TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/090991/0909007.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 105 lines

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                                                          WORLD, Page 44

AMERICA ABROAD

And Now for the Sequels


By Strobe Talbott


    The phantasmagoria in the U.S.S.R. has overloaded the
circuits. For days on end, there was little room on the front
pages for other news, and barely room in our minds for other
astonishments and anxieties.

    Yet the Big Story is even bigger than it seems. The old order
failed in the Soviet Union, and in Eastern Europe two years ago,
for reasons that apply everywhere Marxism-Leninism still holds
sway. What that system does best is protect the power and
privileges of its elite. The means to that end are terror and
bureaucracy. The result is chronic inefficiency, an unhappy,
unproductive citizenry, and a country severely hobbled as it
tries to participate, to say nothing of compete, in the life of
the planet. Therefore, despite their internationalist
pretensions, Marxist states end up with fortress economies under
self-imposed siege. But in an interdependent world well into the
Third Industrial Revolution, as the latest explosive advances in
technology and communications are sometimes known, autarky and
isolation are no longer an option. Just ask the Albanians.

    What is happening in the U.S.S.R. comes as a shock partly
because the Russians had a reputation, even among themselves, for
being passive, obedient, politically "uncultured." A similar
image, tinged with racism, persists about the mysterious East:
hordes of little yellow people waving little red books. But the
miraculous spring of 1989 in China was as much a refutation of
the authoritarian stereotype as was the second Russian Revolution
two weeks ago. China's democracy movement yielded to the tanks on
Tiananmen Square, but many of its leaders -- and, more important,
its followers -- will be back. Any form of government that can
survive only as long as the authorities are willing to slaughter
citizens in the streets can't last forever, or even, these days,
for long. For that reason the other Asian politburos, in North
Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, are also doomed.

    And what about Cuba? El Fidelissimo is just 90 miles from
exiles who are stepping up their plans for a triumphal return
from Florida, while he's 12,500 miles from the nearest country
whose ruler still calls him Comrade. The only suspense is whether
his political demise will precede his physical one (he is 64 and
has smoked too much).

    The task for the West is to coax nations with die-hard
leftist tyrannies into as much engagement as possible with the
outside world. That will accelerate the inevitable transformation
of their societies and perhaps even reduce the danger of
bloodshed. The more external ties a country has when the internal
pressure finally blows, the better the chance that its regime
will be dislodged unceremoniously but safely, like the
Dzerzhinsky statue in Moscow, rather than come crashing down,
killing many of its subjects.

    The end of communist history will also bring plenty of
complications for the winners of the cold war.

    The Iron Curtain made European integration a relatively
simple matter, at least in concept: the rich democracies of the
West were eligible for membership in this new club, the European
Community; the poor dictatorships to the east were not. But now
the Community's neighbors -- newly liberated, thoroughly European
and desperately needy -- will request, and deserve, some kind of
special association.

    NATO was conceived to deter armored columns from the Soviet
Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany (remember
East Germany?) from rolling to the English Channel. The alliance
has survived the victory of the West and the disbanding of the
Warsaw Pact. But unless it can help defuse disasters like the one
now destroying Yugoslavia and threatening peace throughout
southern Europe, NATO too will end in retirement. Thinking about
what will take its place has barely begun.

    Japan's relations with the other industrialized democracies,
already strained, are likely to become more so. As the Japanese
see it, they have put up with a lot of bashing from Europe and
the U.S. in part because they need Western protection from the
big bad bear. Once the U.S.S.R. no longer poses a significant
military threat to shipping lanes, the world is likely to find
itself dealing with an increasingly assertive, even obstreperous
Japan.

    The meltdown of Soviet communism will have disruptive
consequences in the Third World as well. For starters, there
should be a new designation, since there's no longer a Second
World. Whether Azerbaijan and the Central Asian republics remain
connected with Moscow or not, their Muslim populations will
almost certainly turn increasingly southward in their political
attentions, affiliations and machinations. That will make the
Middle East an even more interesting place.

    And then there's the effect on the U.S. For more than 40
years the U.S.S.R. was the Great Other, the polestar by which
the U.S. charted its course in the world. Now, with the Soviet
Union virtually out of business abroad and breaking up at home,
American foreign policy faces an identity crisis. It won't be as
spectacular as the one dominating the news these past two weeks,
but its outcome will be just as important.