The Best of Both Worlds : Wanting Soviet Reform to Succeed, Lithuania to Be Free

Were it not for the fact that the West has so many chips bet on Gorbachev, further restraint over Lithuania would be almost impossible: In any contest between David and Goliath, rooting for the underdog is hard to resist. But like it or not, too much of what the Western alliance wants to do in the name of long-term peace in Europe and the Pacific can be done in the foreseeable future only with Gorbachev’s help.

So far, the West’s relative inaction over Lithuania has been relatively palatable because it appears that what the Kremlin is trying to put around the neck of the small Baltic republic is a leash and not a noose. As long as that is the case, the appropriate response is restraint, even though the appropriate emotional feeling is moral outrage at a people being punished just because they want to be free.

Standing by and doing nothing while President Mikhail S. Gorbachev starts cutting off the vital flow of gas and oil to Lithuania are hard and will get even harder if the embargo is expanded to cover raw materials the country needs to keep its factories going.

Responding to Moscow’s warning that fuel supplies would be cut off starting Tuesday if three new laws were not repealed by the Parliament in Vilnius, some Lithuanian leaders took some hope from the wording of the warning. It did not, they noted, call for repeal of the March 11 declaration of Lithuanian independence itself.

But President Vytautas Landsbergis still felt compelled to call on President Bush to be tougher with Gorbachev, although he was not specific about the form that being tougher might take.

Even Bush, who has made it so clear that he wants to say nothing that might contribute to a repeat of the 1956 crushing of Hungary by Soviet troops, felt compelled Tuesday to talk of Washington’s making an “appropriate response.”

Yet this is not a matter of tit-for-tat between East and West. It is a quarrel over independence between the Soviet central government and one of its 15 republics. From the Soviet Union’s point of view, the very existence of the nation and empire may be at stake because if Lithuania succeeds in breaking completely free, other republics might well follow suit.

It is hard to think of any response Washington could make that would carry the same weight with Moscow as the possible unraveling of its empire. Would Moscow be tempted to let more republics go in return, for instance, for observer status in the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade, or even an improved trading arrangement with the United States? Not likely.

This is why Bush was right on Tuesday to say: “I want to be sure anything we do is productive. There’s been some dramatic change in the world, and I don’t want to inadvertently take some action that would set it back.”