TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030491/0304996.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 115 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 28

AMERICA ABROAD

No, It's Not a New Cold War


By Strobe Talbott


    Whatever else it accomplishes, Mikhail Gorbachev's
diplomatic intervention in the gulf war has already revealed
the shape of Soviet foreign policy in the months, perhaps even
years, to come.

    The Kremlin's new approach is a far cry from the
"partnership" with the U.S. that Gorbachev proclaimed during
the heady days of 1989, when he pulled Soviet troops out of
Afghanistan and liberated Eastern Europe. Some conservatives
have concluded, with as much glee as alarm, that Gorbachev is
returning to the bad old days of the cold war. That
characterization is not just simplistic -- it misses the irony
of what is happening. The emerging U.S.-Soviet interplay is
in some respects a throwback to the even older days of
razzle-dazzle realpolitik, before the era of a global,
Manichaean struggle between two ideologies.

    In the 19th century, isms mattered little; national purposes
varied from case to case, region to region, year to year. Lord
Palmerston summed it up in 1848: "We have no eternal allies,
and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and
perpetual, and these interests it is our duty to follow." Great
powers had some goals in common, others in conflict, and they
adjusted the mix of cooperation and competition in their
dealings accordingly.

    That's pretty much been the pattern between the U.S. and the
Soviet Union during the gulf war. The ascendancy of the
hard-liners in the U.S.S.R., however ominous, has not altered
the country's basic desire to stay in the good graces of the
capitalist world as much as possible, if only because it
desperately wants outside help for its economy. Also the
Soviets are so much in need of internal stability and calm that
they are all the more eager to be seen fostering those virtues
abroad. Hence the core of agreement -- and cooperation --
between Moscow and Washington on the requirement that Iraq get
out of Kuwait.

    But on other issues, their interests -- and thus their
policies -- diverge. For one thing, Bush and Gorbachev are
operating in entirely different domestic political
environments. The man in the White House has strong backing
from his citizens, while his counterpart in the Kremlin has
received delegations of Muslims from Transcaucasia and Central
Asia who are angry at the spectacle of infidels bombing an
Islamic nation.

    Bush's advisers at the Pentagon and at coalition
headquarters in Riyadh are "good to go" for a ground war, in
part because it gives them a chance to clobber the ghosts of
Vietnam. Meanwhile, Gorbachev's generals are licking their
wounds from Afghanistan, bringing home the pieces of the Warsaw
Pact and supervising commando raids against civilians in
restive republics. That makes them all the more dyspeptic about
their principal rival's pummeling a longtime Soviet client
whose northern border is only about 400 miles from the U.S.S.R.
Moreover, Operation Desert Storm is decimating a military
establishment made up largely of Soviet equipment -- MiGs, T-72
tanks and the suddenly famous Scuds.

    Then there's the question of prepositioning for the postwar
order. Bush rightly fears that if Saddam lives to fight another
day, the U.S.'s friends -- especially Israel, Turkey and Saudi
Arabia -- will be in danger. Gorbachev calculates, just as
correctly, that if he helps Iraq avert a cataclysmic defeat,
the Soviet Union will have considerable influence over, and
claim on, a state that everyone agrees must remain a major
player in the area. He will also have enhanced Soviet standing
in the eyes of those countries, like Pakistan, where opposition
to the anti-Saddam coalition is growing.

    Finally, Bush and Gorbachev have different objectives at the
most personal level. So far, Bush has benefited from his role
as a war President. He hopes to expunge forever the word wimp
from the vocabulary of his critics. Gorbachev, by contrast,
desperately needs to refurbish his credentials as a peacemaker.
In December he could not even go to Oslo to pick up his Nobel
Peace Prize because of all his troubles at home. After troops
from the Ministry of Interior slaughtered unarmed Lithuanians
last month, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, who won the prize in
1975, said her late husband's name should be stricken from any
list of laureates that included Gorbachev's.

    Now, thanks to the Baghdad-Moscow shuttle, Gorbachev is
getting the sort of headlines he's used to, as a bold
wheeler-dealer rather than as a brutal head cracker.

    While Gorbachev's objectives are different from Bush's on
many points and incompatible on some, they're not, at root,
necessarily directed against the U.S. That is the
distinguishing feature of the current, and probably coming,
phase of Soviet-American relations. It's also the key
difference from the past. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev
all defined Soviet gain in terms of Western, and more
specifically American, loss. Gorbachev has shown that while he
will go his own way when he feels it necessary, he will also
look for areas where he and Bush can move in tandem. Call it
Soviet Palmerstonism. It leaves plenty of room for tension, but
it's still a big improvement on the perpetual enmity of the
cold war.