America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

TOKYO. For six years the most important factor in Soviet foreign policy has been Soviet domestic politics. The internal crisis in the U.S.S.R. gave Mikhail Gorbachev both an incentive and a pretext for transforming his country's external behavior.

Gorbachev showed a genius for making a virtue out of necessity. The more the Soviet Union turned inward, the more the world cheered its President for abandoning many of the bad habits, disreputable clients and ill-gotten gains of the past. By taking the first steps toward reductions in doomsday arsenals, liberating Eastern Europe, cooperating in the resolution of regional conflicts and enabling the U.N. to move against Saddam Hussein, he made retrenchment, even retreat, look like leadership and the management of decline look like dynamism. It was quite a trick, and he performed it over and over again.

But opposition to Gorbachev at home is so widespread that it hampers his freedom of maneuver abroad. In Tokyo last week he demonstrated his characteristic flair, but the magic was diminished. By promising further negotiations on the future of the four Kurile islands the Soviet Union seized from Japan in the closing days of World War II, he pulled a rabbit's foot out of his hat, but not the whole rabbit that his audiences have come to expect.

This was not the same Gorbachev who in 1987 agreed to eliminate an entire class of missiles, or who in 1989 ordered the Polish Communist Party to share power with Solidarity, or in 1990 accepted a unified Germany in NATO. A year or so ago, the old Gorbachev might have stunned his Japanese hosts by returning the islands on the spot, cutting the knot in a single bold stroke rather than picking at it with his fingernails.

But that was before the rise of Boris Yeltsin. Perhaps the most significant document at the Tokyo meeting was the Soviet delegation list. Gorbachev felt compelled to invite several Yeltsinites to accompany him. By including in his entourage two foreign ministers -- one representing the U.S.S.R., the other the Russian federation -- Gorbachev was tacitly acceding to Yeltsin's demand for a say, if not a veto, on what ultimately happens to the islands.

In his struggle against Yeltsin, Gorbachev has come to rely increasingly on the military for support. Yet in the midst of the Tokyo talks, the commander of Soviet forces in the Far East warned publicly that if the U.S.S.R. relinquished the islands, "we could no longer call ourselves a great power." It was an obvious shot across Gorbachev's bow.

A Kremlin official explained why the issue is so neuralgic for Soviet top brass and hard-liners: "Our loss of Eastern Europe and the retirement of the Warsaw Pact constitute the greatest geopolitical defeat ever suffered by a nation that has not actually lost a war. Many of our generals and admirals are saying, 'That's it! No more concessions!' For them, it's become a matter of symbolism and principle beyond any technical or strategic questions involved."

For much the same reason, the Soviet military has dug in its heels over arms control with the U.S. The impasse has jeopardized the summit that Gorbachev and George Bush want this summer. The White House has been exchanging proposals directly with Gorbachev in hopes that he will override the objections of his comrades in uniform, just as he has done so often in the past. But that was then; this is now. With every passing week, Gorbachev's domestic vulnerability makes diplomatic breakthroughs more difficult.