Global Strategy Eludes U.S. in Soviet Breakup

Not since 1945, foreign policy scholars say, has the world seemed so full of promise and possibilities.

The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union as a superpower is rapidly altering the basic premises of American foreign policy--and confronting President Bush with the prospect of a vacuum where a national strategy ought to be.

For more than four decades, U.S. strategy was designed mainly to deal with the presence of a rival superpower--sometimes threatening, sometimes cooperative--sprawled across the other side of the globe. Even Bush’s idea of a “new world order” was based partly on the idea of cooperating with a Soviet Union that could add its still-considerable global influence to that of the United States.

But now the Soviet superpower is disintegrating into a self-absorbed collection of republics with a troublesome nuclear arsenal but a steadily shrinking ability to exert any deliberate influence on the rest of the world.

As a result, Bush Administration officials acknowledge, the United States needs a new policy toward the Soviet Union. But a growing number of foreign policy experts outside the Administration argue that Bush needs more than that. They say he needs a new concept--a “grand strategy”--to guide U.S. actions all over the world.

“We have to start over from scratch,” Terry L. Deibel, a professor of strategy at the Pentagon’s National War College, said with a hint of relish. “We have to discover some new logic for our foreign policy. The Great Prioritizer, the Soviet Union, is gone.”

And some complain that Bush has failed to grasp the opportunities that lie within reach.

“The President and his advisers are just way out of touch,” complained Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter. “They are pursuing . . . a concept of stability, which is wrong. The only way to deal with dynamic change is to give it shape. Instead, he’s nostalgically trying to preserve the past.”

Bush himself has acknowledged that the changes in Moscow have altered the global landscape in fundamental ways. But, characteristically, he has cautiously shied away from drawing any immediate conclusions.

“If things keep going forward instead of slipping back, there’s an opportunity for a vastly restructured national security posture--but it’s way too early, way too early, to get into that,” Bush told reporters last week.

Still, the President cannot long avoid developing some kind of new strategy, even if it is little more than a collection of individual policies. The changes in Moscow bear too directly on too many issues at home, from the defense budget to the economy.

If Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin moves ahead toward his declared goal of ridding Russia of nuclear weapons, for example, what would be the purpose of a U.S. nuclear arsenal? Is nuclear deterrence, which fueled a hugely expensive arms race for four decades, becoming obsolete? “Maybe,” a senior Bush aide allowed.

What kind of defense does the United States need if the Soviet Union no longer exists and if its remnants no longer have the ability or inclination to invade Western Europe? Does the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed to stop Soviet dictator Josef Stalin from sending his tanks across Germany, have any mission left?

Should the United States act to prevent new, “little” wars in Eastern Europe or among the former Soviet republics? Can the United States preserve its alliance with Japan when the main glue in their relationship--a common fear of the Soviet Union--has melted away?

And, most fundamentally, in a world with no major adversary, what is foreign policy for?

“We’re scratching our heads,” one official admitted cheerfully. “At this point, we’re just trying to keep up with what’s going on in the Soviet Union. From morning to afternoon, you don’t know who’s in charge or what they’re doing.

“It’s a little early to ask us for a whole new policy,” he added. “Our strategy is ‘prudence and patience,’ ” he said with a laugh.

To be sure, Bush and his aides already have remade U.S. foreign policy once, scrambling from 1989 until this year to forge a new, cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union and to assert a “new world order” in which the United States and its allies act to calm troubled parts of the world.

“We’re already changing,” Secretary of State James A. Baker III told reporters Wednesday. “We started this maybe a year ago . . changing in our approach to the people we deal with” in the Soviet Union.

But as for broader changes around the world, Baker said: “That’s not something I really want to speculate or hypothesize about today. We’ve got a lot to do right now, dealing with these changes as they occur in the Soviet Union.”

Spokesmen for the major agencies dealing with foreign policy, including the National Security Council and the State Department, said they know of no major efforts within the government to project the long-term effects of the changes in the Soviet Union or their implications for U.S. policy.

“We’re doing a lot of rethinking on specific issues,” said one, asking that he not be identified. “What does this mean for peace negotiations in the Middle East? What does it mean for Soviet client states like Cuba? What does it mean for weapons production and proliferation? What does it mean when the boundaries of Europe have just shifted eastward by about 2,000 miles (to include a newly independent Ukraine and Russia)?

“We’ve been trying to think about it, but it’s gotten out ahead of us in some respects,” he said.

But then, long-range planning has never been much of a preoccupation for Bush, who once dismissed complaints of a strategy shortage as “the vision thing.”

Bush, Baker and White House National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft have been wary of setting out a grand strategy, in part because they fear it could constrain their flexibility. After Bush set out the idea of a “new world order” in several speeches designed largely to justify U.S. military action against Iraq, he steadily backtracked from using the idea as a guide for U.S. actions elsewhere. “People keep reading too much into the idea,” one of his senior aides complained.

And, so far, Bush and his aides have put their instincts and their tactical diplomatic prowess to good use, successfully nurturing a new relationship with the Soviet Union, aiding the unification of Germany and organizing a victorious war in the Persian Gulf.

Still, the camp of their critics is growing, all complaining that those short-term successes haven’t addressed some of the long-term problems the United States will face in the post-Cold War, post-Soviet world.

“This Administration is a tactically superb team without any evident sense of strategic direction,” Brzezinski charged. In the Soviet Union, he said, “the United States should be in the forefront, welcoming these developments. Instead, the President is acting as if his greatest concern is preserving both (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev and a reformed Soviet Union--at a time when no one in the Soviet Union calls himself ‘Soviet’ any more.”

More broadly, he said, Bush needs to set out a coherent plan for building new structures of global political stability and at the same time revitalize the domestic economy to ensure U.S. strength into the next century. “He has made a start on one (global stability) but not the other,” Brzezinski said.

“I don’t think the Bush Administration has fully grasped its opportunity,” agreed John D. Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at Washington’s Brookings Institution. “What we want to do now is engage with the republics of what used to be the Soviet Union and shape changes there in a constructive way . . . as we did with Germany and Japan after World War II.

“But if you want a policy of engagement, you have to be pretty conceptual. You have to look beyond immediate events,” he said. “Their style is not to anticipate events, not to pursue policy designs but to react.”

“We may be in some trouble over the long run,” he warned. “The downside (of not having a long-term strategy) is that you can miss opportunities, and missed opportunities can come back to bite you down the line.”

Steinbruner said he believes a new U.S. grand strategy should address three emerging issues: keeping the peace through “collective security,” managing the integration of the world’s many national economies into a single global marketplace and solving the growing problems of energy and environmental damage.

A growing number of other foreign policy specialists have argued that a new national strategy should focus not on international affairs but on domestic issues of rejuvenating the American economy, the educational system and the cities.

The chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson, said in a recent speech that domestic decline “threatens America’s long-term national security more than the traditional preoccupations of security and foreign policy such as the menace of Soviet nuclear bombs.”

Added Alan Tonelson, a foreign policy scholar at the Economic Strategy Institute here: “We need a grand strategy at home much more than we need one abroad. . . . The changes that we need to make, rejuvenating our economy and our society, are things we need to do regardless of what happens in the Soviet Union.”

But even the Bush Administration’s critics admit some sympathy for the magnitude of its dilemma.

“This is a more difficult problem than the one Harry Truman faced (at the dawn of the Cold War),” said Steinbruner. “It’s a more complicated set of circumstances. In the hands of a conceptualizing President, we could come up with a new strategy fairly quickly. We don’t have that kind of President--but to be fair, we rarely do.”