TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111191/1111003.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 119 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 63

AMERICA ABROAD

Now for a Moscow Peace Conference . . .


By Strobe Talbott


    When Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush met in Madrid last
week, they had plenty to talk about but little business to
transact. It is no longer clear what authority Gorbachev has to
enter into international agreements, or even what the
constitutional procedure is for ratifying the strategic-arms-
reduction treaty the two Presidents signed last July. That was
barely three months ago, but it was, as they say in Moscow, B.C.
-- before the coup. Since then, with the rapid disintegration
of the U.S.S.R., the very term Soviet leader has become
something of an oxymoron. So has Soviet Union.

    Two weeks ago, the vice president of the Russian
Federation, Alexander Rutskoi, quietly informed U.S. Ambassador
Robert Strauss about an early version of a speech that had been
prepared for Boris Yeltsin to deliver last Monday, on the eve
of Gorbachev's departure for Madrid. The draft declared the
U.S.S.R. defunct and Yeltsin's government the protector of 25
million ethnic Russians in the outlying republics.

    That message would have intensified fears that resurgent
Russian imperialism would fill the vacuum left by the collapse
of Soviet power. Under the pretext of "protecting" their ethnic
kinsmen, some Russian nationalists might try to seize other
republics' territory. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the
spectacularly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, has even made
claims against Poland and Finland on the grounds that they once
belonged to the Czars. You're not likely to dismiss Zhirinovsky
as a nut case if you're a Pole, a Finn -- or one of the 6
million Russians who voted for him in the republic's
presidential election last June.

    Strauss notified Washington about what Yeltsin might say,
and Bush fired back instructions for him to register official
American concern with Rutskoi and Yeltsin's foreign minister,
Andrei Kozyrev -- in effect, an appeal to make the speech less
provocative. In the version Yeltsin finally delivered, he
announced a new round of radical economic reforms, virtually
dissolved most of the Soviet ministries and nominated himself
to the vacant post of Russian prime minister. But he stopped
just short of proclaiming Russia the successor state to the
U.S.S.R., effective immediately.

    The situation in the former Soviet Union is the most
dangerous in the world today, much more so than the one in the
Middle East. In fact, it was precisely the late, unlamented
U.S.-Soviet rivalry that invested the Arab-Israeli conflict with
its greatest peril. As long as the two armed camps each had a
glowering superpower at its back, a regional crisis could
escalate to global conflagration. The end of the cold war has
made progress toward a peaceful settlement more imaginable but
also, in one sense, less crucial. While there is every reason
to hope for success in the new round of talks, it is comforting
to know that if failure there leads to another Middle East war,
U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces will not go on alert against each
other.

    The bad news is that the U.S.S.R., paradoxically, poses a
greater threat to world peace in its present divided and
weakened condition than it did, not so long ago, when it seemed
so strong and monolithic. Throughout the '70s and most of the
'80s, the Soviet Union was what political scientists call a
"rational actor," a single entity with a clearly identified
central leadership and a predictable, if often disagreeable,
pattern of behavior. Sharing the planet with Leonid Brezhnev was
no fun, but the West knew that by dealing with him, it could
manage its relations with a nation of 280 million.

    Now, instead of concentrating on one man in the Kremlin,
the outside world must open channels to a multiplicity of
actors, not all of them rational.

    Gorbachev would obviously prefer presiding over the
largest country on earth to becoming the custodian of little
more than a drafty fortress on the banks of the Moscow River.
His friend Bush would rather have one phone number in his
Rolodex than a dozen.

    But it is too late for that. The incredible has become the
inevitable. The Baltic states are gone; Ukraine and several
other republics are going, and there is probably no stopping
them. What one of Gorbachev's advisers, Yevgeni Primakov, calls
a "unified economic space" is a lost cause, at least during the
coming phase. The U.S.S.R. is, and always has been, a unified
economic disaster area, and that, not ethnicity, is the main
reason so many of those 280 million people want out. The
U.S.S.R. has to go much further in falling apart before the
pieces will have the incentive to reconstitute themselves as a
loose confederation or commonwealth.

    But while the dismantling of the old structure is
irreversible, it need not -- indeed, must not -- be precipitous.
Imagine a civil war like the one in Yugoslavia, only played out
across 11 time zones, with the Russians in the role of the Serbs
and nuclear weapons in the background. Yeltsin can help avert
such a horror by reassuring Russia's neighbors both inside and
outside the old U.S.S.R. that independence won't unleash the
forces of tribalism and irredentism.

    Gorbachev, diminished as he is, has his own important
contribution still to make. Using what is left of his office,
he can supervise an open-ended negotiation over territory,
borders, security and the rights of minorities. Sounds familiar,
doesn't it? That's why Gorbachev's experience in Madrid last
week may come in handy at home.