COLUMN RIGHT : The Bear Isn’t Starving; Don’t Feed It : Gorbachev is flush with cash; U.S. aid will only help his strategies of repression.

Had Republicans in 1988 told voters we would be raising taxes to send foreign aid to Moscow, even the Little Duke might have been able to slip around our right end and run to daylight.

Yet, here we are. Six months ago, Majority Leader Richard Gephardt took a fearsome pounding for even suggesting what Mr. Bush has decided to do: send $1 billion in food aid to Mr. Gorbachev.

Kansas Sen. Robert Dole, whose friend and contributor is Dwayne Andreas of the grain giant Archer Daniels Midland, suggests we raise Moscow’s food-related loan guarantees to $3 billion. Fine, Bob, but when Moscow welshes, let Andreas and ADM eat the loss.

Astonishing. With the dollar sinking, the deficit exploding, the Fed feverishly pumping cash into a failing Bank of New England, the S&L; crisis deepening, the Persian Gulf adventure doubling in cost, Uncle Sam is launching a new foreign-aid initiative--to rescue the last dictator between San Francisco and Vladivostok.

Were the Russian people starving, Americans would be there with food assistance. But they are not starving. They just had the greatest harvest in history, and Gorbachev’s gang is flush with cash. Moscow’s $4-billion windfall profit from the doubling of oil prices, its $24 billion in credits since June from the Germans and Saudis, plus $10 billion to $14 billion in reserves, give Gorbachev all the cash he needs. Why, then, are we sending him food on credit?

Because Bush wishes to signal to the Soviets that Gorbachev is our man in Moscow, that saving him serves U.S. national interests.

But does it, in December, 1990?

Surely, the Gorbachev who held back the tanks in Central Europe in 1989 was the best Soviet leader of our lifetime. Ronald Reagan was right: Gorbachev was a “different kind” of Communist. Were he to preside over the dismantling of the Soviet strategic rocket force and the opening up of his “prison house of nations,” his regime would be as wise a strategic investment as the United States could make. But there is no evidence that Gorbachev intends to preside over the liquidation of the Soviet Empire; there is hard evidence that he is aligning with the imperialist factions determined to save it.

The Soviet military still consumes 20% of GNP; Soviet tanks have been moved east of the Urals to exempt them from U.S. arms-control agreements; Soviet rockets--aimed at the United States--continue to roll off assembly lines. Moreover, Gorbachev has lately declared his intent to use force to keep the Soviet Union together. At the top of the Interior Ministry sits a newly appointed ex-KGB tough from Latvia, Boris Pugo, whose deputy, Gen. Boris Gromov, has the aspect of a Russian Napoleon. There is a good possibility that just as U.S. food aid is pouring into Moscow this winter, Gromov will be conducting a blockade of one or more Baltic republics.

In the battle between neo-Stalinists and reform Communists, Gorbachev was with the reformers. We had an investment in his victory. But that fight is over. The battle now is between those who believe in constitutional rights, free markets and independence for the republics, and those prepared to use force to keep Russia’s captive nations captive forever. Gorbachev is emerging as the leader and voice of the forces of repression.

His regime--with its huge Marxist bureaucracy--is now the impediment to reform. As former National Security Council aide Roger Robinson of the Center for Security Policy writes, the Soviet Union is referred to by American bankers as “Red Bear S&L.;” It should be shut down, its managers fired, its assets parceled out. To stuff Moscow full of cash and credit in 1990 is to give this failed regime the same lease on life we gave Lenin in the ‘20s, Stalin in the ‘40s, Brezhnev in the ‘70s. This time, don’t bail ‘em out, let ‘em go under.

Like the Commodity Credit Corporation loans to Poland in the ‘70s, and to Iraq in the ‘80s, we will never see the money again; all that subsidized food will have to be paid for by the American people.

By denying aid to Gorbachev, we could force him to act in his own best interest. Without hard currency, he could not pay his bureaucrats, maintain his arsenal, send aid to Cuba and Afghanistan, operate his state farms and factories. Without aid, he must open his country to investment or go under. You do the alcoholic no favor when you give him a drink; you do him a favor when you put him through cold turkey.

President Bush put America’s prestige behind Deng Xiaoping, and, until Aug. 2, behind Saddam Hussein; he was burned by both. With this aid package, he ties himself to a dictator who just may reward him with a crackdown that will cause us to forget Tian An Men Square.