Working Out of a Tight Spot : Bush was right to refuse to offer Vilnius guarantees of independence

It is not easy to be both prudent and principled in the pursuit of foreign policy. So far, however, President Bush has struck that balance on the question of Lithuanian independence. At the moment, the beneficiaries of his success appear to be the American and Soviet people; ultimately, the Lithuanians, too, will profit.

The latest test of Bush’s resolve in the matter came this week when Lithuanian Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene was invited to the White House to plead her struggling government’s cause. Clearly her presence in Washington just weeks before the President’s May 30 summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was an inconvenience, if not embarrassment, to the Administration. Thus, there probably was as much chagrin as diplomatic scrupulousness in the rather grudging initial reception Prunskiene was given at the White House. She was forced to leave her car and show her Soviet passport at the executive mansion’s gate, then walk up the driveway to the White House itself. There, she and her party were left to wait unattended for 10 minutes.

Point made--however indelicately: Prunskiene does not represent a nation officially recognized by the United States. She does, on the other hand, represent a people badly used by history, and for whose wholly legitimate claim to self-determination the American people have profound sympathy. President Bush made that essential point, too, in their frank, 45-minute talk.

The President reminded Prunskiene of how the West rhetorically encouraged the 1956 Hungarian uprising, then stood back and watched as it was murderously repressed. In place of such bloody brinkmanship, he said, the United States wants “dialogue--talk, talk, talk.” He also correctly turned aside her suggestion that America become a formal mediator between Vilnius and Moscow. “If there was a constructive role for the United States, of course, we should fulfill that,” Bush said, “but there’s not.”

Perhaps most important, the President rejected Prunskiene’s proposal that the West “guarantee” Lithuania’s independence by formally recognizing its government, sovereignty and territorial boundaries. In return, she had proposed, her government would accept a recent suggestion by the French and Germans that Lithuania voluntarily “suspend” its declaration of independence for two years.

Self-reliance and not another’s guarantee is the wellspring of genuine self-determination. Americans are not indifferent to Lithuanian freedom, but they cannot be made hostage to a particular notion of how it must be expressed. John Quincy Adams’ admonition to realism applies now as it always has: “We are the friend of liberty everywhere, but the custodian of none but our own.”