America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Two cheers for President Bush's performance during the grand finale of the Soviet era. Granted, there has been more tone than content to his approach, but the tone has been just about right.

In other contexts, Bush's obsession with prudence and caution sometimes makes him seem like a stick-in-the-mud. But recently, when even the most exhilarating events have often seemed to be moving too fast for anyone's good, Bush's go-slow instincts were welcome. Given the manic tempo of the times, it's been comforting to know that George was there, working the phones, talking with his old friend Mikhail and his new friend Boris.

Bush's message to both has been a mixture of moral support and friendly advice to ease up a bit, particularly on each other. He's been like the coolly competent air-traffic controller in a Hollywood disaster movie, coaxing down to earth crippled planes in the midst of a raging storm. If there are no crashes in the coming months, he'll deserve some of the credit.

Critics have chided Bush for not having a master plan or doctrine that will bear his name in the history books. So far, that has not been much of a handicap. No Big Think could have anticipated what happened in August. Everyone feared a conservative coup, but no one expected it would consummate the revolution.

In geopolitics as in logistics, the map is not the territory; following dotted lines on a piece of paper, you can still get lost or fall into a swamp or an ambush. As Bush felt his way through these past two years, he may have been better off with his natural aptitude for reassuring people and his preference for restraining them than he would have been with a Kissingerian or Brzezinskian grand design.

During a period of spectacular and almost entirely happy endings -- the Kremlin's capitulation in its global rivalry with the U.S., the emancipation of Eastern Europe, the dismantling of the last vestiges of the Stalinist police state and the retirement without honor of the mother of all Communist Parties -- it has been sufficient for Bush to lead the decorous applause. But now the situation is changing in ways that no longer play to his strengths.

The next stage should be one of beginnings. Old alliances and concepts of security, conceived in the cold war, cry out for redefinition to cope with new or resurgent threats, like nationalism. For their own good, the industrialized democracies have to mount an all-out campaign to help rebuild the shattered Soviet bloc into a sturdy component of a peaceful, prosperous, free-trading international order. For its part, the U.S. must formulate a post-cold war agenda that will keep it fully engaged abroad even as it attends to its problems at home.

The White House recognizes the challenge. In instructions to the bureaucracy to prepare a study of future strategies, Bush and his principal aides have drawn up a list of many of the right questions. But when they make a stab at answers, they have little to offer. The President and other officials argue for retaining NATO, which is a stopgap at best, and a unitary Soviet Union, which is already a thing of the past.

Just as it was at the beginning of his Administration, Bush's lack of "the vision thing" is again painfully evident -- and likely to become more so. Unless the President can make the transition from a soothing, accessible, avuncular figure to a more active, articulate and innovative one, the world will be deprived of its best hope for leadership in the months and years ahead.