There's no doubt, though, that it is too soon to tabulate how the new diplomacy, which is geared for the long-term, is transforming public attitudes. Hough believes that the Gorbachev government's relative receptivity to western influences can be attributed partly to younger Soviet leaders' exposure to western ideas during the 1950s and 1960s. He recalls, for example, that years ago one of Gorbachev's closest advisors spent several months in New York City as part of a student exchange at Columbia University. Citizen diplomats, one argument goes, can take part in free-wheeling discussions that identify possibilities for subsequent official agreement that might otherwise have never come up. But while the theoretical potential for citizen diplomacy is quite high, many of these hopes haven't been borne out in reality.
Obstacles still exist to genuine interaction.
They range from official decrees to barriers at the personal level. Many visitors are struck not by how similar but how different the Soviets really are. Cultural dissimilarities are greater than one would imagine, according to Stanford University political psychologist Steven Kull. While there haven't been any signs that the law has been enforced, it remains on the books. Even if the diplomats' aim is to build personal, cultural, and economic relationships with the Soviet Union so that a Soviet-American war is unthinkable to the public, it can happen anyway, instigated by their governments.