PERSPECTIVE ON THE LATE COLD WAR : Acquaintances, Not Quite Friends : Americans and Russians have a way to go before there is any special relationship. But change can come on fast.

When two great nations, like the United States and the Soviet Union, suddenly decide to resolve their differences and strike up an acquaintance, a lot of mental adjustment becomes necessary.

But history shows that it happens again and again. Indeed the classic case was Britain and America. The two countries had been enemies since the 1770s and they fought the War of 1812 with peculiar bitterness on land and sea. When an agreement to end it was finally signed on Christmas Eve, 1814, John Quincy Adams told the senior British delegate, Admiral Lord Gambier: “I hope this will be the last treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States.”

Adams obviously had no faith in his pious wish. He and men like Gen. Andrew Jackson, both to become U.S. Presidents, had been brought up to regard Britain as the enemy, just as statesmen on the British side like George Canning regarded Americans with dislike and suspicion and indeed, since they were republicans, as ideological enemies. Yet it is a fact that the Treaty of Ghent was the last time Britain and the United States needed to agree to terms of peace, and almost from its signature what later became known as the special relationship began to develop. The Great Lakes were soon turned into a demilitarized zone and the subject of the first successful disarmament treaty ever signed. The line dividing the United States from Canada, which might have been the source of endless conflict, became the longest and almost the only undefended frontier in the world. (I don’t say suspicions were entirely buried: the U.S. Navy had contingency plans for a war with Britain as late as 1930!)

It is worth bearing this history of Anglo-American relations in mind in considering future relations with Russia. There are two prime causes of war--nearness and different ways of doing things. England and France appeared to be “natural” enemies, because of their propinquity, for more than 800 years, during which they went to war with one another more than a score of times. But since they both became universal suffrage democracies, there has been no trouble. France and Germany also fought intermittently over their frontiers. But since Germany demonstrated it could practice democracy with conviction, the two have been working partners. We now hear nothing of the fierce disputes over the Saar and Alsace-Lorraine, which were still active only a generation ago.

The United States and Russia, happily, have no frontier disputes of any consequence. This is partly a matter of historical luck. Russia penetrated the Pacific Northwest in search of furs some time before America did. It was Britain, backed by the power of the Royal Navy,which persuaded the Russians to pull out of Kodiak and Sitka (then called New Archangel) on the North American mainland in 1825. But it was a farsighted American secretary of state, William Henry Seward, who had the sense in 1867 to buy from Russia the rest of Alaska for a mere $7.2 million, a deal that at the time was denounced as “Seward’s Folly.” As a result, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, 1945-90, never became envenomed by a frontier dispute.

The Cold War was, then, essentially about “different ways of doing things”-- that is, ideology. The United States and Russia, as the two powers of the future, were often compared in the 19th Century. Czar Alexander I, a typical pseudo-intellectual, corresponded with President Thomas Jefferson about the possibility of introducing the U.S. federal system in Russia. But it is clear he did not know what that meant--he wanted to divide Russia into “states,” but then have them governed by generals appointed by and answerable to himself. Today, the Soviet Union and the United States can be reasonable acquaintances because the government of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, without actually saying so, has renounced the Marxist-Leninist doctrine that the entire world will eventually go communist--which was tantamount to a program of global expansion and an undeclared war against all “bourgeois states.”

However, the Soviet Union has a long way to go before it acquires the credentials for a genuine friendship with America. Apart from a few months between spring and autumn 1917, Russia has never moved purposefully toward democracy. It is not yet clear whether Gorbachev and the Communist Party are ready to renounce their monopoly of political power. There is a regular pattern in Russian history of “revolution from above,” like Gorbachev’s, producing chaotic muddles and threatening anarchy, and so leading immediately to a return to authoritarian rule. Nor has Russia ever been a true market society, even under the last czars. If democracy comes, Russians have still to be educated into the habit of running the economy for themselves, instead of looking to the state. These are very big jumps to make, but until they are negotiated safely, it is hard to see the present stand-down turning into positive regard. There are many vocal minorities in the United States--Poles and Balts, Germans and Jews, Ukrainians and Russians, too--who will insist that the Soviet Union, or whatever it eventually calls itself, pay for American friendship in the true coin of democracy and capitalism.

But relations among powers are guided by emotions, often irrational, as well as by common sense and self-interest. It is a curious fact that America has always had a highly emotional relationship with China, and has been prepared to tolerate behavior from Beijing that it would not have accepted anywhere else. Even in the 1820s, when all foreign trade with China went through Canton, the Americans, who could be exceedingly stiff-necked in the rest of the world, were much more prepared to kowtow than, say, the British. The Bush Administration has shown a similar amazing willingness to forget, or rather ignore, events in Tian An Men Square, in the apparent hope of getting back on cuddling terms with the authoritarian hard-line Communists in the Forbidden City. Gorbachev noticed this and made some bitter remarks about his inability, despite all his reforms, to get a better deal from Washington than the unreconstructed, bloody-handed Chinese.

It may be, of course, that President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III are being wiser than the rest of us and wish to keep the lines to Beijing open at almost any cost for fear of a yet more momentous coming together of former enemies. For if Japan, with the world’s most dynamic economy, were suddenly to fall into a political, economic and eventual military embrace with China, which has the world’s largest population, then the geopolitics of the world would be changed at a stroke. History, I repeat, shows that such things do happen, often with alarming speed.