48 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
President Brezhnev. Commercial links were picking up – and forty
Soviet trade officials were to pay a return visit to New York in May
- These were years when America’s global balance-of-trade deficit
gave rising concern. In 1983 it had risen to a record of $69.4 billion
and the predictions were that it could be double that figure in the
follow ing year. Several big companies wanted the administration to
assist them by lifting restrictions on trade with communist countries.
The volume of commercial activity between America and the USSR
tumbled from $4.5 billion in 1979 to $2.3 billion in 1983. American
lobbyists pointed out that Western Europe was already taking the
opportunities on offer from Moscow.^26 On 28 July 1983 permission
was given for the USSR to increase its purchases of American grain by
fifty per cent over the previous year and to prolong this volume of
imports for another five years. Secretary of State Shultz and Com-
merce Secretary Baldrige saw this as a first step towards a repeal of the
embargo on sales of gas and oil technology.^27
Shultz and Baldrige followed a tradition in Republican Party in
favour of free trade regardless of ideological disputes, even trade with
a country whose government was regarded as totalitarian. Weinberger
consistently opposed this idea: he wanted to pressurize the Kremlin by
every means available short of war. If the Soviet Foreign Trade Minis-
try was pleading for advanced technology, it was not in the American
national interest to supply it. Oil and gas were crucial exports for the
USSR’s economy. Without them, the Soviet budget would fall apart.^28
Reagan overruled Weinberger’s advice in December 1983.^29 Off-
shore drilling equipment stayed off the CoCom list of banned exports.
The State Department was worried about a regrowth of tensions with
NATO allies that had occurred over the American sanctions against
companies which helped the USSR to build its Siberian pipeline,^30
and the Commerce Department added that if the Americans did not
sell the equipment, other countries would come to terms – and Ameri-
ca would suffer economically. Shultz was simultaneously working to
establish a less dangerous relationship with the USSR. William L.
Armstrong of Colorado led a group of US senators who were unhappy
with this turn of events. They spoke out against any attempt to increase
the quantity of imports that could have been produced in the Soviet
Gulag. They publicized three dozen products which were held to be
the result of forced labour. When Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan
said he was open to persuasion about introducing an embargo,
Shultz and Baldrige highlighted the danger of worsened relations with