NEWS ANALYSIS : Treaty Signing Diplomatic Swan Song for Bush

It was the kind of scene George Bush had seemed to prize above all others in his presidency. The gleaming conference table, the aides scurrying into position, the air electric with portents of history as the two most powerful men in the world sat down together at the summit.

The world had all but held its breath to see what the U.S. President and his counterpart from the Kremlin would do. And they had not disappointed destiny: In meetings that stretched from Malta, Moscow and Munich to Washington and Camp David, the summiteers had almost single-handedly lifted the threat of Armageddon and changed the course of the future.

But how long ago and far away all that seemed now as Bush strode down the steps from Air Force One. In the failing light of the winter’s early dusk, he set off across the bitingly frigid and dreary landscape of Sheremetyevo Airport for this: his last summit, a final sunny moment of international diplomacy in a city where subzero temperatures had frozen the snow into a crust that draped the signature birches along the Ring Road and, on a holiday weekend, left the sidewalks nearly deserted.

Hastily hammered together 18 days before Bush’s presidency expires, stripped of the traditional pomp and circumstance that underscored the importance of what was being done, this final Moscow summit and the New Year’s visit to Somalia are bitter reminders of how unkind fortune has been to the President who staked his all on the big moments of foreign policy.

By any standard, Bush had recorded the ultimate in such triumphs. And in his own eyes as well as the judgment of his contemporaries, they represented the zenith of his career. Indeed, he had counted heavily on victory in the Cold War to help him win a second term in the White House.

Alone among senior-most members of the White House and campaign team, Bush had clung forlornly to the notion that the voters who had witnessed his triumphs in the Persian Gulf, who had seen, as he did, the fall of the Berlin Wall, would not turn him out of office.

And so it came to this: a bear hug from Boris N. Yeltsin, two children holding a U.S. flag just beyond the gate of Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence where Bush would spend the night, and a surprisingly brief half-hour allotted to his private chat this morning with the Russian president.

Still, the President seems at peace with it all as he prepares to leave the world scene and head back home to Houston on Jan. 20.

“You see, my problem is I thought I was going to win,” he told an audience of Marines in Baidoa, Somalia, on Friday, “so I didn’t do any defense planning, you might say.”

In an oddly reflective mood, Bush seemed to have already left behind the world of diplomacy as he spoke of his 12 grandchildren and the need to make up for lost time with them.

“I plan to do stuff with them,” he said as he launched into his special brand of English. “I plan to try to put something back into society and not at the head table, not always in the glamour, certainly not with a lot of news attention--try to be a useful citizen back in Houston, Tex., and in Maine.”

Despite his regrets about “not finishing the course,” he will, he promised, stay out of his successor’s way.

“I told him: ‘Look, you will not have to worry about my being a critic. That’s not my role as a former President,’ ” Bush said. “He was elected by the American people, and he will have my full support as he tackles this job that lies ahead. And I think you will find he’s a good commander in chief of these armed forces. . . . I think you will find he is a very bright and able man suited to lead our country at this time.”

For Bush, the change cannot be easy.

The importance of foreign policy to this President--whose world outlook, by all accounts, was firmly shaped by the crucible of World War II and his own experience as the young pilot of a Navy torpedo bomber in the Pacific theater--has been more than a matter of one election or one final summit. Rather, it defined him as a public servant.

“It is central to his political being,” said Vic Gold, a former aide and collaborator on Bush’s 1988 campaign autobiography. “Foreign policy is really what motivates him.

“That satisfies his spiritual soul. He feels he is contributing something. You get a lot more enjoyment out of that than by increasing the gross national product by one point,” Gold said, delving at once to both the core of the Bush presidency and the core of its loss.

The irony, however, is this: It was only after his defeat by Bill Clinton, whose lack of experience in foreign policy the Bush team hoped would give voters pause, that Bush became free, with no political concerns hanging over him, to plunge once again into the world of diplomacy that has been the raison d’etre for much of his public life.

Matters that had festered throughout the closing months of the presidential campaign--the civil war and starvation in Somalia, the murderous turmoil in Bosnia-Herzegovina--have now drawn his attention, and the ticking of the clock about to welcome a new Administration in Washington helped provide the impetus that brought about final agreement on the strategic arms reduction treaty that Bush and Yeltsin are scheduled to sign this morning.

So now, as he takes his final turn on the world stage, Bush is completing his presidency on a bittersweet and typically rushed note, a journey of barely 100 hours that, in Moscow and Mogadishu, underscores the bookends of U.S. foreign policy: the struggles represented on the one hand by the tortuously meticulous effort required to scale down U.S. and Russian arsenals of nuclear weapons and bring the world back from the potential of mass destruction and, on the other hand, by the humanitarian campaign to raise the living conditions of people barely surviving in the midst of Third World horrors.

Once more, he will go through the formalities of signing a major arms control treaty. Once more, amid the Kremlin’s ornate antiquity undimmed by 75 years of Communist rule, he and Yeltsin are discussing the issues of the day--Bosnia, the uncertain role of the United Nations as peacekeeper, the unrelenting challenge posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the uncertain future of Russia and of Yeltsin himself.

But what would it matter?

Here, in this troubled capital far in miles and spirit from the brightened spirit taking root in Washington on the eve of the arrival of a new Administration, is the true meaning of a lame-duck presidency: The trappings of the office remain, but just barely.

So, here, even in Moscow, is the Cadillac limousine, the embassy staff and White House aides awaiting his beck and call, and the effusive greeting of a foreign president. But no honor guard was turned out to herald his arrival, a lone American flag fluttered alongside the Russian tricolor, and the authority of the office was all but gone, even as he sat down for one last dinner in the Kremlin’s gilded Hall of Facets beneath walls covered with religious and historical murals and neatly tossed back a shot of vodka in a toast to his “dear friend” Yeltsin.

This time, at this summit, there can be no presidential decisions knifing through months of lower-level stalemate. No stern warnings. No promises of future aid. This time, Bush could only listen.

If there would indeed be a new world order, someone else would forge it.

What remained for this President on this, his 25th and final foreign trip in office, was his own brand of personal diplomacy. In the end, just as at the beginning, it was that card, the only one remaining in his hand, that Bush could play.

“He puts that personal touch on his dealings with world leaders that other politicians put into domestic politicking,” Gold said. “He has this feeling that when you can get on first-name terms with the president of Egypt or the president of Russia or the secretary general of the U.N., then you can deal with the crucial issues of war and peace, and human misery.”

But the personal nature of Bush’s diplomacy and his lame-duck status notwithstanding, there are substantive missions to be accomplished in Moscow.

As a President just weeks away from leaving office, Bush can offer Yeltsin little more than a sympathetic ear. But that, along with a vocal demonstration of support for Yeltsin’s reform agenda, can be crucial, not only to keeping those reforms sputtering along but also to getting recalcitrant skeptics in the Russian military and Parliament to step back from their practice of throwing obstacles in the way of the arms treaty’s ratification.

Indeed, arms control experts with long memories recall President Gerald R. Ford’s meeting in Vladivostok with Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev in 1974. The two leaders set a framework for a strategic arms limitation treaty--much as Bush and Yeltsin did six months ago--and then watched as the years slipped by and real strategic arms reduction did not begin until a new treaty was signed by Bush and the last Soviet president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a year and a half ago.

Bush, said Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington and a member of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Jimmy Carter Administration, “clearly can’t accomplish any new business” in Moscow as a lame-duck President.

“What he can try to do is affirm the agreements he and Yeltsin are signing. He can affirm their importance and attach the reputations of these two leaders to the agreements,” Krepon said. “He can reaffirm U.S. support for the general commitments the Yeltsin government has taken with respect to internal reforms and building democracy, and he can clarify and reaffirm some of the penalties that would occur if there were changes in policy and leadership that reversed the advances of the Yeltsin years.”

It is hard to imagine a more fitting way for Bush to leave office--a point the President himself made to the American GIs with whom he met in Somalia.

The Somalia campaign, said a longtime Bush aide, “responds to some of those critics who said our foreign policy was based too much on realpolitik and didn’t have enough of a moral sense to it.”

“He’s always driven by whatever’s the right thing to do. He’s a principled person, and often in international affairs that’s not as clear as in the domestic scene, where you have competing politics and the moral imperative isn’t as clear,” the aide said.

To that point, Bush reminded the troops in an open-sided command tent that on his watch, Operation Desert Storm, the successful campaign to roll back Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, “offered hope to a lot of countries around the world.”

Germany was united, the Soviet Union crumbled, and, he said, “the most historic arms control treaty ever made” is about to be signed.

Yes, he told the Marines, “it’s been a wonderful ride.”