We’re Not Cold War Victors--Yet : Foreign Policy: With Gorbachev leading communism’s retreat, we cannot afford to relax. Nor can we abandon China.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s restraint in responding to the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe has won over many skeptics in the West. He has been credited with inspiring, even encouraging the removal of the leaders of the ossified communist regimes in the region. That explanation misstates reality.

In fact, the millions who demonstrated in the streets of the great cities of Eastern Europe were inspired by Western ideals, by the failure of their communist economic systems and by the hatred of the puppet regimes that ruled on behalf of Moscow for four decades. The rhetoric of the East European reformers paralleled the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble of the Constitution, not the discredited theories of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin to which Gorbachev continues to swear fidelity.

All Gorbachev’s actions have been directed toward two geopolitical goals. To revive his moribund economy, he wants to gain access to Western capital and technology. He knows his economic reforms cannot succeed without this assistance, and he is willing to pay a geopolitical price to achieve this key objective. Gorbachev also wants to divide his adversaries and to end the political isolation of the Soviet Union. His predecessors had succeeded in uniting all the world’s great powers--the United States, Western Europe, Japan and China--against the Kremlin. His foreign-policy actions are largely aimed at loosening the ties of that anti-Soviet bloc.

That’s why when popular uprisings threatened the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev declined to enforce the Brezhnev doctrine. In doing so, however, he was pursuing his own interest. He faced an unenviable choice. If he had intervened, the entire region would have exploded in a violent revolutionary upheaval. That, in turn, would have aborted his efforts to improve relations with the West and eliminated any chances Moscow had of gaining access to Western capital and technology to reinvigorate the Soviet economy.

So far, Gorbachev’s strategy for keeping his empire together has been to keep his hands firmly on the reins of central power, while tolerating more protests against it than most of his predecessors would have done. But as one analyst has noted, allowing the non-Russian nations freedom of protest without being willing to redress their basic grievances is a recipe for revolution.

If these nationalist forces are ever unleashed, they will be all the more explosive for having been suppressed for so long. Once demands for autonomy and freedom by non-Russians in the Soviet Union grow more extreme, there could be a conservative backlash of Russian nationalism, and the Soviet Union could well sink into a grim cycle of revolts and crackdowns.

In the end, Gorbachev will probably survive--not because his reforms will succeed, but because he will back away from them. This does not mean that he does not favor reforms. It means that if he is forced to choose between reforms and power, he will choose power.

The conventional wisdom is that the West has an interest in the success of Gorbachev’s reforms. In responding to Gorbachev, however, our concern should center primarily not on how his reforms affect life inside the Soviet Union but on how his reforms affect our interest outside the Soviet Union. If these changes simply make life better for the Soviet people, we should help him. If they also make life harder for us, we should not.

For the Soviet Union to receive Western assistance, we should insist on six conditions.

* Moscow must establish a free-market economy.

* Eastern European countries must complete their transition to full independence.

* NATO and the Warsaw Pact must establish parity in conventional arms.

* The United States and the Soviet Union must conclude a verifiable START agreement ensuring stable nuclear deterrence.

* Gorbachev must cease his aggressive policies in the Third World.

* The Soviet Union must adopt a political order that respects human rights and reflects the wishes of people expressed in free elections.

Until Gorbachev meets these tests, Western assistance to the Soviet Union would be premature. It would be futile to provide aid before the Soviets overhaul their economy. A banker does no favor to the borrower when he makes a bad loan. Such aid would reduce the pressure on the Soviets to reform their economy and to reduce their massive military budget.

It is true that much has changed. But much has not. The Soviet Union is still a global superpower with decisive superiority in land-based nuclear weapons and in conventional forces. Its leaders are committed to an ideology that is diametrically opposed to ours. They support regimes around the world that are highly detrimental to our interests.

If Gorbachev’s reforms grow and thrive--if perestroika succeeds and glasnost leads to political pluralism--then in the 21st Century we may look across the Bering Strait and see a superpower more like the United States. But if they give Gorbachev’s faltering communist system the jolt it needs to begin to catch up with the West, in the next century we may well face a stronger, more confident, more dangerous adversary. Faced with two such radically different possible outcomes, no U.S. President can be criticized for hoping for the best--just so long as he plans for the worst.

Objective observers would agree on one thing: Whatever Gorbachev does, he does in the interests of himself and of the Soviet Union. He is neither a saint nor a soft-headed do-gooder; nor should we be. No matter how unpopular it may be in the short term--no matter how vociferously the leading pundits may bemoan “tired Cold War thinking”--the United States must continue to pursue our national interest as aggressively as Gorbachev does his.

Today, when peace appears to be breaking out all over and the Soviet leader is more popular than the President in Europe and even among Americans with graduate degrees, it will be tempting for even responsible U.S. politicians to give in to Gorbymania. It is not that they necessarily believe that the Soviet Union no longer poses any threat to our interests. It is that they realize it may be impossible to get anyone to believe it and that it might even be political suicide to try.

When John F. Kennedy and I supported President Harry Truman’s request for aid to Greece and Turkey 43 years ago, we thought at the time that it was a difficult decision. In retrospect, it was easy, because we had a simple choice between two worlds--the Communist World and the Free World. Today, because the communist idea is suffering from a terminal illness, we live in one of those great watershed periods of history where the prospects for peace and freedom are more hopeful than they were in 1947. But because we no longer live in a bipolar world, the decisions we must make are far more complex and difficult.

Communism has been discredited as an ideology and as an economic and political model. Western ideas of political and economic liberty have won the ideological battle. But this victory must still be consolidated in geopolitical terms. While the communists have lost the Cold War, the West has not yet won it.

It has become fashionable in the West to speak of the “end of history.” The triumph of Western ideals, the argument runs, means the end of geopolitical competition. Seldom has fashion veered so widely from fact. Our ideals have proved superior, but their geopolitical triumph remains far from complete. For the foreseeable future, the United States must continue to lead the Free World.

In this phase of the struggle, we must expand the horizons of our efforts. It is not enough to rest content behind the security of our alliances with Western Europe and Japan. Nor is it enough simply to exhort the peoples of the Third World to avoid the evils of communism. We must not only adopt a strategy to promote the cause of freedom in Eastern Europe but also engage ourselves in alleviating the misery and poverty in developing countries that plays into the hands of communists and other demagogues. We can reinvigorate the Western alliance by working together in supporting the cause of positive, peaceful change in Eastern Europe. Our European allies today suffer from a kind of historical fatigue. For 40 years they have been on the front line of history. Their role has been defined by a negative mission--stopping further Soviet expansion. This fatigue can be cured by devoting energy to the positive mission of promoting the cause of freedom beyond the Iron Curtain.

A significant start has already been made by the courageous actions of the peoples of Eastern Europe in defying their would-be communist masters. Their democratic neighbors in the European Community, as well as the United States, should provide the technical advice and economic assistance necessary to ensure that the East Europeans succeed in their groundbreaking efforts to create free-market economies and democratic governments. This is a task that will not only enhance Western security but also help to restore its sense of purpose.

Virtually all objective observers agree that in 1989 the world experienced a watershed year. Those who compare these events to the upheavals of 1848 should bear in mind that the revolutions that swept over Europe in that watershed year, many of which were bloody, were ultimately all repressed. The autocrats returned to power, though with some modest bows to parliamentary reform that did not really limit their power.

The revolutions of 1989 also hold promise and peril. They are popular revolutions driven from below, not above, stimulated by the power of ideas rather than by the force of arms. By ridding themselves of their communist ideas, the peoples of Eastern Europe produced one of the most exciting periods in the postwar era. A great battle has been won, but the war is not over. It is much easier to mount a revolution that destroys an old society than to head a government that can build a new society.

Eastern Europe’s new leaders have excellent intentions but virtually no experience in the difficult task of establishing a democratic political system and managing a free-market economic system. For the West, the great challenge in Eastern Europe--more difficult than tearing down the Berlin Wall--is to help build new systems that will not dash the euphoric expectations of those who risked so much in supporting the revolution.

The process of change has taken on a momentum of its own, and Gorbachev has released forces he himself ultimately will be unable to control. If he takes the final step and adopts their ideas as his own, he will immeasurably advance the cause of peace. He could become not just the man of the decade but the man of the century.

After World War I and World War II, we used to dream of peace as a kind of ideal world. But peace in the limited sense of the absence of war is not enough. Just as in wartime, people in peacetime need to take on challenges larger than themselves. As we are increasingly liberated from the threat of destructive war, we can concentrate our energies on the unlimited challenges of a creative peace.

On Aug. 15, 1945, my wife and I joined the huge throng in Times Square to celebrate the end of World War II. Although I particularly remember the day because my pocket was picked, my most vivid recollection was how elated we were over the end of the war and how high our hopes were for the future of peace and freedom in the world. But our dreams were quickly dashed. At the same time some thief was stealing my wallet, Josef Stalin was making off with Eastern Europe and starting the Cold War.

As internal crises envelop the Communist World, we again have cause for hope--not the giddy expectations of easy times ahead but the reasoned optimism that we have passed a key milestone in history. We know now what we were not sure of then--that freedom, not communism, is the wave of the future. As a nation conceived in and blessed by freedom, we hold the future in our hands.

CHINA

My sixth visit to China in October, 1989, was potentially the most sensitive and controversial since my first trip 17 years before. This time, virtually all my close friends urged me not to go. They predicted that my critics would hammer me unmercifully for appearing to try to salvage the China initiative by tipping glasses with those who had ordered the Tian An Men crackdown less than five months before. I agreed with them. But I believed that doing what I could to restore momentum to one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world was more than worth the risk to my own image.

At the time I was unaware of the secret delegation President Bush had sent to Beijing in early July. But even if I had known about the mission, I would have gone ahead with my own plans. The tragedy at Tian An Men had dealt a devastating blow to Sino-American relations in large part because it had occurred on live television. Private expressions of regret, while important, were not enough.

I knew the American people were realistic enough to understand that we had to continue to have constructive relations with the most populous nation in the world. But they deserved to have their sympathies for the student demonstrators expressed both publicly and directly to the Chinese leaders. I, in turn, was realistic enough to know that my role in the rapprochement between our two countries gave me privileged status as an “old friend” of China. I knew that even if I said things the leaders did not want to hear, they would listen.

To underscore the importance of my visit in their eyes and also to give it a bipartisan character, I asked Michel Oksenberg, a leading China specialist and formerly the Carter Administration’s top China expert, to accompany me. I also consulted with a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen before leaving.

My four days in Beijing were the most arduous I have spent in a foreign country since leaving office. I had more than 20 hours of one-on-one meetings with China’s top leaders--including Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng and Deng’s designated successor, General Secretary Jiang Zemin--and with several highly impressive younger leaders, as well as Deng Yingchao, the widow of Chou En-lai, who is a top Communist Party leader in her own right.

My purposes in these meetings were threefold: to show the leaders that even China’s friends in the United States were outraged at the events of June 2-4 and that China would have to take steps to address our concerns; to draw the leaders back into a discussion of geopolitics after months of preoccupation with their domestic problems, and to establish a dialogue about the future of Sino-American relations.

On Oct. 31 I had what will probably be my last meeting with Deng Xiaoping. It was also his last meeting with a Western figure before announcing his retirement. In the American media, he had been transformed virtually overnight from bold visionary--he was Time’s Man of the Year in 1978 and 1985--to bloodthirsty villain because of his role in the crackdown. I expected to find him distracted and defensive. His physical condition had deteriorated noticeably in the four years since I had last seen him. He was less steady on his feet, and his hearing was so poor that he had two translators--one to make a record of our conversation and another to shout my comments into his left ear. But his mind was still sharp and his energy level remarkable.

I began by telling Deng, “I have watched Sino-U.S. relations closely for 17 years. There has never been a worse crisis than now in those relations, because this time the concerns come not from those who are enemies of China but from those who are friends. In our talks we must examine those differences and repair the damage to the respect among China’s friends in the United States for some of the leaders of China.”

During my earlier meetings on this trip, Deng’s colleagues in the leadership had repeatedly taken what was clearly the current party line. Quoting a Chinese proverb, “He who ties the knot must untie it,” they had asserted that the chill in our relations was the fault of the United States, which had overreacted to the purely internal matter of some troublesome “counterrevolutionary” students.

Deng was far more subtle. “In putting an end to this recent past between us,” he said, “the United States should take the initiative. China is weak and small, while the United States is large and strong. I am not just concerned with trying to preserve face. Rather, if I and my colleagues do not maintain respect for China, we should step down. This is a universal principle.”

Deng was playing an old revolutionary’s tune, appealing for sympathy as leader of a nation that had been the victim of generations of foreign domination and exploitation. While it is true that China has good cause to resent foreign interference in its internal affairs, it is also true that as a nation that now seeks to benefit from relations with foreign countries, it must learn to be sensitive to their concerns about human rights and other issues.

Still, at the end of my three-hour, no-holds-barred exchange with China’s paramount leader, I was more convinced than ever that despite our disagreements over the tragedy that had darkened his last months in power, Deng Xiaoping--the first major communist leader to sense the failure of communism as an economic doctrine and to take dramatic steps to reform it--was one of the most important leaders of our era.

To drive home my message about Tian An Men Square, I used my formal public toasts at two of the banquets the Chinese leaders held in my honor.

I told Li Peng, the hard-line premier, that our differences over the massacre were “huge and unbridgeable.” I asked him whether China would “turn away from greatness and consign itself to the backwater of oppression and stagnation? Or will it continue to venture forth on the open seas on a journey that may at times be rough but which leads to progress and peace and justice for its people?”

In responding to the toast of China’s president, Yang Shangkun, who was also closely linked to the crackdown, I warned that “many in the United States, including many friends of China, believe the crackdown was excessive and unjustified” and that it had “damaged the respect and confidence that most Americans previously had for the leaders of China.”

I asked him a series of tough questions that I knew he and his colleagues did not expect to hear, especially from one they considered an old friend. Would martial law and political repression be permanent features of life in China? Would the courageous and bold economic reforms Deng had initiated 10 years before be abandoned to the stagnation that had nearly strangled China previously? In rooting out corruption and inflation, would China also root out the delicate new growth of individual enterprise that had doubled the per capita income of its people?

It was uncomfortable for me as a guest to ask these questions, and I am sure the Chinese were surprised by my blunt criticism. But I felt it was essential that they understand the depth of the outrage in the United States over the events of June 2-4. I knew it would have more impact coming from a friend rather than from one of their hostile American critics. They could also see that my intention was to show that the crackdown blocked the road to a goal we both wanted to reach eventually: a return to better relations between our two countries.

I concluded my toast by observing that while the death of innocent people in June had been a great tragedy, “another tragedy would be the death of a relationship and of policies that have served so well.” My message was clear: While what they had done in June was tragic and inexcusable, it was in the interests of both the United States and China for our relationship to continue in spite of it.

I left China guardedly optimistic about the future. While I was still in the country, its leaders had already taken two small but telling steps. They had modified the enforcement of martial law in the capital by replacing People’s Liberation Army soldiers with less-threatening Beijing police officers. Also, Li Peng had complied with my blunt demand that the soldiers who were guarding the entrance to the American Embassy be ordered to put away the AK-47 automatic rifles they had been brandishing at American diplomats.

But I was not naive enough to believe that these two small gestures meant anything in the long term. The true source of my optimism was a renewed sense that after some necessary retrenchment, Deng’s economic reforms would continue and that with them would inevitably come renewed pressure for political reforms. Each leader I had met had expressed strong support for the fundamentals of Deng’s reforms.

When I met with President Bush upon my return, I predicted that in the wake of Deng’s retirement there would be a major battle for power between the reformers and the reactionaries who want to return China to the policies that existed before 1972. If the United States adopts a policy of isolating China, it will only be grist for the mill of the reactionaries. Contact and cooperation with all the major Western countries are essential if those who support Deng’s reforms and his opening to the West are to prevail in the inevitable struggle for power.

Restoring the close working relationship between our two countries will not occur, however, until the Chinese leaders respond to the United States’ conciliatory actions and put China once again on the path to economic and political reforms.

Especially in view of the ouster of hard-line regimes in Eastern Europe, it is not easy for those in Beijing to make concessions to forces they may feel seek to bring about the same result in their country. But the political realities faced by President Bush and other supporters of good relations with China make it essential that China’s leaders deal with these issues forthrightly. In mediating between two fundamental interests--maintaining stability in China and constructive relations with the West--the communist government in Beijing faces the greatest test since the revolution that brought it to power more than 41 years ago.