and he noted that all Politburo members, when dealing with
East European leaders, had experience of a decline in ‘sincerity, frank-
ness, trustworthiness’. Gorbachëv saw the solution as lying not in
directives but rather in persuasion and example.^56 Behind the Polit-
buro’s closed doors he robustly condemned the ‘methods that were
applied to Czechoslovakia (in 1968) and Hungary (in 1956)’.^57
While Gorbachëv quietly edged towards a new negotiating pos-
ture, the American administration took stock of the possibilities. At
the National Security Planning Group on 6 June 1986 Shultz declared
that the Kremlin leaders were at a fork in the road: either they could
ignore the President’s overtures and gamble on Congress cutting the
American defence budget or else they might decide that ‘Ronald
Reagan is their best hope for selling an agreement to the American
public’. Shultz favoured boxing Gorbachëv into submission by revers-
ing Congress’s recent cuts in the military budget. He urged the need to
focus efforts on obtaining ‘a good arms control agreement’. Reagan
endorsed this line of thought. He felt sympathy with Gorbachëv in his
struggle against the political resistance to reform. In his opinion, the
American side had to frame their proposals in such a way as to avoid
making the General Secretary ‘look like he gave up everything’. The
President at the same time repeated his commitment to the Strategic
Defense Initiative and stated that if the current technological research
proved successful, he would sanction practical tests. He hoped to
induce Soviet leaders to accept this scenario by convincing them that
the American anti-missile system would not be a threat to anyone but
rather a ‘defence against a madman’.^58
Talking with Shultz on 11 June 1986, the President agreed that an