THE FINAL CURTAIN : Paradox for U.S.: New Threats Arise From an Old Foe’s Demise

For more than 40 years, U.S. Presidents worried about “containing” the Soviet Union, preventing a hostile superpower from extending its sway across the world.

Now, suddenly, the problem is no longer holding Russia back--but propping it up.

The collapse of the Soviet Union into 12 independent republics has handed President Bush the biggest foreign policy challenge since the beginning of the Cold War: stabilizing a superpower in the throes of fragmentation and decay.

Russia still poses a threat to the United States and its allies, Administration officials and other experts say. Only now, the threat comes from weakness instead of strength--from chaos instead of Leninist ambition.

“Much as we will benefit if this revolution succeeds, we will pay if it fails,” Secretary of State James A. Baker III warned in a speech at Princeton University earlier this month.

“The dangers of protracted anarchy and chaos are obvious. Great empires rarely go quietly into extinction,” Baker said. “. . . A fall toward fascism or anarchy in the former Soviet Union will pull the West down too.”

Baker, CIA Director Robert M. Gates and other senior officials have listed a sobering litany of morning-after problems in Russia and the other former Soviet republics. All could have serious effects on the peace or prosperity of the rest of the world.

They range from issues of immediate urgency, such as maintaining control over more than 27,000 nuclear weapons, to the unpredictable consequences of economic collapse in a commonwealth of 300 million people on Europe’s eastern doorstep.

The debate over how to prevent those catastrophes is already the most contentious foreign policy argument Washington has seen since the Persian Gulf War. Bush, who won credit for sure-footedness in foreign policy during his first three years in office, is under more fire than ever before for his hesitant approach to rescuing the former Soviet republics--even from some Republicans.

“The Administration ought to draw up a much more comprehensive plan,” complained Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “The President has spoken many times of letting people (in the republics) sort things out. . . . But I would feel more comfortable if the President and the secretary of state had a more comprehensive view of what is likely to occur and what we can affect.”

Within the Administration, Baker has spoken out for a greater U.S. commitment to helping Russia’s new leaders succeed--despite warnings from some Bush political advisers that voters will rebel against a President who proposes a new foreign aid program in the middle of a domestic economic downturn.

Bush has made a general promise of support for Russia and the other reforming republics. “We will do it because, as Americans, we can do no less,” he said after the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day. But the President has proposed no specific programs or price tags beyond a modest aid package that is mostly emergency loans for food.

There is little debate on one issue: The need to assure reliable control over the Soviet nuclear arsenal, from giant intercontinental missiles that could wipe out U.S. cities in minutes to thousands of portable warheads that would make tempting weapons for terrorists.

“Nuclear weapons are still at the top of the list,” a State Department official said.

Despite Bush’s frequent public assurances that there is no cause for concern, many officials are still worried. At the moment, the existing controls over nuclear weapons have been preserved in the hands of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and the Soviet military command system. But in the long run, no one knows whether that stable command system will survive.

“Part of the problem is that the fate of the soviet military Establishment is undetermined,” warned John Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

“The really bad scenario is that the command system comes unglued and loses track of their nuclear weapons,” he said. “Only slightly less bad is that the command system stays together but becomes extremely suspicious of the United States and the rest of the world.” In that case, he said, Russian military behavior in a crisis--either international or domestic--could be unpredictable.

One answer, Steinbruner said, would be a new system of “cooperative security” that would make partners of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Soviet general staff. “If NATO doesn’t include the Soviet Union, it doesn’t have a future,” he said.

The Administration is also discussing ways to prevent an exodus of former Soviet weapons experts to countries--like Libya or Iran--that might want to buy their expertise for nuclear weapons development programs.

A different military problem is posed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union into 12 independent republics. Baker and other officials say they are confident that Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all want to get rid of the Soviet nuclear weapons on their territory, leaving Russia the area’s only nuclear power. But several republics, like Ukraine, have said that they plan to maintain their own conventional armies--a development that, over time, could produce old-fashioned military conflicts over borders, ethnic minorities and other issues.

“The friction between Russia and Ukraine is a potential Yugoslavia, only in much bigger countries,” said Arnold Horelick of the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica. “Multiply what you’ve seen in Croatia 10 times.” Conflict is also possible between Russia and the Muslim republic of Kazakhstan, which has a large Russian minority, he said.

Any such large-scale ground war would send shock waves through Europe, both because of the potential for a conflict spreading and because of the prospect of thousands of refugees heading west. As a result, the United States and other Western countries probably will find themselves intervening politically among the major republics--”inserting ourselves to avoid large-scale violence,” a State Department official suggested.

The smaller republics, on the other hand, may find themselves on their own. In a form of diplomatic triage, the Administration is concentrating its energy on six republics--Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, which have nuclear weapons; Armenia, which has the backing of Armenian-Americans, and Kyrgyzstan, which has a reformist leader--and leaving the rest to their own devices.

Even if the new Commonwealth of Independent States can find a way to handle disputes, the prospect of economic collapse in Russia and its neighbors still affects the United States and its European allies. If Yeltsin’s attempts at economic reforms fail, Secretary of State Baker warned, the Russian people might well turn to “darker political forces”--authoritarian nationalist leaders who would be less congenial to the West.

“Economic deterioration leads to instability,” noted Michael Mandelbaum of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “If attempts at economic reform fail . . . you could, at some point, have a reconstituted, nationalistic, nasty Russia of the pre-Soviet period--the looming menace of the 16th to 19th centuries. If there is that kind of government, the Europeans won’t be happy--and neither will we.

“The logic of economic aid is clear,” he said. “This is a case where an ounce of prevention is probably worth a pound of cure.”

So far, Western aid to the former Soviet Union has been a series of short-term measures aimed at immediate crises--largely loans and loan guarantees to provide food and emergency supplies.

The United States has committed $4.6 billion, of which $3.8 billion (83%) is agricultural credits or loan guarantees and $400 million (9%) is a fund to help dismantle nuclear weapons; lesser amounts are provided for food purchases, transportation of food and advisory missions.

By way of comparison, Germany has committed more than $37 billion, including $11 billion to pay for the upkeep, withdrawal and housing of Soviet troops from the former East Germany. Italy has committed $6.2 billion, South Korea $3.3 billion and Japan $2.9 billion.

The issue has sparked public bickering among the United States and its chief economic allies over what types of aid are needed most, and which countries should be providing a larger share.

Baker has called for an international conference on the issue in Washington next month in hopes of coordinating the efforts of more than a dozen donor countries. Other State Department officials say the meeting also may have the effect of putting pressure on Congress to loosen U.S. purse strings, although Baker denies any such intent.

Bush has consistently resisted suggestions--from some on Capitol Hill, as well as from leaders of other nations--that this country should be making larger-scale financial commitments to the economic rescue of its former enemy.

“What I think we ought to be doing is helping where we can with food, helping where we can with medicine and helping where we can with private investment,” Bush told reporters at a news conference last week.

But others have contended this vision is far too limited. With so much at stake, they argue for a 1990s version of the Marshall Plan, under which the United States spent more than $13 billion to rebuild Western Europe after World War II.

“Ultimately, we’ve got to convince people in this democracy that this is in their highest self-interest,” House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said in an interview. “We’ve won the Cold War. This is the time for the West to step up and consolidate this victory.”

Gephardt and others envision a long-range program under which the world’s richer governments would tie their assistance to economic reform in the republics.

Although he acknowledged it might be difficult to sell this idea to an American public that is feeling an economic pinch at home, Gephardt noted that President Harry S. Truman embarked on the Marshall Plan at a time when polls showed it had only 14% popular support.

But Treasury Undersecretary David C. Mulford rejected that historical comparison. “The Marshall Plan addressed a war-torn area which had had a highly successful and sophisticated economy. It had been disrupted by the war, but the foundations were still there and the human resources were still there,” Mulford said. “The Soviet Union is an area which really never entered the modern capitalist world, never entered the world economy. . . . This is a question of deep-seated fundamental reforms of an economic system that was never of the Western open-market economy type.”

Moreover, he added, at the time the Marshall Plan was conceived, such international institutions as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had neither the resources nor the experience to undertake such a massive program. Now, he said, they are well-funded and can draw on what they learned through aiding the formerly socialist economies of Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

With the dissolution of the Soviet government, the question of aid has been simplified because it no longer hinges on sorting out the tangled relationships between the center and the republics.

For that reason, Administration officials say they are preparing to recommend full membership in the IMF and World Bank for some of the more strategically important and reform-minded republics.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s government had sought membership but was granted only a special associate status, which gave it access to the expertise of the World Bank and IMF but not their funding.

Even full membership in these international financial institutions will not necessarily satisfy all the needs of the former Soviet republics, however.

To get funds from these organizations, countries often must agree to severe austerity measures, such as clamping down on inflation, reining in budget deficits and freeing up prices long under government control. Any such measures will probably send even more economic shock waves through the already fragile economies of the shattered Soviet empire.

Also, the IMF and World Bank have limited resources based on contributions from their members. They already face enormous demands on those resources from other needy economies--those of the newly liberated East European countries, for example, or reforming nations in Latin America and Africa.

Already those countries, many of which are much further along the path of economic reform than the former Soviet republics, have expressed concern that their needs will take a back seat.

Thus, even if the United States does push to allow some former Soviet republics into the international financial institutions, the pressure is not likely to abate for Washington to take a larger role in bailing out its former superpower adversary.

Voices

“I got very well acquainted with Joe Stalin, and I like old Joe! He is a decent fellow. But Joe is a prisoner of the Politburo.”

--President Harry S. Truman, June 11, 1948

“The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.”

--Franklin D. Roosevelt, Feb. 10, 1940