The Road to Malta

By Strobe Talbott

This week's meeting in the Med will bring together the most daring of all Soviet leaders and one of the most cautious American Presidents. Mikhail Gorbachev frequently, and proudly, describes his approach to the world as "radical," while George Bush's favorite word when he talks about foreign policy is prudent. Yet Bush has come a long way in his thinking about the Soviet Union. In a matter of months, his Administration has gone from viewing Gorbachev as a slickly disguised variant of the old red menace to a potential partner in creating a new world order.

This evolution of American official attitudes has been subtle and uneven. It has been couched in caveats, often obscured by ambivalence and articulated, sometimes inarticulately, by a Chief Executive who has no flair for geopolitical grand rhetoric and has a tendency to step on his applause lines. Still, the change on the American side, if it continues, could turn out to be as important as Gorbachev's abandonment of the Leninist plan for winning the zero-sum game of history. The American equivalent of what the Soviets call new political thinking is all the more significant coming from the President of Prudence.

George Bush did not get where he is today by taking chances or questioning conventional wisdom, particularly on the No. 1 life-or-death issue of U.S. foreign policy. As a Congressman, diplomat, Republican Party chairman, Vice President and presidential candidate, he was always the sort of politician who fretted about the consequences of a misstep. For Bush, therefore, slow is better than fast and standing pat is often the safest posture. Once he replaced Ronald Reagan, Bush's instinct was to apply the brakes to the juggernaut of improved U.S.-Soviet relations, to take the turns very cautiously and perhaps even to pull over on the side of the road and study the map for a while.

The Bush Administration was made up of battle-scarred veterans with long memories. They were acutely aware that every President since the end of World War II had learned the hard way the domestic political perils of underestimating the Soviet capacity for producing unpleasant surprises and overestimating the possibility of profound, permanent improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations.

Even Franklin Roosevelt was posthumously excoriated for "giving away" Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin at Yalta (rhymes with Malta). Harry Truman stood up to Stalin at Potsdam and hung tough over Iran, Berlin and Korea, but he still ended up being pilloried by a couple of junior Senators named Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who called Truman's Secretary of State the dean of the "cowardly college of Communist containment." Two decades later, the New Nixon's policy of detente ran into a buzz saw of bipartisan anti-Soviet opposition. When a Watergate-wounded Nixon went to see Leonid Brezhnev in the Crimea in 1974, he refused to visit Yalta nearby, lest anyone accuse him of another giveaway. It was all for naught: the traveling White House press gleefully filed stories with the dread dateline.

When Jimmy Carter signed a SALT II treaty in June 1979, he gave Brezhnev a big kiss on the cheek. The treaty was never ratified, largely because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan six months later. In 1980 Republicans used photographs of the signing ceremony with the message to voters YOU TOO CAN KISS OFF JIMMY CARTER.

The Bush Administration includes a number of senior officials of the Nixon- Gerald Ford years, notably Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who were chastened by their earlier experience. They returned to office determined not to repeat the mistake of overselling detente, by that or any other name.

Also, just below the surface of the new Administration was a powerful if muted strain of criticism of the way the U.S. had conducted relations with the U.S.S.R. in the last years of the Reagan presidency. The image of Reagan strolling arm in arm through Red Square with Gorbachev during their 1988 meeting in Moscow had a connotation among many Bush people almost as invidious as that of Carter kissing Brezhnev. George Shultz received much of the blame for letting Reagan succumb to Gorbomania. Partly for that reason Shultz was given close to a bum's rush right after Bush's Inauguration.

The new Administration was uncomfortable with the Reagan legacy in another respect. In the critical and perennially controversial field of arms control, Reagan had turned out to be every bit as radical as, and considerably more romantic than, Gorbachev. At their own Malta-like non-summit on neutral ground, at Reykjavik in 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev arced off into the stratosphere of blue-sky nuclear disarmament. They came so close to agreeing on a timetable for the elimination of ballistic missiles that American allies and generals were horrified. So was Reagan's relentlessly prudent Vice President. In Bush's mind and those of his advisers, Reykjavik became a synonym for the risks of free-form encounters between U.S. and Soviet leaders.

The Bush Administration came into office determined to strike what a number of its key officials hoped would be perceived as a tougher, more sober, more traditional posture toward the Soviet Union. Much as they dislike the label, they are, on the whole, moderate Republicans. Scowcroft once even called himself a Rockefeller Republican. Not too long ago, such political animals had been considered an extinct, or at least seriously endangered, species. Even after winning a presidential election, the Bush people felt vulnerable to the vigilant, suspicious, presumably powerful right. Hence they were all the more eager to be seen squinting skeptically at Gorbachev, especially in public, and thus to be staking out a position to the right of the most popular, successful conservative President in modern times. In September Bush reiterated that caution, saying, "I'm like the guy from Missouri."

The first few months of the "show-me" Administration were dominated by three themes:

-- The approved questions of the hour were whether Gorbachev was for real, and whether the success of his program was good for the free world. Those were not rhetorical questions; the answer, on both counts, might turn out to be no.

-- If, however, the answer turned out to be yes -- and the Soviets were indeed changing for the better -- then the onus was on them to keep changing and to keep making concessions. The U.S. was under no obligation to alter its own behavior or thinking in any way, or to adjust its negotiating positions. After all, it was the U.S.S.R., not the U.S., whose political and economic system was hopelessly sick and whose international behavior had made it a pariah.

-- The American approach must not be, in any sense, pegged to the fortunes of a particular Soviet leader. The U.S. must not have what one Bush adviser disdained as a "Gorbo-centric" policy. Rather, it should have an approach that would work equally well for a Soviet Union led, say, by Yegor Ligachev, then seen as Gorbachev's principal hard-line opponent.

The surest way to lose influence in the Bush Administration was to wonder out loud whether the U.S. should be "helping" Gorbachev. After all, even if he turned out to be for real, he could die any day. Or he might be overthrown and replaced by retrogrades who would have at their disposal the military wherewithal to engage once again in old thinking and old behavior. Therefore the best posture for the U.S. -- the policy of greatest prudence -- was to wait and see, to test, to keep American powder dry and to be ready for Ligachev.

The impression of a stand-pat, waiting-for-Yegor policy was reinforced by a presidential "national security policy review." The exercise dragged on for some six months, yielding hundreds of pages of classified bureaucratese and a few leaks in newspaper stories about how the Administration was going to be guided by the underwhelming goal of "status quo plus."

Bush gave a series of five speeches on U.S.-Soviet relations in the spring, but they generally played to yawns and even a few catcalls. Actually, the speeches were better than their reviews. They contained some important watchwords: the U.S., said the President, must move "beyond containment" and seek the "integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations."New slogans can be the beginning of a new policy, especially if they are repeated often enough at the highest level.

Meanwhile, Bush was saying something else over and over again: "I want to do something important, but I don't want to do anything dumb." He said it in closed-door meetings with his staff, in brainstorming sessions with academic experts and in nationally televised interviews. By "something important," he meant a policy that would capitalize on the opportunities presented by Gorbachev's reforms. It was less clear what the President had in mind when he vowed not to do "anything dumb." For several months the implied definition seemed to be anything that would get him in serious trouble with the right wing.

/ However, by late spring an important shift took place: Bush began to worry more about doing too little than about doing too much. He seemed to be calculating the political price he would pay on both sides of the Atlantic if he appeared not to be moving fast enough to meet Gorbachev halfway.

Secretary of State Baker played a key part in nudging the President toward what both men came to call "engagement" with Gorbachev. Baker made frequent trips to Capitol Hill as well as Western Europe. In both places he found impatience building: When was the Administration going to stop reviewing policy and start really making it again, especially in arms control? Congress was facing the fiscal and political imperatives of the Gramm-Rudman-Gorbachev era. The federal budget deficit was squeezing the resources available for defense spending, and the kinder, gentler Soviet Union made the arms buildup that Bush inherited from Reagan seem increasingly like wretched excess.

Meanwhile, the Americans' most important allies in Europe, the West Germans, were restless about American tactical nuclear missiles stationed on their territory. The U.S. wanted to "modernize" those weapons -- a euphemism for replacing old ones with newer ones that had a much longer range -- while the West Germans wanted to negotiate away the old ones. Unless Bush could defuse that controversy with a new arms-control initiative, his transatlantic debut at the NATO summit in late May would be a debacle. That prospect concentrated the minds of the Administration on the issue of conventional forces in Europe, the subject of East-West talks that had been limping along for some 15 years. Gorbachev had already breathed new life into those talks by announcing a unilateral cut in the manpower and armor of the Warsaw Pact, but the Western allies were reluctant to match his dramatic gestures.

Then, at the NATO meeting in Brussels, Bush proposed a mutual drawdown in the number of soldiers that both superpowers have stationed in Europe. The proposal was much more than just a highly successful p.r. gambit. Rather than merely fine-tuning the military balance of terror, which had been the purpose and effect of earlier arms-control arrangements, the CFE initiative was intended to be the first step in a process that might lead to fundamental changes in the international political order.

The logic and strategy behind Bush's CFE proposal were that Gorbachev might, over time, be willing to reduce drastically, perhaps someday to eliminate, Soviet garrisons in Eastern Europe. Previous American arms-control proposals had been concerned with diminishing the threat that the Warsaw Pact might invade the NATO nations. By contrast, the CFE initiative was designed to lead to the scaling back of the Soviet military presence in Eastern Europe -- the instrument of Soviet domination there and the root cause of the division of Europe as a whole.

It was the first arms-control proposal to be at least as concerned with ending the cold war as with preventing World War III. In that sense, the CFE proposal anticipated the breaching of the Berlin Wall, the Pentagon's proposed cuts in U.S. defense programs and the other dramatic events of the past month. It was also, at its core, Gorbo-centric: it represented an attempt to respond to the unprecedented willingness of the man now in charge in the Kremlin to address fundamental, previously out-of-bounds issues -- not just of how to avert war, but of how to restructure the peace.

In July Bush visited Europe for the second time as President. Solidarity leaders in Poland and reformers in Hungary persuaded him that their survival depended on Gorbachev's. Bush was deeply impressed by the implications for U.S. policy: the West had an interest in the blossoming of independence and democracy in Eastern Europe; the advocates of change there had an interest in the success of perestroika; therefore the U.S., too, had an interest in seeing perestroika succeed. Bush's longstanding aversion to the idea of an early, informal meeting with Gorbachev dissolved almost overnight. Aboard Air Force One en route back to Washington, he wrote a personal letter to the Soviet leader proposing this week's get-together.

Shortly afterward, Bush's aides, particularly Baker, began talking -- first privately, then publicly -- about "helping" Gorbachev. They had heard the H word from their boss, so the taboo was lifted.

Yet throughout this period, there were constant, escalating reminders of how much trouble Gorbachev faced at home: ethnic unrest, secessionism, economic deterioration, labor strife, an emboldened political opposition. When Eduard Shevardnadze visited the U.S. in September, he seemed preoccupied with domestic issues, especially the Soviet Union's problem with nationalities. A surprising and revealing addition to his entourage was Nikolai Shmelev, an economist who specializes in dire predictions and drastic prescriptions for the Soviet economy.

Gorbachev's mounting troubles have had an ambiguous effect on the thinking of the Bush Administration. The set of questions that drives U.S. policy has gone from "Is Gorbachev for real? And is he good for us?" to "Can he make it? And can we help him?" There is far more inclination in Washington today than even a few months ago to accept the best-case interpretation of what Gorbachev wants, what he represents, and what the U.S.S.R. would look like if he were to succeed in his program. At the same time, however, there is also more objective reason than before to credit the worst-case interpretation of what will happen to him.

Thus, in one curious and ironic respect, the Administration is back to square one. It has traded its skepticism about Gorbachev's intentions for pessimism about his chances. That leaves the Administration, at least in its own eyes, still stuck with a dilemma about what prudent American policy should be. The strong inclination remains to wait and see, to test, to keep its powder dry and to be ready for someone other than Mikhail Sergeyevich.

But in another, immensely important respect, the two men meeting in the Med this week have already transformed the superpower relationship: for the first time since the beginning of the cold war over 40 years ago, the American and Soviet leaderships have a shared interest not just in averting Armageddon but also in achieving the success of important components of Soviet internal and foreign policy. That is already a breakthrough that makes this a landmark year and augurs well for the future.