Fading prospects for Soviet trade

While this de-emphasis is probably the conscious effort of [Reagan-Gorbachev] administration opponents to Soviet trade, there are signs that U.S. businessmen and Soviet leaders have lowered their expectations. After all, American companies will not soon forget the millions of dollars that several of them spent on plans and contract bidding and projects in the Soviet Union that were aborted after the invasion of Afghanistan. The resulting scars explain as much as anything does why last month's U.S.-Soviet trade and economic council meetings in Moscow attracted fewer senior chief executive officers than similar but more ebullient meetings did in the 1970s. In his comments, Mikhail S. Gorbachev seemed as subdued as the American businessmen. While he spoke encouragingly of U.S.-Soviet trade, going so far as to arrange for his speech to be televised to the Soviet public, he also underplayed the volume of that trade. By stressing U.S. imports of the Soviet Union's goods, where we rank 13th among its hard-currency trading partners, rather than U.S. exports to the Soviet Union, where we are first or second, he may have been trying to suggest how much room there was to expand. Yet when he pointed to specific products that the Soviet Union might buy from the United States, he generally confined his list to machines for industry such as agribusiness, petrochemicals, chemicals, energy and the machine-tool industry itself. For the most part these would be low-technology exports, many of which even the Pentagon might tolerate.

Full text: Providence Journal, Jan 16, 1986

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