TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120489/12048900.037

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 16KB | 309 lines

                                                                                EAST-WEST, Page 32

The Road to Malta


A year ago, Bush distrusted Gorbachev. Now he wonders how to
help him succeed

By Strobe Talbott


    This week's meeting in the Med will bring together the most
daring of all Soviet leaders and one of the most cautious
American Presidents. Mikhail Gorbachev frequently, and proudly,
describes his approach to the world as "radical," while George
Bush's favorite word when he talks about foreign policy is
prudent. Yet Bush has come a long way in his thinking about the
Soviet Union. In a matter of months, his Administration has gone
from viewing Gorbachev as a slickly disguised variant of the old
red menace to a potential partner in creating a new world order.

    This evolution of American official attitudes has been
subtle and uneven. It has been couched in caveats, often
obscured by ambivalence and articulated, sometimes
inarticulately, by a Chief Executive who has no flair for
geopolitical grand rhetoric and has a tendency to step on his
applause lines. Still, the change on the American side, if it
continues, could turn out to be as important as Gorbachev's
abandonment of the Leninist plan for winning the zero-sum game
of history. The American equivalent of what the Soviets call new
political thinking is all the more significant coming from the
President of Prudence.

    George Bush did not get where he is today by taking chances
or questioning conventional wisdom, particularly on the No. 1
life-or-death issue of U.S. foreign policy. As a Congressman,
diplomat, Republican Party chairman, Vice President and
presidential candidate, he was always the sort of politician
who fretted about the consequences of a misstep. For Bush,
therefore, slow is better than fast and standing pat is often
the safest posture. Once he replaced Ronald Reagan, Bush's
instinct was to apply the brakes to the juggernaut of improved
U.S.-Soviet relations, to take the turns very cautiously and
perhaps even to pull over on the side of the road and study the
map for a while.

    The Bush Administration was made up of battle-scarred
veterans with long memories. They were acutely aware that every
President since the end of World War II had learned the hard way
the domestic political perils of underestimating the Soviet
capacity for producing unpleasant surprises and overestimating
the possibility of profound, permanent improvement in
U.S.-Soviet relations.

    Even Franklin Roosevelt was posthumously excoriated for
"giving away" Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin at Yalta (rhymes
with Malta). Harry Truman stood up to Stalin at Potsdam and hung
tough over Iran, Berlin and Korea, but he still ended up being
pilloried by a couple of junior Senators named Joseph McCarthy
and Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who called Truman's Secretary
of State the dean of the "cowardly college of Communist
containment." Two decades later, the New Nixon's policy of
detente ran into a buzz saw of bipartisan anti-Soviet
opposition. When a Watergate-wounded Nixon went to see Leonid
Brezhnev in the Crimea in 1974, he refused to visit Yalta
nearby, lest anyone accuse him of another giveaway. It was all
for naught: the traveling White House press gleefully filed
stories with the dread dateline.

    When Jimmy Carter signed a SALT II treaty in June 1979, he
gave Brezhnev a big kiss on the cheek. The treaty was never
ratified, largely because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
six months later. In 1980 Republicans used photographs of the
signing ceremony with the message to voters YOU TOO CAN KISS OFF
JIMMY CARTER.

    The Bush Administration includes a number of senior
officials of the Nixon-Gerald Ford years, notably Secretary of
State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft,
who were chastened by their earlier experience. They returned
to office determined not to repeat the mistake of overselling
detente, by that or any other name.

    Also, just below the surface of the new Administration was
a powerful if muted strain of criticism of the way the U.S. had
conducted relations with the U.S.S.R. in the last years of the
Reagan presidency. The image of Reagan strolling arm in arm
through Red Square with Gorbachev during their 1988 meeting in
Moscow had a connotation among many Bush people almost as
invidious as that of Carter kissing Brezhnev. George Shultz
received much of the blame for letting Reagan succumb to
Gorbomania. Partly for that reason Shultz was given close to a
bum's rush right after Bush's Inauguration.

    The new Administration was uncomfortable with the Reagan
legacy in another respect. In the critical and perennially
controversial field of arms control, Reagan had turned out to
be every bit as radical as, and considerably more romantic than,
Gorbachev. At their own Malta-like non-summit on neutral ground,
at Reykjavik in 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev arced off into the
stratosphere of blue-sky nuclear disarmament. They came so close
to agreeing on a timetable for the elimination of ballistic
missiles that American allies and generals were horrified. So
was Reagan's relentlessly prudent Vice President. In Bush's mind
and those of his advisers, Reykjavik became a synonym for the
risks of free-form encounters between U.S. and Soviet leaders.

    The Bush Administration came into office determined to
strike what a number of its key officials hoped would be
perceived as a tougher, more sober, more traditional posture
toward the Soviet Union. Much as they dislike the label, they
are, on the whole, moderate Republicans. Scowcroft once even
called himself a Rockefeller Republican. Not too long ago, such
political animals had been considered an extinct, or at least
seriously endangered, species. Even after winning a presidential
election, the Bush people felt vulnerable to the vigilant,
suspicious, presumably powerful right. Hence they were all the
more eager to be seen squinting skeptically at Gorbachev,
especially in public, and thus to be staking out a position to
the right of the most popular, successful conservative President
in modern times. In September Bush reiterated that caution,
saying, "I'm like the guy from Missouri."

    The first few months of the "show-me" Administration were
dominated by three themes:

    The approved questions of the hour were whether Gorbachev
was for real, and whether the success of his program was good
for the free world. Those were not rhetorical questions; the
answer, on both counts, might turn out to be no.

    If, however, the answer turned out to be yes -- and the
Soviets were indeed changing for the better -- then the onus was
on them to keep changing and to keep making concessions. The
U.S. was under no obligation to alter its own behavior or
thinking in any way, or to adjust its negotiating positions.
After all, it was the U.S.S.R., not the U.S., whose political
and economic system was hopelessly sick and whose international
behavior had made it a pariah.

    The American approach must not be, in any sense, pegged to
the fortunes of a particular Soviet leader. The U.S. must not
have what one Bush adviser disdained as a "Gorbo-centric"
policy. Rather, it should have an approach that would work
equally well for a Soviet Union led, say, by Yegor Ligachev,
then seen as Gorbachev's principal hard-line opponent.

    The surest way to lose influence in the Bush Administration
was to wonder out loud whether the U.S. should be "helping"
Gorbachev. After all, even if he turned out to be for real, he
could die any day. Or he might be overthrown and replaced by
retrogrades who would have at their disposal the military
wherewithal to engage once again in old thinking and old
behavior. Therefore the best posture for the U.S. -- the policy
of greatest prudence -- was to wait and see, to test, to keep
American powder dry and to be ready for Ligachev.

    The impression of a stand-pat, waiting-for-Yegor policy was
reinforced by a presidential "national security policy review."
The exercise dragged on for some six months, yielding hundreds
of pages of classified bureaucratese and a few leaks in
newspaper stories about how the Administration was going to be
guided by the underwhelming goal of "status quo plus."

    Bush gave a series of five speeches on U.S.-Soviet
relations in the spring, but they generally played to yawns and
even a few catcalls. Actually, the speeches were better than
their reviews. They contained some important watchwords: the
U.S., said the President, must move "beyond containment" and
seek the "integration of the Soviet Union into the community of
nations."New slogans can be the beginning of a new policy,
especially if they are repeated often enough at the highest
level.

    Meanwhile, Bush was saying something else over and over
again: "I want to do something important, but I don't want to
do anything dumb." He said it in closed-door meetings with his
staff, in brainstorming sessions with academic experts and in
nationally televised interviews. By "something important," he
meant a policy that would capitalize on the opportunities
presented by Gorbachev's reforms. It was less clear what the
President had in mind when he vowed not to do "anything dumb."
For several months the implied definition seemed to be anything
that would get him in serious trouble with the right wing.

    However, by late spring an important shift took place: Bush
began to worry more about doing too little than about doing too
much. He seemed to be calculating the political price he would
pay on both sides of the Atlantic if he appeared not to be
moving fast enough to meet Gorbachev halfway.

    Secretary of State Baker played a key part in nudging the
President toward what both men came to call "engagement" with
Gorbachev. Baker made frequent trips to Capitol Hill as well as
Western Europe. In both places he found impatience building:
When was the Administration going to stop reviewing policy and
start really making it again, especially in arms control?
Congress was facing the fiscal and political imperatives of the
Gramm-Rudman-Gorbachev era. The federal budget deficit was
squeezing the resources available for defense spending, and the
kinder, gentler Soviet Union made the arms buildup that Bush
inherited from Reagan seem increasingly like wretched excess.

    Meanwhile, the Americans' most important allies in Europe,
the West Germans, were restless about American tactical nuclear
missiles stationed on their territory. The U.S. wanted to
"modernize" those weapons -- a euphemism for replacing old ones
with newer ones that had a much longer range -- while the West
Germans wanted to negotiate away the old ones. Unless Bush
could defuse that controversy with a new arms-control
initiative, his transatlantic debut at the NATO summit in late
May would be a debacle. That prospect concentrated the minds of
the Administration on the issue of conventional forces in
Europe, the subject of East-West talks that had been limping
along for some 15 years. Gorbachev had already breathed new life
into those talks by announcing a unilateral cut in the manpower
and armor of the Warsaw Pact, but the Western allies were
reluctant to match his dramatic gestures.

    Then, at the NATO meeting in Brussels, Bush proposed a
mutual drawdown in the number of soldiers that both superpowers
have stationed in Europe. The proposal was much more than just
a highly successful p.r. gambit. Rather than merely fine-tuning
the military balance of terror, which had been the purpose and
effect of earlier arms-control arrangements, the CFE initiative
was intended to be the first step in a process that might lead
to fundamental changes in the international political order.

    The logic and strategy behind Bush's CFE proposal were that
Gorbachev might, over time, be willing to reduce drastically,
perhaps someday to eliminate, Soviet garrisons in Eastern
Europe. Previous American arms-control proposals had been
concerned with diminishing the threat that the Warsaw Pact might
invade the NATO nations. By contrast, the CFE initiative was
designed to lead to the scaling back of the Soviet military
presence in Eastern Europe -- the instrument of Soviet
domination there and the root cause of the division of Europe
as a whole.

    It was the first arms-control proposal to be at least as
concerned with ending the cold war as with preventing World War
III. In that sense, the CFE proposal anticipated the breaching
of the Berlin Wall, the Pentagon's proposed cuts in U.S.
defense programs and the other dramatic events of the past
month. It was also, at its core, Gorbo-centric: it represented
an attempt to respond to the unprecedented willingness of the
man now in charge in the Kremlin to address fundamental,
previously out-of-bounds issues -- not just of how to avert war,
but of how to restructure the peace.

    In July Bush visited Europe for the second time as
President. Solidarity leaders in Poland and reformers in Hungary
persuaded him that their survival depended on Gorbachev's. Bush
was deeply impressed by the implications for U.S. policy: the
West had an interest in the blossoming of independence and
democracy in Eastern Europe; the advocates of change there had
an interest in the success of perestroika; therefore the U.S.,
too, had an interest in seeing perestroika succeed. Bush's
longstanding aversion to the idea of an early, informal meeting
with Gorbachev dissolved almost overnight. Aboard Air Force One
en route back to Washington, he wrote a personal letter to the
Soviet leader proposing this week's get-together.

    Shortly afterward, Bush's aides, particularly Baker, began
talking -- first privately, then publicly -- about "helping"
Gorbachev. They had heard the H word from their boss, so the
taboo was lifted.

    Yet throughout this period, there were constant, escalating
reminders of how much trouble Gorbachev faced at home: ethnic
unrest, secessionism, economic deterioration, labor strife, an
emboldened political opposition. When Eduard Shevardnadze
visited the U.S. in September, he seemed preoccupied with
domestic issues, especially the Soviet Union's problem with
nationalities. A surprising and revealing addition to his
entourage was Nikolai Shmelev, an economist who specializes in
dire predictions and drastic prescriptions for the Soviet
economy.

    Gorbachev's mounting troubles have had an ambiguous effect
on the thinking of the Bush Administration. The set of questions
that drives U.S. policy has gone from "Is Gorbachev for real?
And is he good for us?" to "Can he make it? And can we help
him?" There is far more inclination in Washington today than
even a few months ago to accept the best-case interpretation of
what Gorbachev wants, what he represents, and what the U.S.S.R.
would look like if he were to succeed in his program. At the
same time, however, there is also more objective reason than
before to credit the worst-case interpretation of what will
happen to him.

    Thus, in one curious and ironic respect, the Administration
is back to square one. It has traded its skepticism about
Gorbachev's intentions for pessimism about his chances. That
leaves the Administration, at least in its own eyes, still stuck
with a dilemma about what prudent American policy should be. The
strong inclination remains to wait and see, to test, to keep its
powder dry and to be ready for someone other than Mikhail
Sergeyevich.

    But in another, immensely important respect, the two men
meeting in the Med this week have already transformed the
superpower relationship: for the first time since the beginning
of the cold war over 40 years ago, the American and Soviet
leaderships have a shared interest not just in averting
Armageddon but also in achieving the success of important
components of Soviet internal and foreign policy. That is
already a breakthrough that makes this a landmark year and
augurs well for the future.