TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110689/p40

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                Ä                                                            WORLD, Page 40

COVER STORIES: Yes, He's For Real


By loosening the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, Gorbachev proves
once and for all that he seeks a different world. How should the
West respond?

By Walter Isaacson/Reported by Christopher Ogden/Washington and
Strobe Talbott/Moscow, with other bureaus


    For the Russians, tempered by centuries of land invasions,
national security has long been defined as the control of
territory and the subjugation of neighbors. Moscow's desire for
a protective buffer, combined with a thousand-year legacy of
expansionism and a 20th century overlay of missionary Marxism,
was what prompted Stalin to leave his army in Eastern Europe
after World War II and impose puppet regimes in the nations he
had liberated.

    This Soviet quest for security necessarily meant insecurity
for others. It also, as it turned out, meant the same for the
Soviets. "One irony of history is that the security zone in
Eastern Europe that Stalin created turned out to be one of the
greatest imaginable sources of insecurity," says Princeton
Professor Stephen Cohen, co-author of Voices of Glasnost. It
precipitated the cold war, provoked an armed competition with
the West and saddled the Soviets with a string of costly and
cranky vassals.

    Thus it was understandable, perhaps even inevitable, that
Soviet control over Eastern Europe would erode and its
territorial approach to security be exposed as obsolete in a
world of nuclear missiles. Yet even years from now, when the
breathtaking events of 1989 are assessed, hindsight is unlikely
to dilute the amazement of the moment. For suddenly, amid a
barrage of headlines that a year ago would have seemed
unimaginable, the architecture of Europe is being redrawn and
the structure of international relations transformed by Mikhail
Gorbachev's redefinition of Soviet security.

    "These changes we're seeing in Eastern Europe are
absolutely extraordinary," George Bush told the New York Times
last week. In fact, 1989 will be remembered not as the year that
Eastern Europe changed but as the year that Eastern Europe as
we have known it for four decades ended. The concept was always
an artificial one: a handful of diverse nations suddenly
iron-curtained off from their neighbors and force-fed an
unwanted ideology. Soviet dominion over the region may someday
be regarded as a parenthetical pause (1945-89) that left
economic scars but had little permanent impact on the culture
and history of Central Europe.

    Last week saw yet another series of events that reflected
the upheavals of this watershed year:

    -- In Budapest acting President Matyas Szuros stood on a
balcony overlooking a rally in Parliament Square and said that
the 1956 uprising, which the Soviets suppressed with tanks and
the hangman's rope, was actually a "national independence
movement." He declared the People's Republic of Hungary, so
named in 1949, dead. Now it is the Republic of Hungary, an
independent state with plans to hold multiparty elections. When
speakers mentioned the U.S., the crowd cheered; for the Soviet
Union, there were jeers. But along with shouts of "Russians, go
home!," there were chants for the man who made the scene
possible: "Gorby! Gorby! Gorby!"

    -- Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze marked the
anniversary of the Hungarian uprising by telling Moscow's new
parliament that the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan had "blatantly
violated" the law. By doing so, he implied that events like the
1956 Hungarian crackdown and the 1968 Czechoslovakian invasion
would not recur. In addition, with a candor rare even in the
West, Shevardnadze said of the controversial Krasnoyarsk radar
station in Siberia: "Let's admit that this monstrosity the size
of the Egyptian pyramid has been sitting there in direct
violation of the ABM treaty." (His fealty to the treaty was in
part motivated by a desire to drive a stake through America's
SDI missile-defense program.)

    -- In San Francisco Secretary of State James Baker
delivered the Administration's strongest endorsement to date of
Gorbachev's efforts. "Any uncertainty about the fate of reform
in the Soviet Union," said Baker, "is all the more reason, not
less, for us to seize the present opportunity." President Bush
likewise abandoned a timid U.S. attitude when he granted Hungary
most-favored-nation trading status and declared, "We are
privileged to participate in a very special moment in human
history. We are witnessing an unprecedented transformation of
Communist nations into pluralistic democracies with market
economies."

    -- In a trip laden with symbolism, Gorbachev visited
neighboring Finland, a dexterous nation that has maintained
friendly relations with Moscow while retaining political and
economic independence. "Finlandization" used to be derided as
a form of latter-day appeasement that might infect Western
Europe; now it is considered a model for the relationship that
Poland or Hungary could achieve.


    When Gorbachev first spoke of "new thinking" in foreign
policy, many in the West -- especially in the U.S. -- doubted
his sincerity. The real test was whether Gorbachev would end the
policy at the heart of the cold war: the subjugation of Eastern
Europe. At the end of last year, in a speech at the United
Nations, Gorbachev declared that he would. "Freedom of choice
is a universal principle," he said. Yet the doubts lingered.
They always seemed to come down to the question: Is Gorbachev
for real?

    There can be only one answer now: yes, emphatically yes.
Earlier this year, after Poland's Communists lost the most open
elections since World War II but tried nevertheless to thwart
Solidarity's effort to form a government, Gorbachev spoke by
phone to the Communist Party leader, who subsequently backed
down. Gorbachev has also provided public approval to the
Hungarian reformers. In summing up a Warsaw Pact meeting in
Bucharest last July, he pronounced: "Each people determines the
future of its own country and chooses its own form of society.
There must be no interference from outside, no matter what the
pretext." What it all adds up to is that both in rhetoric and
in reality, Gorbachev has done what Western leaders have been
demanding for 21 years: repealed the "Brezhnev Doctrine," under
which the Soviets claimed the right to provide "military aid to
a fraternal country" (translation: invade it) whenever there was
"a threat to the common interests of the camp of socialism"
(translation: a threat to Soviet dominance).

    Gorbachev is clearly motivated by his nation's desperate
internal situation. Perestroika, which aims to radically
restructure the Soviet economy, has so far succeeded only in
disrupting the clanky old centralized-state system that at
least belched forth a few second-rate consumer goods for the
store shelves. Now those shelves are barer than they have been
for 20 years, there are rumors of looming food riots this
winter, and Gorbachev is not the hero at home that he is abroad.
It is no wonder, then, that the Soviets, as former U.S. arms
negotiator Paul Nitze says, "have turned inward, looking at what
the military establishment has cost the people, the society, the
economy."

    For the first six months of the Bush Administration,
agnosticism about Gorbachev was an article of faith. White
House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater went so far as to call him "a
drugstore cowboy." Moreover, it was virtually taboo to use any
form of the verb "to help" in the same sentence with Gorbachev.
Senate Democratic leader George Mitchell accused the Bush
Administration of "status quo thinking" and exhibiting an
"almost passive stance." Bush's attitude began to change when
he visited Poland and Hungary in July. His hosts impressed on
him that their survival, not to mention their success, depended
on Gorbachev's. Bush commented afterward that he had understood
the connection intellectually but now he understood it "in his
gut."

    Bush's conversion has not ended the deep schism within his
Administration. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft
remains cautious about Gorbachev's ultimate aims, and his deputy
Robert Gates is acidly skeptical about the Soviet leader's
ability to prevail. In an unusual move, Baker last week forbade
Gates to deliver a speech that was too pessimistic about
Gorbachev's economic program. Vice President Dan Quayle directly
challenged Baker in a Los Angeles speech by stressing "the
darker side of Soviet foreign policy" and saying that instead
of helping, the U.S. ought to "let them reform themselves."

    Raising this skepticism is probably, to use Bush's favorite
word, prudent. After all, what if Gorbachev is indeed merely
pursuing by more subtle means the old Soviet goals of getting
the U.S. to withdraw from Europe, dissolving NATO and
neutralizing Germany? Even so, as Baker points out, it would
still make sense for the U.S. to "lock in" gains by helping
Soviet bloc nations be come more independent and by securing
agreements that make mutually beneficial arms reductions. In
addition, the changes in Eastern Europe have progressed so far
that a sudden reversal becomes less likely every day. In the
worst-case scenario, a hard-liner -- even Gorbachev -- could
crack down in Moscow tomorrow. But could he reverse the course
of events in Hungary and Poland? Could he ensure the loyalty of
troops in Eastern Europe?

    Gorbachev and Shevardnadze said once again last week that
NATO and the Warsaw Pact should eventually be dismantled. NATO
Secretary-General Manfred Worner dismissed the suggestion as "a
long-standing aim" of Soviet policy. Still, if there is no cold
war to fight, it will be impossible at some point to avoid
reconsidering the roles of the two military alliances. One of
Worner's predecessors, Britain's Lord Ismay, said the goal of
NATO was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the
Germans down." As the Soviet threat recedes, NATO could serve
to keep the West Germans, if not down, at least tethered to the
West. The organization's purpose would become more political:
preventing the Continent from reverting to the spasmodic shifts
in national alliances that sparked centuries of wars. The
twelve-nation European Community is likewise poised to play a
leading role in belaying the nations that are breaking loose
from the Soviet orbit.

    The success of perestroika will depend on the Soviets, but
Washington can help Gorbachev by reaching agreements to cut
conventional arms and strategic nuclear arsenals. In addition,
Shevardnadze in his speech last week spoke of Moscow's desire
to join such Western economic institutions as the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund and GATT (the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade). Like Hungary, the Soviet Union could
benefit from most-favored-nation trade status.

    Yet given the sweeping transformations under way, these
measures seem limp. Such a step-by-step approach would be, at
best, yet another example of the -- dare one say timid? --
incrementalism on arms control and trade that has marked
Soviet-American relations for four decades. As Bush him self
says, the opportunity is historic. The idea that the Warsaw Pact
would launch a land invasion of Western Europe, which is what
most of NATO expenditures are designed to prevent, has become
nearly inconceivable. "It may be time to abandon incrementalism
for a leapfrog approach, to see if we can really make a basic
change in our relationship," says former Assistant Secretary of
State Richard Holbrooke.

    Instead, Bush could challenge Gorbachev with courage and
imagination. He could ask the Soviets to join the West in
making enormous, fundamental cuts in defense spending. This
would not be naive pacifism but hardheaded self-interest. It
could be a boon to the deficit-choked American economy as well
as to perestroika. Rather than negotiating trims in a few
weapons programs, Bush could propose demobilizing significant
portions of each side's military, testing whether Gorbachev
would go along with dismantling whole divisions and
reconfiguring forces so as to create a less dangerous world.

    Dean Acheson compared the task of his fellow statesmen at
the end of World War II to the one described in the first
chapter of the Bible. "That was to create a world out of chaos;
ours, to create half a world, a free half, out of the same
material." The genesis that is now at hand may be just as
formidable, because it involves transcending not chaos but a
rigid order.

    The postwar era was launched with a speech by Harry Truman
outlining a presidential vision of containment. Similarly, Bush
could launch a postcontainment era by propounding a bold
swords-into-plow shares scheme for a fundamental change in
East-West relations. Such a clarion call for a radical new Bush
Doctrine could command the bipartisan support that accompanied
the Truman Doctrine. It could also, at the very least, regain
for the U.S. the initiative on the world stage. And, who knows?
Gorbachev might go along. More surprising things have happened
this year.