TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100289/10028900.012

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.4 KB | 111 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 24

Fresh Air, Fresh Ideas


The Soviets are raring to go, but the U.S. isn't


    The U.S. is panicked at what the Soviets may say yes to."
That comment from Jack Mendelsohn, deputy director of the Arms
Control Association, may sound a bit exaggerated. But when
Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze brought a letter
from Mikhail Gorbachev to Washington last week, it had U.S.
officials worried. What if it contained some bold proposals?
That might force a curiously hesitant Administration to decide
how far and how fast it wants to go toward nuclear-weapons
agreements -- or even to make up its mind on what, if anything,
it should do to help Gorbachev survive.

    As it happened, Gorbachev proposed nothing startling but
plenty to intrigue negotiators. His letter was a grab bag of
proposals covering the whole gamut of arms control. All told,
they suggested not just Soviet cooperation but an extraordinary
readiness to compromise to give stalled arms negotiations fresh
momentum. Standout example: Moscow withdrew its insistence that
curbs on space weapons must be linked to slashes in the number
of long-range nuclear missiles.

    Yet, oddly enough, arms control seemed almost peripheral in
the wide-ranging talks Shevardnadze had with President Bush at
the White House and with Secretary of State James Baker during
two days amid the majestic scenery of Jackson Hole in Wyoming's
Teton mountains. They agreed to hold a summit in late spring in
the U.S. But the most astonishing talk concerned the Soviet
Union's internal troubles, an unheard-of topic for superpower
discussion.

    On the four-hour flight from Washington to Wyoming,
Shevardnadze gave Baker a detailed rundown on Moscow's problems
with its economy and restive nationalities. The two men took
off their jackets and leaned so close together that their faces
were just inches apart. Shevardnadze's tone was urgent. "We need
fresh ideas," he told reporters. "It is high time for us to move
from mutual understanding to mutual action."

    The U.S. has little useful advice for Moscow's ethnic
revolts. But Shevardnadze made it clear he was in search of
American technical know-how for the ailing Soviet economy.
Together with several U.S. and Soviet economists, the pair
chewed over such specifics as ruble convertibility and Soviet
Treasury bonds. "There is a change in the psychology of how they
are prepared to talk about themselves and in their attitude
toward us," said a Baker aide. "There is a degree of trust
emerging."

    But if the Soviets are "raring to go," said a senior U.S.
official, "we're not so raring." That has begun to disturb not
only the Soviets but many American foreign policy specialists
and Congressmen as well. They fear the Administration is passing
up a historic opportunity to move beyond the superpower
confrontation and risking the danger that if Gorbachev is not
helped, he will fall and be replaced by a hard-liner. Senate
majority leader George Mitchell charged last week that Bush and
company seem "almost nostalgic about the cold war." To many, the
Bush team seems stubbornly reluctant to move beyond what the
President calls a "show me" attitude.

    In part, this attitude reflects Bush's deeply ingrained
caution about doing "something dumb," as Baker put it last week.
It also suits the hard-line doubters, like NSC deputy Robert
Gates, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Vice President Dan
Quayle, who think Gorbachev is only a short-timer and the Soviet
Union will never really change.

    There are practical as well as ideological impediments to
moving more dramatically to help out the Soviets. Expanded aid
to Eastern Europe, for example, could conflict with Bush's
no-new-taxes pledge. And officials rightly insist that the
Administration has few moves that would really improve Soviet
conditions. Presidential aides defend their policy as a kind of
diplomatic semaphore: carefully calibrated gestures to convey
that Washington wants perestroika to succeed and will reward
progress. `It's a clear signal to the Soviets," says a top
official. "You change and we'll change."

    Nonetheless, even if the U.S. can exercise only a marginal
influence on Soviet events, it ought to use what clout it does
possess. Bush should:

    Start a round of regular summits. Things happen when the
bosses talk that do not otherwise.

    Drive harder for arms deals. Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev
were close to a START deal to cut nuclear arsenals in half.
There seems little reason Bush could not wrap one up, though he
might link it to proposed cuts in conventional forces.

    Offer food aid to the Soviets and allow them to enter the
U.S. market on terms equal to those offered most other nations.
Additional food might help Gorbachev more than anything else

    Expand aid to Poland and Hungary. The U.S. is trying to
signal the Kremlin that if it pushes internal reforms "it could
all be yours," as one official puts it.

    None of this may ease Gorbachev's troubles much; in the
end, the U.S. cannot solve them for him. But his fall could
cause such instability within the Soviet Union, and beyond, that
it would be nearly as disastrous for the U.S. as it would be for
the U.S.S.R., and so Washington should do whatever it can to
avert such a calamity.