Troop Plan Shows That Bush Knows How to Seize Moment : Foreign policy: The President relishes the ‘dramatic proposal.’ He makes full use of the element of surprise.

The pattern, by now, is familiar. Taking advantage of events tumbling his way, George Bush has put together a striking proposal that is the foreign policy equivalent of motherhood and apple pie.

In this case, as he surveyed the political scene, he found on this side of the Atlantic a Congress growing increasingly reluctant to foot the bill for 305,000 U.S. troops stationed in a post-Cold War Europe.

On the other side, he found an Eastern Europe throwing off the communist yoke and pressuring the Kremlin to pull its troops back to behind Soviet borders.

What to do? Seize the moment.

And so he did. Wednesday night, the President whose foreign policy watchword has been prudence, suddenly called on the Soviet Union to join him in agreeing to make further massive cuts in the forces arrayed along the thoroughly frayed East-West divide--forces which appear each day less likely to be called to combat.

And Bush managed to accomplish the announcement in what has become true Bush fashion: when it was least expected.

“It’s a combination of the timing of the speech and the circumstances allowing us to do this. It was a coincidence of situations,” a senior White House official said, marveling quietly at both the surprise with which the President’s plan was greeted, and the fortuitous timing that allowed Bush to turn to his advantage events beyond his control in Europe and unrelenting pressures at home.

The new proposal is “an attempt to catch up with events that are moving very fast,” a senior Administration official said.

Bush’s troop cut plan, political analyst William Schneider said, “accepted the inevitable”--that the massive changes in Eastern Europe coupled with U.S. budget pressure meant troop levels had to come down. But he did it with a “dramatic gesture.”

‘Time Is Right’

The twin tracks came together when Bush, in the historic, majestic setting of the House of Representatives, declared in his first State of the Union address: “The time is right to move forward on a conventional arms control agreement to move us to more appropriate levels of military forces in Europe--a coherent defense program that ensures that the United States will continue to be a catalyst for peaceful change in Europe.

“I agree with our European allies that an American military presence in Europe is essential--and that it should not be tied solely to the Soviet military presence in Eastern Europe,” the President said. “But our troop levels can still be lower. So tonight, I am announcing a major new step for further reduction in U.S. and Soviet manpower in Central and Eastern Europe to 195,000 on each side.”

The Soviet Union now has approximately 565,000 troops deployed beyond its borders in Eastern and Central Europe. The United States has 255,000 troops stationed in Central Europe, and a total of 305,000 throughout the continent.

But in the weeks and months leading up to the speech, the Warsaw Pact nations have been rocked by the turmoil of popular revolutions. In May, when Bush offered a plan to cut U.S. and Soviet troop levels in Europe down to 275,000 on each side, Communist governments still tightly tied to the Soviets controlled almost all of Eastern Europe. But since then, Communist Party power has been diluted, and in some cases ended, in one Eastern European country after another, undercutting the welcome given to the Soviet troops that have been deployed throughout the region since the end of World War II.

At the same time, senior members of Congress have begun insisting that the President take advantage of these stunning developments to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee who for more than a decade has tried to pressure succeeding administrations to trim the European force, has argued that the U.S. troop strength could be reduced to between 200,000 and 250,000.

Bettered Critics

All the while, critics objected that the Administration was offering nothing to respond to those events. As recently as eight weeks ago, Bush, speaking to reporters after his summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, fended off that criticism, saying he wanted to get his May proposal “locked in” before he proposed any new troop cut proposal. Now, Bush, in effect, has seen the critics’ proposed cuts and has gone 5,000 further.

The President’s proposal “became a real option a couple of weeks ago,” said a senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, although he insisted the timing “was not something that was rushed by the speech. The circumstances allowed us to do it.”

The move, Schneider noted, followed what’s become the “typical rhythm of the Bush presidency.”

“A crisis emerges and dominates the agenda, the Administration seems not to have a response and they are called timid. Then, all of a sudden, Bush comes up with a dramatic proposal.” The political impact of the proposal is heightened precisely because it comes after the public repeatedly has heard that the Administration is not acting.

As much as Bush has told interviewers and others that he disdains managing events for dramatic appeal, he appreciates--indeed seems to thrive on--the inherent ability of a carefully managed presidency to spring surprises on an unsuspecting audience, and to take advantage of those surprises.

As he posed for photographers at the start of a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Bush was asked whether such a troop cut proposal was in the offing. “The speech comes on at 9 tonight and there’s going to be a lot of surprises there--maybe,” he said.

The President made the troop cut proposal--which he discussed earlier in the day on the telephone with Gorbachev--only after his most senior aides carefully let out the word that the State of the Union speech would be one addressing broad themes of the Bush presidency, rather than providing “a laundry list” of specific programs the President wants enacted in the new year or startling initiatives.

Indeed, over a period of about two weeks, they leaked to reporters details of each of the domestic programs.