Insider : Between Caution and Euphoria: Crafting a Policy Toward Moscow

Marveling at the headlong pace that characterizes U.S.-Soviet relations these days, a senior State Department official joked: “We seem to enter a new era every two weeks or so.”

That may not be very far off the mark, at least as far as the changing focus of Administration policy is concerned. In little more than a year, the Bush Administration has already run through two distinct policies on how to deal with the Soviet Union. Now--on the eve of President Bush’s summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev--harried Administration architects are working on a third.

As the map of Europe has changed, and as the Soviet Union has moved from Gorbachev’s early success to the brink of serious instability, the Administration’s own outlook has come full circle: from caution to euphoria and back to caution again.

“President Gorbachev has made profound progress in his country, reforms so fundamental that the clock cannot be turned back,” Bush said earlier this month, embracing a proposition that his own aides once debated hotly. “And yet,” the President warned, “neither can we turn the clock ahead to know what kind of country the Soviet Union will be in years to come.”

Hopes for a new, more cooperative U.S.-Soviet relationship, which reached a peak only six months ago at the first Bush-Gorbachev summit in Malta,have since been “tempered somewhat,” a senior Bush adviser said. Now, the aim is not so much to achieve great things as to avoid greater problems. “Serious instability in the Soviet Union is much more thinkable than it was six months ago,” he pointed out.

As a result, Administration officials and foreign policy experts outside the government are once again debating what the United States should do about the Man in the Kremlin.

Some critics charge that the Administration has consistently been a step behind events. At first, they say, it was too cautious to embrace Gorbachev; now it is too hesitant to adjust its approach.

“The policy of watching, waiting and keeping a low profile was a very successful one for the year 1989,” said Michael Mandelbaum, a Sovietologist at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “But in 1990, with the Eastern European political revolutions completed, with the Soviet Union in turmoil, with policy dilemmas arising right and left and with real business to transact, that kind of policy may no longer be appropriate.”

The Bush Administration has been debating the Gorbachev Question since its first day in office, but the question--like the policy--has had to change with events.

“The question was first: Is he real?” a senior official recalled. “Then it was: Can he last? Now it really is: Can he stay relevant? Can he manage what he’s unleashed?”

Indeed, barely a year ago, Bush and his aides were deeply skeptical about Gorbachev’s motives. As late as last May, after the Kremlin leader stung the Administration with surprise proposals for arms reductions in Europe, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater publicly derided the Soviet leader as a “drugstore cowboy.”

Throughout the spring and summer of 1989, the Administration’s high command waged a major--and occasionally public--debate over whether Gorbachev was more than that. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who was the first Administration official to spend any significant time with Gorbachev and with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, argued that the Kremlin finally was ready to do business.

Vice President Dan Quayle and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney cautioned that Gorbachev’s reforms might well not succeed--and in any case could easily be reversed if the Soviet leader were overthrown.

But Gorbachev impressed Bush with his actions, especially in Eastern Europe, where he began withdrawing Soviet troops and encouraging democratic reforms. American allies in Western Europe--particularly West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher--pressed for supporting the Soviet leader.

And Baker found a policy formula that cut through the debate over Gorbachev’s chances of success: He argued that instability in the Soviet Union should not deter the United States from negotiating; rather, it should spur an effort to “lock in” Soviet concessions while they were still available.

For Bush, the turning point on this phase of the Administration’s evolving policy came in October, when Gorbachev intervened to help oust East Germany’s old-style Communist regime--an unexpected move that almost immediately resulted in the opening of the Berlin Wall. “That was a fairly decisive moment,” one senior Bush adviser said. “From then on, (the Soviet Bloc) pretty much collapsed.”

Within weeks, a new Soviet-American rapprochement went into high gear. U.S. and Soviet officials huddled for hours discussing how an injection of American capitalism could resuscitate the Soviet economy. Negotiations over nuclear and conventional arms reductions rapidly made headway. Old conflicts that had long dominated the superpower dialogue--Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union and conflict in Central America, to name just two--virtually evaporated.

The euphoria reached a high point at the first Bush-Gorbachev summit, held aboard a Soviet cruise ship off Malta last December. At an unprecedented joint press conference, the President of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union beamed at each other like old friends. “We stand on the threshold of a brand new era of U.S.-Soviet relations,” an elated Bush declared.

Even so, some top Bush aides were privately pessimistic. “Are we tying ourselves too closely to Gorbachev?” one asked, worrying that the United States could find itself committed to backing Soviet policies that were unlikely to work.

And the news from the Soviet Union had already begun to sour, reviving the old debate about Gorbachev’s chances of survival. In January, ethnic friction in the Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan escalated into a small-scale civil war. Plans for Soviet economic reform bogged down. Rumors swept Moscow that Gorbachev might resign. In Washington, the Bush Administration repeated its support for Gorbachev, but officials were increasingly worried.

Yet the honeymoon lasted until Lithuania. On March 11, the Baltic republic’s new Parliament defied Gorbachev openly and declared independence from the Soviet Union, touching off a confrontation with Moscow that remains unresolved today. Gorbachev reacted by sending troops through the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius and clamping an economic blockade on the recalcitrant republic. Bush and his aides responded with indignation.

The chill intensified in April, when Soviet officials seemed to retract several concessions made in recent arms control talks. Aides to Bush and Baker confessed to some consternation and scrambled for explanations: Was the Soviet military reasserting itself and demanding more conservative policies?

Had Gorbachev, after months of handing unilateral concessions to the West, finally gone as far as he could go? “Maybe,” a senior Administration official said, with a half-smile. In fact, officials here concede, they simply don’t know.

As a result, the policy debate has shifted again--to how the United States can balance conflict and cooperation in its dealings with a nuclear superpower that has been beset by mounting instability. “The question now is: Where is the Soviet Union going?” said one of the government’s leading Sovietologists. “Will it stay together? What will be the balance between democratic and authoritarian forces? It just isn’t knowable yet.”

In the short run, those questions boil down to a concrete negotiating problem: Should the Administration seek quick arms agreements with Gorbachev, even if it means compromising on some issues, or should it hold out for more Soviet concessions?

Last week, Baker drew heavy criticism from conservative Republicans in Congress for being “too willing” to compromise with Moscow in order to complete a strategic arms-reduction accord. But there has been no sign yet of similar criticism inside the Administration.

“The notion that while (the Soviets) are weak, we can strike and get more,” doesn’t hold up, a senior White House official said. “Sometimes weakness produces even more resistance than the confidence of strength.”

Still, hard-liners--including some inside the Administration--are pointing to Soviet instability to renew their warnings that Gorbachev’s reforms could yet be reversed. “Is the Soviet Union going to continue to change or is it going to revert to the old thinking? We’re hopeful, but we don’t really know,” Vice President Dan Quayle said earlier this month. “You get into this debate about irreversibility. Nothing is irreversible.”

In the months to come, the argument within the Administration appears likely to intensify again as points of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union come to the fore. The struggle for independence of the Baltic states, Sovietologist Mandelbaum noted, could easily become a long-term irritant between the countries--much as the human rights issue was during the 1970s. “It will be hard not to support what these people are seeking,” he said, “ . . . (but) this will make American policy hostage to a long, contentious--and possibly bloody--process.”

The United States must also decide whether--and how--to offer moral or other support to Gorbachev’s more radical critics, who are demanding more sweeping political and economic reforms. “Mikhail Gorbachev is no doubt one of the great figures of the 20th Century,” Mandelbaum said. “But Gavriil Popov (the new reformist mayor of Moscow) is one of us.”

As Mandelbaum sums it up: “If the alternative to Gorbachev is democratization, we’re against him. If the alternative to Gorbachev is chaos, we’re for him.”