Deeper shifts will also be necessary: a strengthening of consumer society in China, for example, and a reallocationofresources towards tradable goods and services in Britain and America.
But a serious reallocationofresources on the railways would mean cutting lots of branch lines, and that is a task for a politician with the hide of Dr Beeching, not of Tony Blair.
In reality, there is no evidence that the USSR has yet embarked upon the kind of massive reallocationofresources away from the bloated military sector to the starving civilian economy promised by perestroika.
If it is other than the advertised wholesale reordering of the USSR's economic priorities -- if it entails less than a fundamental and irreversible reallocationofresources from the military to the civilian sectors, perestroika's benefit to the United States and its allies will be greatly reduced.