TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/042489/04248900.026

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 64 lines

WORLD, Page 36

America Abroad

What's Wrong with Yalta II

By Strobe Talbott


    Mikhail Gorbachev has a nightmare, and it keeps coming true.
In various corners of the world's last empire, demonstrators wave
placards, some of them bearing Gorbachev's portrait; they hurl
slogans, including some he made famous; they taunt troops, all of
whom he commands from Moscow. Shouts lead to shots, and a riot
becomes an enactment of Gorbachev's greatest dilemma: the
relaxation of control can also mean disorder, which in turn can
provoke repression, reversing reform and jeopardizing the political
survival of the reformer. Last week it happened in Tbilisi. Next
week, or next month, it could happen outside the borders of the
U.S.S.R. but still within the empire, in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague,
East Berlin. Western statesmen have their own dilemma. A crisis in
the East, especially if it seemed to be fanned by the West, could
play into the hands of Gorbachev's conservative opponents and
trigger a crackdown.

    Henry Kissinger has been trying to persuade the Bush
Administration to work out a new agreement with the Kremlin. The
Soviet Union would commit itself to tolerate political and economic
pluralism in Eastern Europe in exchange for Western guarantees of
Soviet military security. The notion seems to be that Moscow might
be more likely to allow Poland, Hungary and other countries to
evolve toward democracy and free markets, perhaps even to associate
themselves with the European Community, if NATO promises not to
lure them out of the Warsaw Pact and perhaps desists from covert
intelligence operations behind the Iron Curtain.

    Critics have stigmatized the proposed deal as "Yalta II," a
repetition of Franklin Roosevelt's unwitting sellout of Eastern
Europe in 1945. The State Department bureaucracy is unanimously
(though anonymously) convinced that a superpower negotiation on the
fate of Europe would offend the Europeans. Last month James Baker
publicly floated the idea, without quite endorsing it. Sure enough,
transatlantic cables poured into Foggy Bottom with protests and
warnings. The British Ambassador in Washington sought, and
received, assurances that the Administration was not embracing the
plan. Last week Kissinger insisted that his purpose is not to redo
Yalta but to undo it. His proposal, he says, is to provide Eastern
Europe with the political breathing room to reintegrate with the
West while depriving the Kremlin of a military pretext to
interfere.

    The furor is a curious sort of testament to Kissinger. Twelve
years out of office, he still commands immense authority,
especially in the absence of fresh ideas from official Washington;
the Bush Administration's long-awaited "national-security review"
of policy toward the U.S.S.R. has turned out to be a prescription
for business as usual. But the Kissinger plan is fundamentally
flawed. It seeks from the men in the Kremlin something they are
already willing to grant -- latitude for diversity and
liberalization in the "fraternal" countries of Eastern Europe. And
it offers in return assurances that have little to do with the
Soviets' real fears -- political deterioration inside the bloc, not
a military threat from outside. Moreover, the forces that stand
ready to exploit the trouble are also internal, not external; they
are domestic hard-liners, not CIA or Pentagon mischief-makers.

    For many of Gorbachev's comrades, the stuff of nightmares comes
not from NATO, which Kissinger would restrain, but from the very
process of liberalization that the former Secretary of State seeks
to protect.