TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042489/04248900.026

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.7 KB | 72 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 36

America Abroad

What's Wrong with Yalta II


By Strobe Talbott


    Mikhail Gorbachev has a nightmare, and it keeps coming true.
In various corners of the world's last empire, demonstrators
wave placards, some of them bearing Gorbachev's portrait; they
hurl slogans, including some he made famous; they taunt troops,
all of whom he commands from Moscow. Shouts lead to shots, and
a riot becomes an enactment of Gorbachev's greatest dilemma: the
relaxation of control can also mean disorder, which in turn can
provoke repression, reversing reform and jeopardizing the
political survival of the reformer. Last week it happened in
Tbilisi. Next week, or next month, it could happen outside the
borders of the U.S.S.R. but still within the empire, in Warsaw,
Budapest, Prague, East Berlin. Western statesmen have their own
dilemma. A crisis in the East, especially if it seemed to be
fanned by the West, could play into the hands of Gorbachev's
conservative opponents and trigger a crackdown.

    Henry Kissinger has been trying to persuade the Bush
Administration to work out a new agreement with the Kremlin. The
Soviet Union would commit itself to tolerate political and
economic pluralism in Eastern Europe in exchange for Western
guarantees of Soviet military security. The notion seems to be
that Moscow might be more likely to allow Poland, Hungary and
other countries to evolve toward democracy and free markets,
perhaps even to associate themselves with the European
Community, if NATO promises not to lure them out of the Warsaw
Pact and perhaps desists from covert intelligence operations
behind the Iron Curtain.

    Critics have stigmatized the proposed deal as "Yalta II," a
repetition of Franklin Roosevelt's unwitting sellout of Eastern
Europe in 1945. The State Department bureaucracy is unanimously
(though anonymously) convinced that a superpower negotiation on
the fate of Europe would offend the Europeans. Last month James
Baker publicly floated the idea, without quite endorsing it.
Sure enough, transatlantic cables poured into Foggy Bottom with
protests and warnings. The British Ambassador in Washington
sought, and received, assurances that the Administration was not
embracing the plan. Last week Kissinger insisted that his
purpose is not to redo Yalta but to undo it. His proposal, he
says, is to provide Eastern Europe with the political breathing
room to reintegrate with the West while depriving the Kremlin
of a military pretext to interfere.

    The furor is a curious sort of testament to Kissinger.
Twelve years out of office, he still commands immense authority,
especially in the absence of fresh ideas from official
Washington; the Bush Administration's long-awaited
"national-security review" of policy toward the U.S.S.R. has
turned out to be a prescription for business as usual. But the
Kissinger plan is fundamentally flawed. It seeks from the men in
the Kremlin something they are already willing to grant --
latitude for diversity and liberalization in the "fraternal"
countries of Eastern Europe. And it offers in return assurances
that have little to do with the Soviets' real fears --
political deterioration inside the bloc, not a military threat
from outside. Moreover, the forces that stand ready to exploit
the trouble are also internal, not external; they are domestic
hard-liners, not CIA or Pentagon mischief-makers.

    For many of Gorbachev's comrades, the stuff of nightmares
comes not from NATO, which Kissinger would restrain, but from
the very process of liberalization that the former Secretary of
State seeks to protect.