America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

MOSCOW

The most contentious issue of this week's summit may also be the most important foreign policy challenge facing the U.S. in the '90s: how to keep the peace in Europe now that the cold war is over. George Bush not only wants to preserve NATO, with a united Germany as a full member and U.S. troops on its soil; he also wants the Soviet Union to like the idea. In his TIME interview, Mikhail Gorbachev dismissed as "not serious" (a scathing put-down in the lexicon of Soviet diplomacy) the notion that a strengthened NATO will replace a disintegrating Warsaw Pact as the guarantor of the U.S.S.R.'s security.

Gorbachev was rebutting an argument that American officials dare not make in public and are circumspect about making even in private. Their winks and nods, euphemisms and disclaimers can be translated into one stark sentence that summarizes the only truly strategic thought the U.S. Government has about the 21st century: a Germany "anchored" in NATO is less likely to cause trouble than one that is neutral and nonaligned. Note the verb, with its metaphorical suggestion not only of safety from rough seas but also of a heavy chain and benevolent captivity.

Even in their most confidential communications with the Kremlin, U.S. policymakers and diplomats have been careful not to make this pitch too explicit. They are afraid the KGB may make mischief between Washington and Bonn by leaking any cable or memorandum that reveals Americans to be exploiting Soviet anxiety about Germany. There is nothing cryptic about the apprehension of the British, French, Czechoslovaks and Poles as they watch the juggernaut of German unification. The Bush Administration keeps hoping the Kremlin will therefore not object too strenuously as the U.S. helps sponsor the emergence of a new Germany at the center of a new NATO.

At the beginning of the year, the Administration was counting on the summit to help advance its German policy. The meeting , predicted one presidential adviser, was going to be "Christmas in spring," with Bush in the role of Santa Claus. Gorbachev would go home in triumph, laden with so many honors and agreements that his countrymen would barely notice he had let the U.S. have its way on Germany.

Then the Lithuanian crisis complicated the work of Santa's helpers in Washington and steeled resistance in Moscow. The top brass of the military was already upset about "losing" Eastern Europe. Now it looked as though Soviet power might be humiliated even within the borders of the U.S.S.R. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, Gorbachev's personal military adviser, bluntly said that no setback would be more galling than "seeing our East German allies defect to NATO." Yevgeni Primakov, one of Gorbachev's closest associates on the Presidential Council, agreed in a conversation a few weeks ago: "A united Germany in NATO is something we just can't swallow."

A high Foreign Ministry official explains why. "Having East Germany leave the Warsaw Pact -- that's one thing. It means we've lost the cold war. Okay. We can accept that, although it's not so easy. But having our enemies of the '40s, the Germans, join our enemies of the '50s, '60s and '70s in an alliance whose whole reason for being is anti-Soviet -- that makes us feel as though we lost World War II."

Then comes a telling reference, frequently echoed in Moscow, to the aftermath of World War I: "The U.S. and the West must not rub our noses too much in our defeat; it must not impose on us at the end of the 20th century a version of the Treaty of Versailles that caused so much trouble at the beginning. We don't want to feel like Weimar Germany. And you shouldn't want us to." Not even in private will a patriotic Soviet finish that thought: the Weimar Republic gave way to Hitler's Third Reich. Yet that is what some Soviets seem to have in mind. They fear not only the worst from Germany's past but also something just as bad that may lurk in their own future. These twin dreads interact powerfully, if not quite logically. As Gorbachev at least tacitly acknowledges, in his country rationality is as scarce as soap these days. The outside world is a mirror into which Soviets look and wince.

What can they do to stop the U.S. from ramming its own answer to the German question down their throats? "Nothing," admits a close Gorbachev adviser. "But the outcome will influence our approach on many other matters. If the old German Democratic Republic joins NATO, the Soviet military will be harder for all of us, including Gorbachev, to deal with on a variety of other issues." That presumably refers to the many issues of nuclear and conventional arms control that will not be resolved at the summit this week.

Washington's response is predictable: Oh, that's just Gorbachev letting his marshals and generals play the bad cops. But George Bush may find that on this subject there are no good cops in the Soviet Union.