Giving Yeltsin a Blank Check Is Disastrous : In debt to his army, he raises the nuclear ante.

Boris Yeltsin has done it again, betraying friends and principle with easy abandon in his incessant quest for greater personal power.

This time, the hand bitten is that of the Clinton Administration, which has been abjectly supine in its support of every twist and turn in the Yeltsin line. Emboldened by slavish U.S. support, Yeltsin now contemptuously blocks the Administration’s efforts to impose U.N. sanctions on Libya. Then he abruptly abandons a decade-old Soviet pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons.

Warren Christopher was in Moscow only last week, proclaiming Yeltsin the savior of peace and democracy despite the old Bolshevik’s total control of the electronic media, his unconstitutional dismissal of every elected regional official and the fact that his key opponents now languish without rights in a KGB jail.

The rationale, all along, for demeaning democracy by backing the ambitions of a man who at best aspires to be a good czar was that he was on the side of world peace. Since Yeltsin claims to favor free-market capitalism, it was assumed that his foreign policy would be moderate and complement our own.

To expect such a simple correlation between how a nation orders its domestic economy and its foreign-policy ambitions denies the essential disorder of this century. Nations, irrespective of their economic systems, have been driven by nationalist and religious forces in myriad directions. Yeltsin’s Russia is a perfect example.

His popularity, particularly given the dire state of the Russian economy, depends most of all on assuming the mantle of Great Russian nationalism. That is why Yeltsin has consistently supported the Serbian rapists and murderers in the former Yugoslavia and has been a major force in blocking U.S. and U.N. intervention.

That same appeasement of wounded Russian nationalism--and old-fashioned avarice--has caused Yeltsin to block sanctions against Libya. Yeltsin’s emissary at the U.N. Security Council threatens to veto the effort by Britain, France and the United States to punish Libya for refusing to extradite the two men accused of bombing a Pan American World Airways jet in which 270 people were killed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Yeltsin now seeks to blackmail the United States into paying him the $4 billion that Libya owes Moscow for past arms deals. Has the man no shame? Do the tens of billions in U.S. aid to Russia not warrant this minor degree of cooperation?

More serious yet is the announcement two days ago by the Russian Defense Ministry that it is abandoning the pledge not to use nuclear weapons first--originally guaranteed in 1982 by former Soviet ruler Leonid I. Brezhnev and accepted by every leader until Yeltsin.

Lest we forget, Yeltsin has control over 6,200 strategic warheads and the means to deliver them. Some “experts” in this country and Russia are justifying this changed stance because of the weakness of Russian conventional forces. “It’s just a very practical statement for a country that now has few other ways of warning off attacks on its territory,” says Stephen Meyer, a Russian affairs expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It is true, as Meyer points out, that U.S. policy-makers never matched the no-first-use pledge, claiming that the threat to use nuclear weapons first was necessary to making a nuclear deterrent credible. We were wrong then, and Yeltsin is wrong now to take this step backward. But at least the U.S. deterrent was aimed at a rival and equal nuclear power. The current Russian thinking is to use the nuclear threat against conventional forces. There is no sane argument for escalating regional strife into nuclear conflagration.

One hopes, as his apologists suggest, that Yeltsin understands the implications of nuclear escalation and is only attempting to placate the Russian Defense Ministry, which issued the new guidelines. But isn’t it dangerous to have human existence hang on the decision-making of a military elite unchecked by civilian power?

And unchecked they are. Yeltsin owes his survival to the top military brass who backed him in the destruction of the Russian Parliament and Supreme Court. The payoff is that the generals now call the shots on arms control and intervention in regional as well as internal conflicts.

It is time to recognize that giving Yeltsin a blank check is disastrous for both Russian and U.S. foreign policy. Once again, a faithful U.S. client is turning out to be a monster. Each uncritical concession to Yeltsin only encourages his desperate struggle for personal power.