Still on the Diving Board

On foreign policy, the Bush Administration acts like an Olympic diver, seemingly frozen on the high platform and complaining because timers keep pointing at their stop watches.

Experience was the most important thing George Bush had going for him in the 1988 presidential campaign. But Thursday marked the end of his third month in office--perilously close to the end of the mythic first 100 days--and still everything is under review. And there are no lights on in many crucial offices because nobody has moved into them.

Bush Administration sources keep reminding impatient onlookers that haste makes waste and insisting that they will not be rushed into moves, particularly with respect to relations with the Soviet Union, that they may later regret. They counsel that what has happened at the end of Bush’s presidency will count more than what happened at the beginning.

It is hard to quarrel with any of this, but it is difficult to imagine that further delays will increase the confidence of people that Bush knows what he is about. It also is hard not to make comparisons with the views and attitudes of a veteran Soviet specialist like George Kennan, who created the policy of holding at bay Soviet communism until the flaws in the system became apparent even to the Soviets.

Kennan’s concept of “containment” was more like an economic quarantine than the nuclear barriers to Soviet expansion that Washington put in place instead, much to Kennan’s horror. But he was absolutely right on the other fundamentals of containment and he is entitled, more than anyone else, to savor the way things turned out.

Kennan’s penetrating intellect and his profound understanding of the Soviets gave him a consistent view of developments during the Cold War that was rare in the United States, if not unique.

So much so that it was, or should have been, like listening to his first outline of the theory of containment when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee early this month that “the time for thinking (of the Soviet Union as a potential opponent in battle) has clearly passed.”

Kennan does not have the political power to declare the Cold War at an end, but he has the intellectual stature to advise the U.S. government where to concentrate its energies.

One place is on large-scale reduction of nuclear weapons by the superpowers and mutual efforts to prevent their spread to other nations. Another is in joint efforts on global problems such as the environment.

America is a pluralist society and preserving the diversity of opinion and culture that comes with pluralism is worth spending time listening to opposing views. But that time already has been taken and the President must switch, and quickly, from diversity of thought to unity of action on a new global policy for the United States.