TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042991/0429003.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 83 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 44

AMERICA ABROAD

The Old Magic Is Gone


By Strobe Talbott


    TOKYO. For six years the most important factor in Soviet
foreign policy has been Soviet domestic politics. The internal
crisis in the U.S.S.R. gave Mikhail Gorbachev both an incentive
and a pretext for transforming his country's external behavior.

    Gorbachev showed a genius for making a virtue out of
necessity. The more the Soviet Union turned inward, the more the
world cheered its President for abandoning many of the bad
habits, disreputable clients and ill-gotten gains of the past.
By taking the first steps toward reductions in doomsday
arsenals, liberating Eastern Europe, cooperating in the
resolution of regional conflicts and enabling the U.N. to move
against Saddam Hussein, he made retrenchment, even retreat, look
like leadership and the management of decline look like
dynamism. It was quite a trick, and he performed it over and
over again.

    But opposition to Gorbachev at home is so widespread that
it hampers his freeof maneuver abroad. In Tokyo last week he
demonstrated his characteristic flair, but the magic was
diminished. By promising further negotiations on the future of
the four Kurile islands the Soviet Union seized from Japan in
the closing days of World War II, he pulled a rabbit's foot out
of his hat, but not the whole rabbit that his audiences have
come to expect.

    This was not the same Gorbachev who in 1987 agreed to
eliminate an entire class of missiles, or who in 1989 ordered
the Polish Communist Party to share power with Solidarity, or
in 1990 accepted a unified Germany in NATO. A year or so ago,
the old Gorbachev might have stunned his Japanese hosts by
returning the islands on the spot, cutting the knot in a single
bold stroke rather than picking at it with his fingernails.

    But that was before the rise of Boris Yeltsin. Perhaps the
most significant document at the Tokyo meeting was the Soviet
delegation list. Gorbachev felt comto invite several Yeltsinites
to accompany him. By including in his entourage two foreign
ministers -- one representing the U.S.S.R., the other the
Russian federation -- Gorbachev was tacitly acceding to
Yeltsin's demand for a say, if not a veto, on what ultimately
happens to the islands.

    In his struggle against Yeltsin, Gorbachev has come to
rely increasingly on the military for support. Yet in the midst
of the Tokyo talks, the commander of Soviet forces in the Far
East warned publicly that if the U.S.S.R. relinquished the
islands, "we could no longer call ourselves a great power." It
was an obvious shot across Gorbachev's bow.

    A Kremlin official explained why the issue is so neuralgic
for Soviet top brass and hard-liners: "Our loss of Eastern
Europe and the retirement of the Warsaw Pact constitute the
greatest geopolitical defeat ever suffered by a nation that has
not actually lost a war. Many of our generals and admirals are
saying, `That's it! No more concessions!' For them, it's become
a matter of symbolism and principle beany technical or strategic
questions involved."

    For much the same reason, the Soviet military has dug in
its heels over arms control with the U.S. The impasse has
jeopardized the summit that Gorbachev and George Bush want this
summer. The White House has been exchanging proposals directly
with Gorbachev in hopes that he will override the objections of
his comrades in uniform, just as he has done so often in the
past. But that was then; this is now. With every passing week,
Gorbachev's domestic vulnerability makes diplobreakthroughs more
difficult.