TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012389/01238900.035

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.8 KB | 78 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 33

America Abroad

Credit Where Credit Is Due


By Strobe Talbott


    In Luanda last week Sergeant Vivian Hernandez Cabellero, a
19-year-old member of an antiaircraft battery, said goodbye to
her companeros. She was part of the first contingent of Cuban
soldiers to be withdrawn from Angola as part of a negotiated
settlement to 13 years of fighting. In Kabul 500 Soviet
soldiers, laden with equipment, lined up before military
transport planes to fly home. Meanwhile, the Kremlin's Foreign
Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, and his deputy, Yuli Vorontsov,
met separately with the Afghan regime and the leaders of the
mujahedin to discuss what amounted to the terms of the
U.S.S.R.'s defeat.

    The global boom in peacemaking that brightened 1988 is
continuing into the new year -- and into the new American
Administration. The cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war is holding,
and there is progress toward an end to the Vietnamese
occupation of Kampuchea. But in the background of all the
promising jaw-jaw going on at conference tables around the world
is the muted but discordant sound of the superpowers bickering
over which one deserves more credit for peace breaking out.

    U.S. foreign policy officials see the current diplomatic
progress as a vindication of the Reagan Doctrine, under which
the U.S. has supplied arms to anti-Marxist "freedom fighters"
around the world. "A common thread was the emergence of a
balance of forces that has convinced the parties involved that a
military solution isn't possible," says Michael Armacost, Under
Secretary of State for Political Affairs. "It was our policy to
help preserve that balance, making a political solution more
likely."

    Meanwhile, the Soviet Union has become more willing to
accept such solutions, including ones that require sending
Sergeant Hernandez home from Angola. Secretary of State George
Shultz last week commented privately to Western diplomats that
the Soviets have played what he called "a remarkably
constructive role" in southern Africa and elsewhere.

    But Shultz and his colleagues quickly add that the
improvement in Soviet behavior is in response to American
firmness. State Department officials dismiss talk about Soviet
"initiatives" or a Soviet "peace offensive," since those
phrases suggest that Mikhail Gorbachev is leading the way toward
a more tranquil future. "Insofar as Gorbachev is now more
peacefully inclined," says Richard Solomon, director of the
State Department's Policy Planning Staff, "it's because he's
butting his head up against new realities, notably including the
Reagan Doctrine."

    If the Soviets are not about to recognize the success of any
American doctrine, they do admit, at least tacitly, the failure
of any number of doctrines from their own Communist past: Karl
Marx's world revolution, Vladimir Lenin's "proletarian
internationalism," Nikita Khrushchev's sponsorship of "wars of
national liberation" and Leonid Brezhnev's assertion of the
right to use force to protect the "gains" of socialism. In an
interview with TIME, Anatoli Gromyko, director of Moscow's
Institute of African Studies admits, "We should not export
revolution. The idea that a socialist revolution would spread
around the world was a romantic view. The change in our
thinking came because we were engulfed in our own problems."

    That statement is all the more striking coming from the son
of Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Foreign Minister for 28 years and
President for three until Gorbachev ousted him last September.
Grim Grom, now merely a member of the Central Committee, is
rarely heard from these days. And despite his lighter work
load, he looks as dour as ever, perhaps in part because of the
way the younger generation is talking -- and acting.