TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/120489/12048900.037

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The Road to Malta

A year ago, Bush distrusted Gorbachev. Now he wonders how to

help him succeed

By Strobe Talbott


    This week's meeting in the Med will bring together the most
daring of all Soviet leaders and one of the most cautious American
Presidents. Mikhail Gorbachev frequently, and proudly, describes
his approach to the world as "radical," while George Bush's
favorite word when he talks about foreign policy is prudent. Yet
Bush has come a long way in his thinking about the Soviet Union.
In a matter of months, his Administration has gone from viewing
Gorbachev as a slickly disguised variant of the old red menace to
a potential partner in creating a new world order.

    This evolution of American official attitudes has been subtle
and uneven. It has been couched in caveats, often obscured by
ambivalence and articulated, sometimes inarticulately, by a Chief
Executive who has no flair for geopolitical grand rhetoric and has
a tendency to step on his applause lines. Still, the change on the
American side, if it continues, could turn out to be as important
as Gorbachev's abandonment of the Leninist plan for winning the
zero-sum game of history. The American equivalent of what the
Soviets call new political thinking is all the more significant
coming from the President of Prudence.

    George Bush did not get where he is today by taking chances or
questioning conventional wisdom, particularly on the No. 1
life-or-death issue of U.S. foreign policy. As a Congressman,
diplomat, Republican Party chairman, Vice President and
presidential candidate, he was always the sort of politician who
fretted about the consequences of a misstep. For Bush, therefore,
slow is better than fast and standing pat is often the safest
posture. Once he replaced Ronald Reagan, Bush's instinct was to
apply the brakes to the juggernaut of improved U.S.-Soviet
relations, to take the turns very cautiously and perhaps even to
pull over on the side of the road and study the map for a while.

    The Bush Administration was made up of battle-scarred veterans
with long memories. They were acutely aware that every President
since the end of World War II had learned the hard way the domestic
political perils of underestimating the Soviet capacity for
producing unpleasant surprises and overestimating the possibility
of profound, permanent improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations.

    Even Franklin Roosevelt was posthumously excoriated for "giving
away" Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin at Yalta (rhymes with Malta).
Harry Truman stood up to Stalin at Potsdam and hung tough over
Iran, Berlin and Korea, but he still ended up being pilloried by
a couple of junior Senators named Joseph McCarthy and Richard
Nixon. It was Nixon who called Truman's Secretary of State the dean
of the "cowardly college of Communist containment." Two decades
later, the New Nixon's policy of detente ran into a buzz saw of
bipartisan anti-Soviet opposition. When a Watergate-wounded Nixon
went to see Leonid Brezhnev in the Crimea in 1974, he refused to
visit Yalta nearby, lest anyone accuse him of another giveaway. It
was all for naught: the traveling White House press gleefully filed
stories with the dread dateline.

    When Jimmy Carter signed a SALT II treaty in June 1979, he gave
Brezhnev a big kiss on the cheek. The treaty was never ratified,
largely because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan six months
later. In 1980 Republicans used photographs of the signing ceremony
with the message to voters YOU TOO CAN KISS OFF JIMMY CARTER.

    The Bush Administration includes a number of senior officials
of the Nixon-Gerald Ford years, notably Secretary of State James
Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who were
chastened by their earlier experience. They returned to office
determined not to repeat the mistake of overselling detente, by
that or any other name.

    Also, just below the surface of the new Administration was a
powerful if muted strain of criticism of the way the U.S. had
conducted relations with the U.S.S.R. in the last years of the
Reagan presidency. The image of Reagan strolling arm in arm through
Red Square with Gorbachev during their 1988 meeting in Moscow had
a connotation among many Bush people almost as invidious as that
of Carter kissing Brezhnev. George Shultz received much of the
blame for letting Reagan succumb to Gorbomania. Partly for that
reason Shultz was given close to a bum's rush right after Bush's
Inauguration.

    The new Administration was uncomfortable with the Reagan legacy
in another respect. In the critical and perennially controversial
field of arms control, Reagan had turned out to be every bit as
radical as, and considerably more romantic than, Gorbachev. At
their own Malta-like non-summit on neutral ground, at Reykjavik in
1986, Reagan and Gorbachev arced off into the stratosphere of
blue-sky nuclear disarmament. They came so close to agreeing on a
timetable for the elimination of ballistic missiles that American
allies and generals were horrified. So was Reagan's relentlessly
prudent Vice President. In Bush's mind and those of his advisers,
Reykjavik became a synonym for the risks of free-form encounters
between U.S. and Soviet leaders.

    The Bush Administration came into office determined to strike
what a number of its key officials hoped would be perceived as a
tougher, more sober, more traditional posture toward the Soviet
Union. Much as they dislike the label, they are, on the whole,
moderate Republicans. Scowcroft once even called himself a
Rockefeller Republican. Not too long ago, such political animals
had been considered an extinct, or at least seriously endangered,
species. Even after winning a presidential election, the Bush
people felt vulnerable to the vigilant, suspicious, presumably
powerful right. Hence they were all the more eager to be seen
squinting skeptically at Gorbachev, especially in public, and thus
to be staking out a position to the right of the most popular,
successful conservative President in modern times. In September
Bush reiterated that caution, saying, "I'm like the guy from
Missouri."

    The first few months of the "show-me" Administration were
dominated by three themes:

    The approved questions of the hour were whether Gorbachev was
for real, and whether the success of his program was good for the
free world. Those were not rhetorical questions; the answer, on
both counts, might turn out to be no.

    If, however, the answer turned out to be yes -- and the Soviets
were indeed changing for the better -- then the onus was on them
to keep changing and to keep making concessions. The U.S. was under
no obligation to alter its own behavior or thinking in any way, or
to adjust its negotiating positions. After all, it was the
U.S.S.R., not the U.S., whose political and economic system was
hopelessly sick and whose international behavior had made it a
pariah.

    The American approach must not be, in any sense, pegged to the
fortunes of a particular Soviet leader. The U.S. must not have what
one Bush adviser disdained as a "Gorbo-centric" policy. Rather, it
should have an approach that would work equally well for a Soviet
Union led, say, by Yegor Ligachev, then seen as Gorbachev's
principal hard-line opponent.

    The surest way to lose influence in the Bush Administration was
to wonder out loud whether the U.S. should be "helping" Gorbachev.
After all, even if he turned out to be for real, he could die any
day. Or he might be overthrown and replaced by retrogrades who
would have at their disposal the military wherewithal to engage
once again in old thinking and old behavior. Therefore the best
posture for the U.S. -- the policy of greatest prudence -- was to
wait and see, to test, to keep American powder dry and to be ready
for Ligachev.

    The impression of a stand-pat, waiting-for-Yegor policy was
reinforced by a presidential "national security policy review."
The exercise dragged on for some six months, yielding hundreds of
pages of classified bureaucratese and a few leaks in newspaper
stories about how the Administration was going to be guided by the
underwhelming goal of "status quo plus."

    Bush gave a series of five speeches on U.S.-Soviet relations
in the spring, but they generally played to yawns and even a few
catcalls. Actually, the speeches were better than their reviews.
They contained some important watchwords: the U.S., said the
President, must move "beyond containment" and seek the "integration
of the Soviet Union into the community of nations."New slogans can
be the beginning of a new policy, especially if they are repeated
often enough at the highest level.

    Meanwhile, Bush was saying something else over and over again:
"I want to do something important, but I don't want to do anything
dumb." He said it in closed-door meetings with his staff, in
brainstorming sessions with academic experts and in nationally
televised interviews. By "something important," he meant a policy
that would capitalize on the opportunities presented by Gorbachev's
reforms. It was less clear what the President had in mind when he
vowed not to do "anything dumb." For several months the implied
definition seemed to be anything that would get him in serious
trouble with the right wing.

    However, by late spring an important shift took place: Bush
began to worry more about doing too little than about doing too
much. He seemed to be calculating the political price he would pay
on both sides of the Atlantic if he appeared not to be moving fast
enough to meet Gorbachev halfway.

    Secretary of State Baker played a key part in nudging the
President toward what both men came to call "engagement" with
Gorbachev. Baker made frequent trips to Capitol Hill as well as
Western Europe. In both places he found impatience building: When
was the Administration going to stop reviewing policy and start
really making it again, especially in arms control? Congress was
facing the fiscal and political imperatives of the
Gramm-Rudman-Gorbachev era. The federal budget deficit was
squeezing the resources available for defense spending, and the
kinder, gentler Soviet Union made the arms buildup that Bush
inherited from Reagan seem increasingly like wretched excess.

    Meanwhile, the Americans' most important allies in Europe, the
West Germans, were restless about American tactical nuclear
missiles stationed on their territory. The U.S. wanted to
"modernize" those weapons -- a euphemism for replacing old ones
with newer ones that had a much longer range -- while the West
Germans wanted to negotiate away the old ones. Unless Bush could
defuse that controversy with a new arms-control initiative, his
transatlantic debut at the NATO summit in late May would be a
debacle. That prospect concentrated the minds of the Administration
on the issue of conventional forces in Europe, the subject of
East-West talks that had been limping along for some 15 years.
Gorbachev had already breathed new life into those talks by
announcing a unilateral cut in the manpower and armor of the Warsaw
Pact, but the Western allies were reluctant to match his dramatic
gestures.

    Then, at the NATO meeting in Brussels, Bush proposed a mutual
drawdown in the number of soldiers that both superpowers have
stationed in Europe. The proposal was much more than just a highly
successful p.r. gambit. Rather than merely fine-tuning the military
balance of terror, which had been the purpose and effect of earlier
arms-control arrangements, the CFE initiative was intended to be
the first step in a process that might lead to fundamental changes
in the international political order.

    The logic and strategy behind Bush's CFE proposal were that
Gorbachev might, over time, be willing to reduce drastically,
perhaps someday to eliminate, Soviet garrisons in Eastern Europe.
Previous American arms-control proposals had been concerned with
diminishing the threat that the Warsaw Pact might invade the NATO
nations. By contrast, the CFE initiative was designed to lead to
the scaling back of the Soviet military presence in Eastern Europe
-- the instrument of Soviet domination there and the root cause of
the division of Europe as a whole.

    It was the first arms-control proposal to be at least as
concerned with ending the cold war as with preventing World War
III. In that sense, the CFE proposal anticipated the breaching of
the Berlin Wall, the Pentagon's proposed cuts in U.S. defense
programs and the other dramatic events of the past month. It was
also, at its core, Gorbo-centric: it represented an attempt to
respond to the unprecedented willingness of the man now in charge
in the Kremlin to address fundamental, previously out-of-bounds
issues -- not just of how to avert war, but of how to restructure
the peace.

    In July Bush visited Europe for the second time as President.
Solidarity leaders in Poland and reformers in Hungary persuaded him
that their survival depended on Gorbachev's. Bush was deeply
impressed by the implications for U.S. policy: the West had an
interest in the blossoming of independence and democracy in Eastern
Europe; the advocates of change there had an interest in the
success of perestroika; therefore the U.S., too, had an interest
in seeing perestroika succeed. Bush's longstanding aversion to the
idea of an early, informal meeting with Gorbachev dissolved almost
overnight. Aboard Air Force One en route back to Washington, he
wrote a personal letter to the Soviet leader proposing this week's
get-together.

    Shortly afterward, Bush's aides, particularly Baker, began
talking -- first privately, then publicly -- about "helping"
Gorbachev. They had heard the H word from their boss, so the taboo
was lifted.

    Yet throughout this period, there were constant, escalating
reminders of how much trouble Gorbachev faced at home: ethnic
unrest, secessionism, economic deterioration, labor strife, an
emboldened political opposition. When Eduard Shevardnadze visited
the U.S. in September, he seemed preoccupied with domestic issues,
especially the Soviet Union's problem with nationalities. A
surprising and revealing addition to his entourage was Nikolai
Shmelev, an economist who specializes in dire predictions and
drastic prescriptions for the Soviet economy.

    Gorbachev's mounting troubles have had an ambiguous effect on
the thinking of the Bush Administration. The set of questions that
drives U.S. policy has gone from "Is Gorbachev for real? And is he
good for us?" to "Can he make it? And can we help him?" There is
far more inclination in Washington today than even a few months ago
to accept the best-case interpretation of what Gorbachev wants,
what he represents, and what the U.S.S.R. would look like if he
were to succeed in his program. At the same time, however, there
is also more objective reason than before to credit the worst-case
interpretation of what will happen to him.

    Thus, in one curious and ironic respect, the Administration is
back to square one. It has traded its skepticism about Gorbachev's
intentions for pessimism about his chances. That leaves the
Administration, at least in its own eyes, still stuck with a
dilemma about what prudent American policy should be. The strong
inclination remains to wait and see, to test, to keep its powder
dry and to be ready for someone other than Mikhail Sergeyevich.

    But in another, immensely important respect, the two men
meeting in the Med this week have already transformed the
superpower relationship: for the first time since the beginning of
the cold war over 40 years ago, the American and Soviet leaderships
have a shared interest not just in averting Armageddon but also in
achieving the success of important components of Soviet internal
and foreign policy. That is already a breakthrough that makes this
a landmark year and augurs well for the future.