The Man Who Loved Dictators

By Charles Krauthammer

Just days after Boris Yeltsin risked his life to defeat the August coup, anonymous White House sources were leaking contempt and disdain for Yeltsin. A week earlier, the man had saved not only his country but the entire Bush foreign policy (which had placed all its bets on Gorbachev) and Washington was already dumping on him.

To be sure, a few days later the White House tried to take it all back. But what was said was said, and it was not the first time. Two years earlier, the White House had similarly beaten up on Yeltsin, labeling him a lightweight and a demagogue, a man unworthy of doing business with the President of the U.S.

Not that the White House favored the Stalinist coupmongers (although the President's initial reaction to the coup was, as Margaret Thatcher would have said, wobbly). But the Administration's obvious favorite in Moscow is not Yeltsin but Gorbachev.

Gorbachev merits respect. History will honor him for having set in train the second Russian revolution. The White House, however, has favored him not for his historic qualities but for his personal and political ones: he was the polished, predictable, if dictatorial, leader of a unitary Soviet state. Yeltsin was the crude, rash, populist leader of a new political animal (Russia), a china-breaking democrat.

This is an Administration that prefers strongmen and dictators. Nothing entirely new here, but at least in the past we supported the likes of Somoza and Marcos in the name of anticommunism. What is the excuse now? One of Bush's favorite dictators is Deng Xiaoping, a communist whose specialty is the repression of democratic (and fervently pro-American) forces. Even the massacre at Tiananmen Square seems to have had little effect on the President's regard for Deng, except for requiring some circumspection, given the heavy domestic opposition to Bush's policy of appeasement.

But the most egregious case of this preference for dictators, particularly for their ability to bring "stability" to those parts of the world deemed * too primitive to tolerate democracy, is Saddam Hussein. For it was Bush who saved Saddam. In the crucial days after the gulf war, when the Shi'ite south and the Kurdish north were in revolt, Saddam was hanging by a thread. The Administration could easily have tipped the balance against him. It chose not to. It stayed its hand -- muted its threats and grounded its aircraft -- in the name of stability and the unity of the Iraqi state.

True, Bush would have preferred and called many times for another Baathist to put a bullet through Saddam's head. His first choice was Saddamism without Saddam. But his second choice was Saddamism with Saddam.

A few months later, Secretary of State Baker went to Yugoslavia on the eve of civil war and gave the distinct impression to all involved that the U.S. favored the unitary Yugoslavian state, then controlled by Serbian communists. This signal too had to be withdrawn when the Serbian-controlled army set out to restore the unitary state with tanks and planes.

Wrong every time. Every time favoring stability, dictatorship, central rule over the messiness and uncertainty that come with independence and democracy.

Why? In some cases, sheer familiarity. Bush knows Deng from his good old days as envoy to China. And he has an easy rapport with Gorbachev. In some sense, he even thought he knew Saddam, preferring the devil he knew to some unknown Shi'ite or Kurdish revolutionary. There is an element too of snobbery. Bush is comfortable with the club of world leaders of which he is dean. He prefers men of rank to upstarts and pretenders. The existing rulers may be quick on the trigger. But they know how to hold a fork.

Then there is sheer diplomatic laziness. It is much easier to deal with one Yugoslavia, one Soviet Union, a unified and dictatorial China than it is to deal with fractured countries and a multiplicity of republics.

But there is a deeper reason why the Administration prefers dictators to democrats: for Bush, the central value of the New World Order is order. Empires are better at it than newborn democracies. (Consider India before and after British rule, for example.) Dictators are better at it than democrats.

But only in the short run. And that is where the Bush policy fails, even on its own terms. It is a shortsighted, short-run prescription for order. After all, is the Persian Gulf more stable with Saddam and the Baath, or would it not have been better to remove this artificial repressor and once and for all allow Iraq to develop along more natural and representative ethnic lines?

Will China's communist neo-orthodoxy make for a more stable future, or does it merely delay and aggravate the coming postcommunist instability? We already know the answer to that question for the Soviet Union: just a few too many years of centralized control have made the transition to a looser confederation infinitely harder. (Ukraine, for example, will not today accept the limited sovereignty it would gladly have accepted three years ago.) And the Yugoslav policy was so shortsighted that it lasted but a few days longer than the Soviet coup.

This Administration has shown good judgment in some foreign policy enterprises (German unification) and courage in others (the gulf war). But its general foreign policy prowess has been overrated. This has been the luckiest Administration in American history. After 40 years of struggle against the Soviet empire, it happened to be on station on the day the empire collapsed.

When it does exercise discretion trying to manage the collapse, it operates under a monumental handicap. This is the age of revolution, and Bush does not much like revolutionaries.