NEWS ANALYSIS : President Comes Away From Eastern Europe With ‘Bush Doctrine’ Taking Form

For those with any memory of the bad old days in Eastern Europe, President Bush’s journey through Poland and Hungary this week was nothing short of astonishing--from the Warsaw lunch at which Communists and once-jailed opposition leaders joined in toasting the United States, to the Hungarian military band that saluted Bush with a spirited rendition of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“(The) change is absolutely amazing,” Bush marveled aboard Air Force One as he left Eastern Europe on Thursday.

“What we’ve been witnessing in the last three days,” added Brent Scowcroft, the President’s national security adviser, “is a really historic set of developments in the postwar world.” The surge of reform in Poland and Hungary, Scowcroft said, has brought about “a fundamental change in the whole international structure.”

In return, Bush outlined a striking new U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe, an approach that some enthusiastic aides are already calling “the Bush Doctrine.”

Its central idea, as Bush said in a speech at Karl Marx University here, is to offer “the partnership of the United States” in the effort to dismantle Stalinism in Eastern Europe.

The concrete financial-aid component in Bush’s proposals was modest: $125 million to promote private enterprise in the two countries; smaller amounts of cultural and environmental assistance, plus a promise to seek help from the other Western nations in relieving their economies’ crushing burden of foreign debt.

But the underlying changes in U.S. policy have been extraordinary, and many Poles and Hungarians recognized it.

“The new attention from the West is important to us,” said Gyorgy Kadar, a Hungarian democratic activist. “It helps guarantee that the process of reforms will continue.”

Ever since the Iron Curtain descended over Eastern Europe after the end of World War II, the United States has treated the Soviet satellites as just that--satellites. U.S. relations with Poland and Hungary reflected the state of relations with the Soviet Union. Even when the United States declared a policy of “differentiation” in the 1970s, it was largely an exercise of giving small rewards to those satellites, such as Romania, that made life most difficult for their masters in Moscow.

Now, however, Bush has raised the U.S. commitment to Hungary and Poland considerably, declaring himself a full partner in their efforts to reform. The accent is on treating Poland and Hungary as if they were independent, in part to see how far their autonomy can be extended. And so far, Bush noted, “there doesn’t seem to be a bottom line.”

As a result, the U.S. goal appears to be nothing short of a “rollback” of communism in Eastern Europe. But unlike the belligerent policy that bore that name in the 1950s, this rollback would be peaceful, infiltrating Communist territory not with spies or troops but with Western-oriented economic reforms.

The theory, Bush aides say, is that more and more Communist rulers will follow the lead of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in deciding that economic reforms require political reforms as well--and that political reforms will inevitably draw once-Western countries such as Poland and Hungary back into what Bush calls “a Europe whole and free.”

“A market-oriented economy and a vigorous private sector can provide the foundation for a more democratic political system,” one senior Administration official said. Or, as Lenin might have put it, the idea is to help the Communists of Eastern Europe improve their economies--so they can produce the rope to hang themselves.

Ironically, in another departure from the policies of the past 40 years, the Bush approach is not aimed at ending Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe--at least, not openly. Instead, Bush took pains all week to say that he was not campaigning to detach Poland and Hungary from the Soviet Bloc or stir up trouble for Moscow. “ . . . We’re not there . . . to poke a stick in the eye of Mr. Gorbachev,” he said Thursday. “Just the opposite--to encourage the very kind of reforms that he is championing, and more reforms.”

So intent was Bush at getting this message across that several Polish and Hungarian officials said they were startled at how often he volunteered it. And some members of the two countries’ democratic opposition movements were a little dismayed at the President’s insistence on patient and gradual change.

More than one member of Poland’s Solidarity movement grumbled about Bush’s praise for Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Communist leader who outlawed their union and jailed many of their leaders after declaring martial law in 1981. Bush called him “a man of serious purpose trying very hard to move his country forward,” and added, “He’s come a long way since 1981.”

And in Hungary, opposition leaders had said they had hoped to win Bush’s endorsement of their call for a total withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country. Instead, they found the President assuring them that the issue was being dealt with in East-West negotiations on conventional forces.

Some U.S. officials have even argued that Poland and Hungary can--and should--attempt to democratize without leaving the Soviet Bloc.

“Our involvement in Eastern Europe has no political-military dimension,” one senior White House aide asserted.

But opposition activists in both Poland and Hungary made it clear that they would like to lead their countries out of the Warsaw Pact, if they thought they could do it without provoking Soviet intervention.

As in the rest of the Administration’s campaign for a new system of U.S.-Soviet relations, dubbed “beyond containment,” officials remain deliberately imprecise over what political and military structures should replace the familiar ones of the Cold War. “We’re feeling our way step by step,” a State Department official said. But he acknowledged that the Administration has deliberately avoided calling for an end to the Warsaw Pact, for example, because that would endanger the incremental progress that has already been made.

Americans, Poles and Hungarians all agree on two factors that are needed to make the policy work. One is the forbearance of Gorbachev.

“The support of President Bush is important to us,” said Kadar, the Hungarian activist. “I hope you will not be offended if I say the success of Mr. Gorbachev is very much more important.”

The other is whether the new U.S. commitment to two Communist countries in economic distress can be sustained in an era of tight federal budgets. The first test will come this weekend, at the Paris economic summit, where Bush expects to win agreement from the world’s other wealthy democracies for more liberal terms on debt relief for Poland and a general commitment to increased investment and aid.

But officials acknowledge that the job will take a considerable amount of money and a long time--especially to revive the moribund Polish economy.