TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010190/01019005.004

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 32.3 KB | 614 lines

                                                                                MAN OF THE DECADE, Page 66

Rethinking The Red Menace


Gorbachev is helping the West by showing that the Soviet threat
isn't what it used to be - and what's more, that it never was

By Strobe Talbott


    George Bush concluded after the shipboard summit in Malta
that the time had come for him to join in an enterprise that
Mikhail Gorbachev has called "new political thinking." It was
a sentiment worthy of a New Year's resolution, and a new
decade's. So far, Gorbachev has had a near monopoly on the
promulgation of bold ideas. Bush's main contribution has been
an appeal for Western policy to move "beyond containment." That
phrase, which he hoped would be the slogan of the year, sounded
all right when he first enunciated it last spring, but that was
a long time ago. Since then Gorbachev's initiatives and the
events they have triggered have made containment sound like such
an anachronism that the need to move beyond it is self-evident.
Last week's U.S. invasion of Panama was a case in point. It was
Uncle Sam's first major post- containment military operation;
neither the ghost of President James Monroe nor a single live
communist was anywhere in sight.

    Members of the Administration have had trouble thinking
about the long-term future because the short term is so
uncertain. No sooner did they decide on affirmative answers to
their initial questions about Gorbachev -- Is he for real? Is
he good for us? -- than they started worrying, Will he last?
Will he succeed? What happens, and who takes his place, if he
doesn't?

    Such questions are by definition unanswerable except with
qualified guesses. What are the chances of rain tomorrow? Forty
percent. Better take an umbrella. What are the chances of the
Big One sometime in the next 30 years if you live along the San
Andreas fault? High enough that you'd better check your
insurance policy; make sure it covers acts of God. Gorbachev is
to political earthquakes what matadors are to bulls. Wondering
about what will happen to him -- or because of him -- is
unlikely to inspire boldness in someone so naturally cautious
and prone to overinsurance as George Bush. That, in essence, is
what happened in 1989.

    Whether Gorbachev succeeds or not matters immensely to his
people and the world. But the world should not need to await
the outcome of what he is trying to do to see the significance
of what he has already done: he has accelerated history, making
possible the end of one of its most disreputable episodes, the
imposition of a cruel and unnatural order on hundreds of
millions of people. Sooner or later, their despair and defiance
would have reached critical mass. But the explosion occurred
this year, much sooner and more spectacularly than anyone had
predicted, because the people had in Gorbachev the most powerful
ally imaginable.

    Perhaps just as important, the Gorbachev phenomenon may
have a transforming effect outside the communist world, on the
perceptions and therefore the policies of the West. Watching
him ought to inspire, in addition to awe, suspense and
admiration, an epiphany about what his fellow citizens call,
with increasing irony, anger and impatience, "Soviet reality."
Gorbachev's determination to restructure that reality should
induce Westerners to practice a kind of reverse engineering on
the images in their own mind. The question of the hour should
be not just, What next? but, Knowing what we know now, having
seen what we have seen this year, how should we revise our
understanding of the Soviet challenge?

    The best way to begin mapping the conceptual terrain that
lies beyond containment is to re-examine the premises of
containment itself.

    For more than four decades, Western policy has been based
on a grotesque exaggeration of what the U.S.S.R. could do if it
wanted, therefore what it might do, therefore what the West
must be prepared to do in response. Gorbachev has shown that,
in some respects, where the West thought the Soviet Union was
strong, it was in fact weak. The spectacle of this past year --
often exhilarating, sometimes chaotic and in Tiananmen Square
horrifying -- has revealed a brittleness in the entire communist
system, whether the armed and uniformed minions of the state
ended up snipping barbed wire, as they did in Hungary, or
slaughtering students, as they did in China. That brittleness
has been there all along, but it was often mistaken for
toughness. By "calling things by their own names," Gorbachev is
admitting that much of what has been perceived by the outside
world as his country's collective "discipline" is actually an
ossifying, demoralizing, brutalizing system of institutionalized
inefficiency. He should make us look again at the U.S.S.R.: a
monstrosity, yes, but not a monster in so formidable and
predatory a sense as has figured in the cross hairs of Western
defense policy.

    The Soviets themselves now look back on the almost two
decades of Leonid Brezhnev's rule as the era of "stagnation."
Harsh as that word sounds, it is actually a euphemism; it really
means general decline. Gorbachev personifies to his own people,
and should personify to the outside world, a damning revelation
about Soviet history: Russia made a huge mistake at the
beginning of the 20th century, one that it is trying to correct
as it prepares to enter the 21st. Having already missed out on
what the 18th and 19th centuries offered in the way of
modernity, including much of the Industrial Revolution and the
democratic revolution, Russia then missed whatever chance World
War I and the collapse of the monarchy gave it to become a
modern country in this century. In assembling the Soviet state,
the Bolsheviks took two components of their own revolutionary
modus operandi -- terror and conspiracy -- grafted them onto the
ideology of universal state ownership, then retained five
vestiges of the czarist old regime: despotism, bureaucracy, the
secret police, a huge army and a multinational empire subjugated
by Russians.

    The result of that mix is the disaster that Gorbachev faces
today. The combination of totalitarianism, or
"command-administrative methods," and bureaucracy has
stultified Soviet society, economy and culture. Gorbachev is
trying to introduce the economic mechanisms and democratic
political institutions that have been developing in the West
while the Soviet Union has been trudging down its own dead end,
particularly during the lost years of the Brezhnev period.

    Yet in the West the era of stagnation was seen as one of
Soviet ascendancy -- even, in some key and dangerous respects,
of Soviet supremacy. Here was a vast, mysterious country on the
other side of the globe from the U.S., the Great Geopolitical
and Ideological Antipode. It was believed to be possessed of
immense and malignant strength, including the self-confidence,
prowess and resources for the conduct of all-out war. Even now,
with the Pentagon looking for ways to trim its budget, U.S.
defense policy includes a caveat: the West must be prepared for
the danger that Gorbachev will be overthrown; he might be
replaced by a retrograde Soviet leadership that will once again
-- that is the key phrase: once again -- threaten the rest of
the world with military intimidation if not conquest.

    Soldiers are given to cautioning their civilian bosses to
judge the enemy by his capabilities, not by his stated
intentions. He can deceive about his intentions, or his
intentions can change from one year to the next. Capabilities,
by contrast, are more constant; they can be gauged objectively;
they are harder to change and mask, and once they have truly
changed, they are harder to reverse.

    And what was this capability that the Soviet Union
supposedly had, which the West must, at whatever cost necessary,
be prepared to match and thwart? The short answer: the
capability to win World War III. And what would World War III
be like? Again, the short answer: it would be like the beginning
of World War II. The minds and computers of Western defense
experts have long concentrated on two dangers, each a variant
of a devastating episode that occurred about a half-century ago.
One is an armored attack on Western Europe, a replay of Hitler's
dash to the English Channel. The other is a nuclear Pearl
Harbor, a bolt-from-the-blue attack by Soviet intercontinental
ballistic missiles that would catch American weapons sleeping
in their silos.

    These nightmares are the ultimate example of generals
preparing to fight the last war. Western strategists arguably
must assume the worst about how good the enemy is in his ability
to do bad things, how reliable and well-trained his troops are,
how swiftly and effectively he could coordinate his attack. But
they must also have a plausible answer to the question, Why
would the enemy do those bad things?

    Scenarios for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe have
always had a touch of paranoid fantasy about them. In the late
1940s, when Western Europe was weak and virtually defenseless,
the Soviet Union itself was exhausted and overextended. Yes,
Joseph Stalin "conquered" Eastern Europe -- Exhibit A in the
charge of Soviet expansionism -- but he did so in the final
battles of World War II, not as a prelude to World War III. The
Red Army had filled the vacuum left by the collapsing Wehrmacht.
By the early 1950s, any Kremlin warmonger would have to contend
with a Western Europe that was already firmly back on its feet
and therefore no pushover, and also with an American doctrine
warning that Soviet aggression would trigger nuclear retaliation
against the U.S.S.R.

    As for an attempted Soviet decapitating attack on American
missiles, that danger has always been mired in a paradox. No
matter how homicidal or even genocidal the enemy is thought to
be, he is not supposed to be suicidal. Deterrence presupposes
not only the capacity to retaliate but also sanity and the
imperative of self-preservation on both sides. A madman bent on
self-destruction is, almost by definition, impossible to deter.
It has always required a suspension of disbelief to imagine a
sane Soviet leadership, no matter how cold-blooded, calculating
that it could, in any meaningful sense, get away with an attack
on the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Even if all American land-based
missiles were destroyed, the men in the Kremlin would have to
count on the distinct possibility that their country, and
perhaps their command bunker, would sustain a pulverizing blow
from U.S. submarine- and bomber-launched weapons.

    Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, a world-class
thinker about the unthinkable and nobody's softy, acknowledged
back in the 1970s that a Soviet decision to attack American
missiles would be a "cosmic roll of the dice." Yet Soviets play
chess; they do not shoot craps. Stalin advanced several black
pawns and a knight against one of white's most vulnerable
squares, West Berlin, in 1948. Nikita Khrushchev tried a similar
gambit in 1961, and he was downright reckless over Cuba in 1962.
The stupidity as well as the failure of that move contributed
to his downfall.

    Those episodes, scary as they were at the time, should be
strangely reassuring in retrospect. They prove that deterrence
is something like a force of nature. The very existence of
nuclear weapons exercises a gravitational pull on the
superpowers during moments of political and military
confrontation, tugging them back from the brink. In a real
crisis, precise calculations on one side about exactly how many
of what kind of weapons the other side has do not matter all
that much; what matters is that both have nuclear weapons,
period.

    This concept of "existential deterrence" (so named by
McGeorge Bundy, who was at John F. Kennedy's side during his
showdowns with Khrushchev) is rooted in common sense and
experience alike. Yet until now it has never been deemed a
prudent basis for keeping the peace. Why? Because worst-case
assumptions about Soviet intentions have fed, and fed upon,
worst-case assumptions about Soviet capabilities.

    Even now the nightmare of a Soviet nuclear attack continues
to darken the waking hours of Western military and political
leaders and the theoreticians who advise them. The Bush
Administration remains committed to an expensive, redundant and
provocative array of new strategic nuclear weapons -- the MX and
Midgetman intercontinental missiles, the B-1 and B-2 (Stealth)
bombers and the Trident II submarine-launched missile. These
programs are monuments to old thinking. They are throwbacks to
the days when the strategists accepted, as an article of their
dark faith, the vulnerability of the U.S. to Kremlin
crapshooters.

    In order to believe the Soviet Union is capable of waging
and quite possibly winning a war against the West, one has to
accept as gospel a hoary and dubious cliche about the U.S.S.R.:
the place is a hopeless mess where nothing works, with the
prominent and crucial exception of two institutions -- the armed
forces and the KGB. A Kremlin that cannot put food on its
people's tables can put an SS-18 warhead on top of a Minuteman
silo in North Dakota, some 5,000 miles away. Even though 15% to
20% of the grain harvested on the collective farms rots or falls
off the back of trucks before it reaches the cities, a
Soviet-led blitzkrieg through West Germany would be a
masterpiece of military efficiency.

    The big red military machine may still look formidable from
22,000 miles up, the altitude from which American spy
satellites snap pictures of armored columns on maneuver. But at
ground level, the Soviet army looks more like a lot of
bewildered 17-year-olds, many of them far from their backward,
non-Russian homelands, bouncing around in the back of clunky
trucks on potholed roads leading nowhere useful to their
country's devastated economy. Yet they are counted under the
ominous rubric of 4.25 million men under arms in the Warsaw
Pact. So are over a million troops, most of them draftees, from
the East European states. They include some of the same
Hungarians who chanted, "Russians Go Home!"; the same
Czechoslovaks, many of army age, who thronged into Wenceslas
Square and exorcised the Politburo by clinking their key chains;
and the same East Germans who found a better way to invade the
Federal Republic throughout the year.

    In addition to counting heads with helmets on them and
inventorying the enemy's hardware, the American arithmetic of
fear has always factored in an ideological multiplier. Here was
a political system that, seen from the outside, seemed to have
a flat belly, a thick neck, big biceps and plenty of intestinal
fortitude; it was also thought to have, in communism, a coherent
and all too plausible plan for winning the zero-sum game of
history.

    In the 1970s some respected intellectuals in the U.S. and
Europe worked themselves into paroxysms of Spenglerian
pessimism about the decline of the West. As recently as 1983,
Jean-Francois Revel, the distinguished French journalist and
philosopher, wrote a widely read book, How Democracies Perish.
It began: "Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a
historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before
our eyes . . . It will have lasted a little over two centuries,
to judge by the speed of growth of the forces bent on its
destruction." Principal among those superior hostile forces was
world communism.

    Yet an important part of the drama of this past year was
the implosion of the very idea of communism. Many card-carrying
party intellectuals in Moscow, particularly of the younger
generation, admit that perestroika too is a euphemism; it
suggests fixing something that is broken, but it really means
scrapping something that never worked, even as a blueprint for
Soviet society, not to mention for world conquest.

    One of Gorbachev's closest advisers, Politburo member
Alexander Yakovlev, privately told a foreign leader this fall,
"Perestroika means a loss of our self-confidence." Then he
added, "It also means realizing that our self-confidence was
always misplaced." The West ought to realize that much of its
fear of the Soviet Union was also misplaced.

    To recognize that the Soviet threat has been greatly
exaggerated is not to commit the sin of "moral equivalence";
Western self-criticism about the phobias of the cold war does
not imply a neutral judgment about the Soviet system. Quite the
contrary: it is precisely because that system is such an
abomination against basic human aspirations, against human
nature itself, that much of what the West called "Soviet power"
was actually Soviet weakness, and the instruments of that power
could never have been all they were cracked up to be.

    For years there has been dissenting wisdom in the West.
Most notably, George Kennan, the intellectual godfather of the
original concept of containment, has objected to the way it was
applied; he has cautioned against demonizing the adversary,
overestimating enemy strength and overmilitarizing the Western
response.

    As early as 1947, Kennan suggested that Soviet power "bears
within it the seeds of its own decay" and that the U.S.S.R.
might turn out to be "one of the weakest and most pitiable of
national societies." But unlike the little boy in the fable,
Kennan was largely ignored by the crowd when he dared to say out
loud that perhaps the emperor in the Kremlin was not quite so
resplendent in his suit of armor. Now along comes Gorbachev to
announce his nakedness to the world, and Yakovlev to confide
that he too feels a chill.

    Even some of the most hardheaded Western diplomats
stationed in Moscow as well as some of the most hard-line
experts who have recently visited there are revising their
views. They now say they doubt that Gorbachev's Kremlin or any
imaginable successor's will undertake foreign adventures while
the home front is in a state of such crisis, as it will be for
a long, long time to come. A new consensus is emerging, that the
Soviet threat is not what it used to be.

    The real point, however, is that it never was. The doves in
the Great Debate of the past 40 years were right all along.

    Yet, ironically, it is the hawks who are most loudly
claiming victory, including moderate Republicans who are
uncomfortable with that label and would rather be seen as
conservatives. Much of American policy now seems based on the
conceit that insofar as Gorbachev is good news, he is both a
consequence and a vindication of Western foresight, toughness,
consistency and solidarity. According to this claim, the heady
events of 1989 are the payoff for the $4.3 trillion ($9.3
trillion adjusted for inflation) that it has cost the U.S. to
wage peace since 1951.

    Some go further, contending that the $2 trillion Reagan
defense buildup of the 1980s made possible the opportunities for
ending the cold war in the 1990s. In other words, had it not
been for the whole panoply of post-detente Western pressure
tactics, starting with the imposition in 1974 of the
Jackson-Vanik Amendment linking improved U.S.-Soviet trade to
increased Jewish emigration from the U.S.S.R., there would be
a different man in the Kremlin today. Or at least there would
be a very different Gorbachev, one who would still be
suppressing dissidents, sending refuseniks to Siberia, invading
neighboring countries, propping up dictators, financing wars in
the Third World and generally behaving the way central-casting
Soviet leaders are supposed to.

    If one believes that, then it follows naturally enough that
there should be no basic change in the main lines of U.S.
policy. It was largely this logic and the smugness that went
with it that earlier this year helped the Bush Administration
rationalize its initial passivity in response to Gorbachev.

    But Gorbachev is responding primarily to internal
pressures, not external ones. The Soviet system has gone into
meltdown because of inadequacies and defects at its core, not
because of anything the outside world has done or not done or
threatened to do. Gorbachev has been far more appalled by what
he has seen out his limousine window and in reports brought to
him by long-faced ministers than by satellite photographs of
American missiles aimed at Moscow. He has been discouraged and
radicalized by what he has heard from his own constituents
during his walkabouts in Krasnodar, Sverdlovsk and Leningrad --
not by the exhortations, remonstrations or sanctions of
foreigners.

    George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker are
realistic enough to see that there is little the U.S. can do to
"help" Gorbachev turn his economy around in the near- or even
medium-term future. By the same token, there was never all that
much the U.S. could do, or did do, to hurt the Soviet economy.
The inertia, the wastefulness, the corruption -- these have
always been inherent in the Soviet system. Therefore their
consequences are self-inflicted wounds rather than the result
of Western boycotts or other punitive policies. The imposition
more than 15 years ago of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was
politically symbolic but marginal in its impact; the same is
likely to be true if and when the amendment is waived next year.

    It is a solipsistic delusion to think the West could bring
about the seismic events now seizing the U.S.S.R. and its
"fraternal" neighbors. If the Soviet Union had ever been as
strong as the threatmongers believed, it would not be undergoing
its current upheavals. Those events are actually a repudiation
of the hawkish conventional wisdom that has largely prevailed
over the past 40 years, and a vindication of the Cassandra-like
losers, including Kennan.

    If Kennan's view and his recommendations had prevailed, the
world would probably at least still be where it is today,
beyond containment, and perhaps it might have arrived there
considerably sooner and at less expense.

    For much of the past year, it was considered bold to ask,
What if Gorbachev really is willing to disarm significantly?
What if he is prepared to demilitarize Soviet society and Soviet
foreign policy? What if he adopts levels and deployments of
troops, types and numbers of weapons that give real meaning to
his slogans of "mutual security" and "nonoffensive defense"?

    The question marks are now out of date and therefore out of
place. Gorbachev is already doing the things spelled out in the
litany of conditional clauses. This fall the prestigious
London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies
solemnly concluded that the unilateral cuts that Gorbachev has
already announced "will, once complete, virtually eliminate the
surprise attack threat which has so long concerned NATO
planners." In November the Pentagon said virtually the same
thing. That certification is all the more meaningful coming from
two organizations that have long believed such a threat existed
not only on paper but in the real world.

    To its credit, the Bush Administration has gone from asking
what-if questions about Gorbachev to what-now questions about
the American share of responsibility for transforming the
military competition. But it would be easier to come up with a
new answer to the perennial question about defense -- How much
is enough? -- if there were a clearer realization that the old
answer was excessive.

    It also is time to think seriously about eventually
retiring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with honor, to
be sure, but without too much nostalgia. Yes, NATO has helped
keep the peace. But so has the existence of nuclear weapons, and
so has the inherent weakness of the Soviet Union -- the
nakedness of the red emperor before his enemies.

    There is no danger that NATO will be dismantled
precipitately, since virtually all leaders in the West and even
some in the East agree that the alliance is necessary to help
handle the dislocations, instabilities and potential conflicts
that are almost sure to attend the disintegration of communist
rule in the East. But NATO is at best a stopgap until something
more up-to-date and effective can be devised to take its place.
The Western alliance was invented to maintain the standoff
between two giant blocs. But the great ideological divide of the
Iron Curtain is giving way to messier divisions among
nation-states and nationalities within states. NATO is simply
not constituted or equipped to deal with trouble between two
highly uncomradely Warsaw Pact members, Hungary and Rumania, or
between two feuding republics of nonaligned Yugoslavia, Serbia
and Slovenia. NATO should be maintained during a period of
transition, as long as it is understood to be playing that
temporary role. To his credit, and the Administration's, James
Baker, in a thoughtful and farsighted speech earlier this month
in West Berlin, seemed to be inviting Western statesmen and
thinkers to join in the search for new ideas and institutions
that will ensure the security of post-cold war Europe.

    Nor is it too soon to think about rolling back other U.S.
security commitments outside Europe. If the Soviets will
finally pack up and pull out of their air and naval bases in
Viet Nam, why shouldn't the U.S. vacate its facilities in the
Philippines? One objection is that the peoples and governments
of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim want a permanent, visible
American military presence in that region as a counterbalance
to China and Japan. That is a bit like suggesting, as many are
suddenly doing, that now more than ever the world needs NATO --
and the Warsaw Pact -- to fend off the specter of German
reunification and remilitarization. New rationales are being
concocted for old arrangements.

    Maybe a transformed international order does require
American (and Soviet) troops in a divided Germany, or American
warships in the South China Sea. But the objectives for those
deployments should be honestly and clearly defined; they should
be vigorously debated and politically supported on their own
terms. If the U.S. obfuscates or misrepresents its purposes, it
will be able to sustain neither domestic political support for
its overseas missions nor the hospitality and cooperation of its
allies.

    When the global revolution against communism came to China
this year, stimulated in part by Gorbachev's visit in May, the
U.S. Government was seized with ambivalence. It welcomed the
outburst of democratic spirit, up to a point. At the same time,
it feared instability, not just because widespread trouble could
cost the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of students, but
because it would jeopardize a long-standing relationship between
the U.S. and the now so obviously misnamed People's Republic.
The Administration was so eager to repair relations that it
seemed willing to do so on the terms laid down by the decrepit
tyrants in the Forbidden City. Bush first sent his National
Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and the Deputy Secretary of
State, Lawrence Eagleburger, to Beijing secretly in July.
Another visit earlier this month was not announced until after
the emissaries had arrived at their destination. The whole thing
looked sneaky, as though the Administration were trying to pull
a fast one (which in a way it was). As a result, the U.S.
humiliated itself, insulted the forces of democracy in China,
dishonored the martyrs of Tiananmen and reminded the world that
old thinking from the 1970s still dominates on certain issues
of American foreign policy. The misguided mission also seemed
intended to send a distinctly ominous signal to the Soviet
Union, quite out of keeping with the one Bush had sought to
convey a few days earlier in Malta. Gorbachev and perestroika
may fail. The U.S.S.R. may revert to its misbehavior of the
past. But the Kremlin should beware: the U.S. is hedging its
bets with good old-fashioned triangular diplomacy; however often
its existence has been denied, the infamous China card is
available for whatever poker games the future may have in store.

    The U.S.'s treasured "strategic partnership" with China is
valid and worth preserving only if it can be redefined beyond
its original anti-Soviet reason for being. The same goes for all
the U.S.'s security arrangements, in Asia, Latin America, the
Middle East.

    In its unrelenting hostility to Cuba, Nicaragua and Viet
Nam, the Bush Administration gives the impression of flying on
an automatic pilot that was programmed back in the days when
the Soviet Union was still in the business of exporting
revolution. Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas and the rulers in
Hanoi are all, in varying ways and to varying degrees,
disagreeable characters. But so are plenty of other leaders with
whom the U.S. deals. The U.S. might be able to cope with these
particular bad actors more effectively if it stopped treating
them as Soviet clones. That very notion has lost its meaning in
the past year.

    In general, such American fresh thinking as there has been
is too much focused on the question of what the U.S. can do to
"help" Gorbachev. There is also the issue of what he can do to
help the U.S., its allies and the rest of the world. He has
already done a lot, simply by- presiding over a Soviet Union
that is easier to see anew as a great big country with great big
troubles and that is trying to get out of the 20th century in
one piece.

    The cold war has been not only a multitrillion-dollar (and
ruble) expense but also a grand obsession. It has distorted
priorities, distracted attention and preoccupied many of the
best and the brightest minds in government, academe and think
tanks for nearly two generations. There is a long line of other
issues awaiting their turn, and some have been waiting none too
patiently.


    The indebtedness and poverty of the Third World threaten
the trend of democracy there. The indebtedness of the U.S., both
to itself and to foreigners, threatens its prosperity at home
and its influence abroad. The consequences of Japan's emergence
as an economic superpower could end up dwarfing the current,
suddenly fashionable concern over the reunification of Germany.
The U.S. may have won the cold war against the Soviet Union, but
it has gone a long way toward losing the trade and technology
war with Japan. Meanwhile, the environment, while also newly
fashionable as a subject of political rhetoric, is not being
treated by policymakers, legislators and citizens with anything
like the seriousness and urgency it deserves.

    The U.S. and its principal partners have no coherent
strategy for dealing with these and other mega-issues. Until
now, the cold war provided an alibi.

    No longer.

    Even as he is thanked by the masses, Gorbachev is quietly
cursed, only half-jokingly, by some in the foreign-policy elite
for having kicked the centerpiece out from under the big top of
American diplomacy. All of a sudden, the think tanks and back
rooms of the policymaking establishment are filled with a new
kind of head scratching. Some who have spent their careers
fretting about the end of the world (the big bang of nuclear
Armageddon) are suddenly lamenting "the end of history"; now
that the good guys have won and the Manichaean struggle is over,
humanity will have nothing but a lot of boring technical and
local problems to deal with. It is a silly idea but a telling
one, for it underscores the dilemma facing all Western
foreign-policy thinkers and doers, starting with George Bush:
the fading of the cold war in and of itself does not provide a
road map or a compass for the post-cold war era.

    They should worry less about what Gorbachev will do next,
or what the tiger he is riding will do to him. Leave that to
Gorbachev. He has done fairly well so far. Besides, he has
certainly made monkeys out of the experts and prophets.

    If Bush can muster "the vision thing," he should apply it
to the development of a new internationalism, a new geopolitics
that prepares the West, and perhaps the West and East together,
to manage the looming problems that will make the chapter now
beginning every bit as challenging as the one, mercifully,
coming to an end. Whether the new period will be known as the
Gorbachev era belongs to that category of unanswerable questions
on which it is better not to waste time. But whatever the next
stage of history comes to be called, there is no question that
Gorbachev has made it possible.