Fast Break by East Bloc: Short Pants, Stuff Shots

The recent article by “Z,” excerpted by the New York Times from a scholarly journal, rocked the pooh-bahs of foreign policy. That piece, claiming the United States should let a teetering Soviet regime fall, impelled other theorists to speak out.

It is understandable that, after more than four decades of demanding and expensive Cold War vigilance, many in this country would feel relieved at our seeming ability--in the face of apparent decay in the Soviet Empire--to let down part of our guard. Of course, those so busily advocating new ways to spend the “peace dividend” have yet to explain, after these anticipatedly severe cuts in our defense budget, how we propose to keep the Grummans of the world from forgetting how to build fighter aircraft. But that topic is best addressed in another article, under a different initial.

Of more immediate concern is the debate about how best to deal with the predicament of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. For example, it brings great joy to the accommodationist camp that Alexander Volkov, Drazen Petrovich, Zarko Paspalj, Vlade Divac and Sarunas Marciulionis are now household names in many parts of this country. They are not--need it be pointed out?--leaders of “velvet revolutions” on the borders of the crumbing Russian commonlackofwealth. More dangerously, in fact, they serve as an “underwear pipeline” sending hard Western currency straight into the basket holding Gorbachev’s case.

Volkov et al. are the Eastern European and Russian basketball players who, in less than a season, have become fixtures in this country’s professional sports league, the National Basketball Assn. Cleverly allocated at no more than one to a team, they have become iconic symbols of rampant accommodationism. At the same time, they cement their positions on this side of a curtain not yet deironized by serving as reminders to many fans that some white people can still play basketball somewhere in the world.

But is it in the long-term strategic interests of the United States to have more and more grown-ups in short pants propping up the Soviet economy? Do not the dollars that flow from the owners of the Lakers, Hawks, Spurs, Warriors and Trail Blazers back to Vilnius and Moscow merely postpone the time of reckoning, by making the families and friends of these “roving ambassadors of roundball” more patient with the doomed attempts of the Gorbachevites to square the circle, to reform the unreformable?

One can even discern consequences more directly deleterious to U.S. interests in this seemingly “healthy” six-foot-and-over opening to the East, or Ostbreak. Two years away lie an Olympic Games in which, for the first time, Americans will compete against Soviet Bloc athletes who have been their teammates in preceding months. Such “revolving door” procedures--so heartily decried by liberals when practiced by defense consultants--may well result in divided loyalties and decreased competitiveness among our representatives in Barcelona.

As they rush to embrace the enhanced competitive posture of 1992, we do not find Western Europe giving as hearty a welcome to the world’s tallest fifth column, especially at the charity stripe. Before we decide that the Soviets have renounced confrontation, we might well consider that retreat from direct competition, while undermining the opponent’s ability to give 110%, is a traditional gambit in the canon of Leninist tactics.

Like so much else in our reaction to the tumultuous appearance of change in the East, this new policy just happened, without benefit of open debate or, more important, secret consultations with important analysts who don’t sign their full names to newspaper articles. And so anomalies multiply. That these young men, some already draftees in their nations’ armies, are accepted into locker rooms that constitute the inner sanctum of a major professional sport leads to a disquieting conclusion. Besides hard currency, they could serve as a conduit for sophisticated coaching techniques.

This seems not to have occurred, except to accommodationists keen on pointing out the seeming symmetry in East German sports officials now selling their training manuals on the open market. One must be sufficiently tough-minded, however, to point out the appalling lack of true symmetry: Eastern players here, integrated into the fabric of team life, are getting “the real thing,” from Gatorade to shoe endorsements; those German “training manuals” carry no such warranty of authenticity. One can imagine the glee with which one-step-backward, two-steps-forward ideologues devised manuals urging, perhaps, overdoses of minoxidil for our female gymnasts.

Of course, to American fans of a team that might, with a Divac, win a championship, it may seem worth the price. To Soviet citizens who have to endure additional years of hardship because the “underwear pipeline” pumps hard currency to prolong the rotting system’s death agonies, our currentSlavophilia may not seem so “FAN-tastic.”

The Cold War, despite our wishes, is probably not over. It’s taking a jump shot from just outside the point.