TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/012389/01238900.035

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 69 lines

WORLD, Page 33

America Abroad

Credit Where Credit Is Due

By Strobe Talbott


    In Luanda last week Sergeant Vivian Hernandez Cabellero, a
19-year-old member of an antiaircraft battery, said goodbye to her
companeros. She was part of the first contingent of Cuban soldiers
to be withdrawn from Angola as part of a negotiated settlement to
13 years of fighting. In Kabul 500 Soviet soldiers, laden with
equipment, lined up before military transport planes to fly home.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin's Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, and
his deputy, Yuli Vorontsov, met separately with the Afghan regime
and the leaders of the mujahedin to discuss what amounted to the
terms of the U.S.S.R.'s defeat.

    The global boom in peacemaking that brightened 1988 is
continuing into the new year -- and into the new American
Administration. The cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war is holding, and
there is progress toward an end to the Vietnamese occupation of
Kampuchea. But in the background of all the promising jaw-jaw going
on at conference tables around the world is the muted but
discordant sound of the superpowers bickering over which one
deserves more credit for peace breaking out.

    U.S. foreign policy officials see the current diplomatic
progress as a vindication of the Reagan Doctrine, under which the
U.S. has supplied arms to anti-Marxist "freedom fighters" around
the world. "A common thread was the emergence of a balance of
forces that has convinced the parties involved that a military
solution isn't possible," says Michael Armacost, Under Secretary
of State for Political Affairs. "It was our policy to help preserve
that balance, making a political solution more likely."

    Meanwhile, the Soviet Union has become more willing to accept
such solutions, including ones that require sending Sergeant
Hernandez home from Angola. Secretary of State George Shultz last
week commented privately to Western diplomats that the Soviets have
played what he called "a remarkably constructive role" in southern
Africa and elsewhere.

    But Shultz and his colleagues quickly add that the improvement
in Soviet behavior is in response to American firmness. State
Department officials dismiss talk about Soviet "initiatives" or a
Soviet "peace offensive," since those phrases suggest that Mikhail
Gorbachev is leading the way toward a more tranquil future.
"Insofar as Gorbachev is now more peacefully inclined," says
Richard Solomon, director of the State Department's Policy Planning
Staff, "it's because he's butting his head up against new
realities, notably including the Reagan Doctrine."

    If the Soviets are not about to recognize the success of any
American doctrine, they do admit, at least tacitly, the failure of
any number of doctrines from their own Communist past: Karl Marx's
world revolution, Vladimir Lenin's "proletarian internationalism,"
Nikita Khrushchev's sponsorship of "wars of national liberation"
and Leonid Brezhnev's assertion of the right to use force to
protect the "gains" of socialism. In an interview with TIME,
Anatoli Gromyko, director of Moscow's Institute of African Studies
admits, "We should not export revolution. The idea that a socialist
revolution would spread around the world was a romantic view. The
change in our thinking came because we were engulfed in our own
problems."

    That statement is all the more striking coming from the son of
Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Foreign Minister for 28 years and President
for three until Gorbachev ousted him last September. Grim Grom,
now merely a member of the Central Committee, is rarely heard from
these days. And despite his lighter work load, he looks as dour as
ever, perhaps in part because of the way the younger generation is
talking -- and acting.