East-West No More Mr. Tough Guy?

By Strobe Talbott/Washington

At muster points in besieged garrison towns around Afghanistan, sentries in camouflage uniforms guard mounds of duffel bags, stripped-down weapons and communications gear. The streets teem with jeeps, armored personnel carriers, trucks, tanks, half-tracks, command cars, vans, ambulances. The vehicles are the beasts of burden for a caravan of retreat and defeat that will begin this week to wend its way through the rugged passes of the Hindu Kush, north toward home along the Salang Highway, which stretches from Kabul to the Soviet border. The road was a "gift" from the U.S.S.R. to the people of Afghanistan in the 1960s. Western experts noted at the time that it would make an ideal invasion route. So it did in 1979, when the Kremlin decided to extend "fraternal assistance" to the beleaguered Afghan Communist regime. Soon the highway will prove useful once again, as the 115,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan, whom the Kremlin described nine long years ago as a "temporary contingent," begin heading home.

Their departure could mean the end of one of the longest, chilliest episodes in the cold war. It also offers the most dramatic evidence to date that Soviet foreign policy may be changing for the better. Certainly that is how General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev wants the move to be seen.

In Moscow next week Gorbachev is scheduled to hold his fourth summit meeting with Ronald Reagan. Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze were in Geneva last week making the final arrangements for the session. On the eve of the summit, Gorbachev is hoping that by cutting his losses in Afghanistan, he will win friends and influence governments around the globe. If he can allay concerns about Soviet intentions from the Pacific to the Caribbean, Gorbachev may persuade a mistrustful world to lower its guard and permit more maneuvering room for Soviet diplomacy. To that end, he wants to restore the atmosphere of detente that the invasion of Afghanistan did so much to destroy nearly a decade ago.

Hard-liners in the West were quick to denounce the invasion as a first step toward the seizure of the oil fields and warm-water ports of the Persian Gulf, ) and as part of a continuing overall Soviet design for the conquest of the world. More moderate experts, like Diplomat and Historian George Kennan, the father of the doctrine that the U.S. and its allies must "contain" Soviet expansionism around the globe, had another explanation. They believed that Leonid Brezhnev and the other Kremlin gerontocrats were seeking a buffer zone against Islamic ferment in Iran, much as Joseph Stalin had erected the Iron Curtain to protect the U.S.S.R. against its enemies in the West after World War II.

Whatever the motivation, Soviet expansionism was widely seen as a major threat to vital Western interests and world peace. Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, like Stalin's, would not feel entirely secure until all other nations felt entirely insecure. Predatory or paranoid, the old men in the Kremlin seemed determined to continue playing the "Great Game" much as Rudyard Kipling had described it a hundred years before, when Czarist Russia and the British Raj maneuvered for influence among the tribes of the Hindu Kush.

For a while, the Soviets seemed to be winning almost everywhere. From Kampuchea in Southeast Asia to Angola and Ethiopia in Africa to Nicaragua in Latin America, Kremlin-backed or Kremlin-installed regimes had an ominous look of permanence. After all, Soviet power, once entrenched beyond its own borders, had never allowed itself to be dislodged by local resistance. There was no reason to think Afghanistan would be different. Quite the contrary, tucked up against the soft underbelly of Soviet Central Asia, that benighted country seemed to have become virtually a 16th republic of the U.S.S.R.

The view from Red Square, however, was different. The Soviet army was bogged down in a no-win war against determined enemies who were fighting for their own land. The Communists' often savage tactics provoked protests around the world, increasing sympathy for the mujahedin. A popular American President had advanced a new, more assertive variant of containment, the so-called Reagan Doctrine of support for anti-Communist insurgents. Moreover, the war was an impediment to Soviet diplomacy. Wherever Moscow's emissaries went, especially in the Arab and Islamic worlds, the first question was "What about Afghanistan?"

Within a month after becoming General Secretary in 1985, Gorbachev set about to cauterize the wound. In the weeks ahead, Gorbachev and his comrades must be prepared for the spectacle of their abandoned Afghan quislings hanging for ) their lives from the undercarriages of Hind helicopters as they lift off from the Soviet embassy roof -- or hanging dead from the lampposts in Kabul.

But Gorbachev realizes that if there is pain in the pullout, there can also be gain. Even before the retreat began, the Soviet leader and his spokesmen were using it as Exhibit A in a campaign to convince international public opinion that the U.S.S.R. now has a more benign foreign policy. "Even the professional Russia-haters must now admit that things have changed, and they've changed for the better," says Georgi Arbatov, the Kremlin's best- known America watcher. "We are going to do something terrible to you -- we are going to deprive you of an enemy." Gorbachev would have the world believe he is ready to do with the cold war what he is starting to do with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan: he is declaring it over.

The watchwords for Gorbachev's brand of diplomacy are "new thinking," "mutual security" and "interdependence." What the Soviet Union needs, Gorbachev said not long ago, is a "modern foreign policy for the late 20th century." According to him, the Great Game is simply too dangerous to play by the old rules in the age of nuclear weapons; the objectives must be changed so that the superpowers no longer deal with each other on a zero-sum, I-win-you- lose basis: "Less security for the U.S. compared to the Soviet Union would not be in our interest, since it could lead to mistrust and produce instability."

But as Andrei Gromyko, the perennial sourpuss of Soviet diplomacy, used to say when reacting to peaceful rhetoric from the West, "One must distinguish between words and deeds." That advice has always applied particularly to the U.S.S.R. Soviet foreign policy has been marked by tactical retreats and no- more-Mr.-Tough-Guy public relations campaigns before. In 1919 Vladimir Lenin cautioned his Foreign Minister, Georgi Chicherin, who was preparing to address an international conference in Genoa, "Never mind the hard language." Lenin pursued conciliatory policies toward Poland and the then independent Baltic states. By the 1940s, those nations had all been brutally incorporated into the Soviet empire.

As a result, U.S. policymakers are skeptical as they look for further evidence -- an Exhibit B or C -- that the Soviet Union is changing its deeds as well as its words. To date, they see plenty of signs beyond Afghanistan that the Kremlin has adopted a slicker diplomacy. But the substance is still often flimsy and the objective is still competitive. Michael Armacost, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, has been conducting talks with Soviet officials on what he calls "super-regional" issues -- trouble spots like the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, which could ignite a clash between the superpowers. "We and the Soviets are necessary partners on some issues, like avoiding nuclear war, preventing local crises from becoming wider confrontations, and defusing regional conflicts," says Armacost. "But we're also geopolitical rivals. That hasn't changed. The Soviets will continue to try to erode the strategic advantages of the U.S. They will do so, however, in a more adroit and sophisticated manner than the old crowd."

The most obvious example is the Soviet Union's conduct of its all-important relationship with the U.S., especially in nuclear-arms control. Gromyko had a penchant for saying nyet to American proposals. The new crowd has mastered the politics of da. Gorbachev has spun out a dizzying array of initiatives, and he has agreed to U.S. proposals that Western negotiators thought the Soviets would never accept.

When, at the Washington summit in December, Gorbachev signed the treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles, he received more credit for accepting the zero option than Reagan got for having proposed it in 1981. Gorbachev achieved, as part of the deal, the long-standing Soviet aim of forcing the removal of all U.S. missiles from Europe. Congressional concerns about some details of that treaty led the Senate last week to postpone ratification, but in Geneva last Thursday, Secretary Shultz and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze seemed to have cleared up the remaining points of ambiguity. There is still deep suspicion in the U.S. that the Soviets are sharpies who outnegotiate Americans and then cheat on whatever agreement is reached.

In his new book, 1999, former President Richard Nixon warns, "Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's foreign policy has been more skillful and subtle than ever before. But it has been more aggressive, not less." The Soviets have not been aggressive in the use, or threatened use, of military force -- at least, not so far -- but rather in the pursuit of influence and propaganda points at the expense of the U.S. "The Soviets are more attentive to the diplomatic methods of solving a problem, as opposed merely to relying on blatant displays of raw muscle," says Armacost. "But they're also using - diplomacy in pursuit of their traditional goal of hemming us in where necessary, rolling us back where possible."

In the Middle East Gorbachev has stepped up efforts to convene an international conference to promote an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, with the Soviet Union and the U.S. as co-chairmen. In the Persian Gulf Gorbachev is urging a greater role for the U.N. -- and, correspondingly, a lesser one for the U.S. Navy. In Southeast Asia he is peddling a plan for a so-called zone of peace that would make it harder for the American Seventh Fleet to operate in the area.

These are all examples, says Richard Solomon, who holds Kennan's old post as director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, of how the Soviets are practicing their own version of counter-containment. "They are trying to engage us in collective procedures, international organizations and multilateral arrangements that will constrain our ability to act on our own," says Solomon. A deputy to George Shultz calls this strategy the "hug of the bear."

The good news for the West is that the bear may be relying less on fangs and claws to get his way. Historically, the Soviet Union has been in the business of franchising revolution. That was the aim of the Comintern of the 1930s and '40s and of the Moscow-backed "wars of national liberation" under Nikita Khrushchev in the '50s and '60s. In recent years, however, the Soviets have become a status quo power in parts of the world where they were once bent on stirring up trouble. Now Soviet client states and puppet governments are themselves in trouble.

In Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Kampuchea, leftist leaderships in the capitals are battling nationalist resistance movements in the hills and the jungles. Supporting those regimes is expensive enough for Moscow even without the challenge of local anti-Communist insurgencies. And with Gorbachev focusing on whipping the Soviet Union's shaky economy into shape, Moscow is not in a generous mood. Were it not for its size and military strength, the U.S.S.R. itself would qualify as a Third World country. Not surprisingly, its clones around the real Third World are basket cases. Last year Cuba and Viet Nam each cost Moscow more than $3 billion, while Soviet subsidies to the governments of Angola, Ethiopia and Nicaragua ran at about $1 billion each. In all instances, 70% to 90% of the total was for military aid.

Gorbachev has put the leaders of all those countries on notice that as the Soviet Union turns its attention and resources to perestroika at home, it is not going to throw good money after bad abroad. Pro-Soviet regimes will thus be forced to do some restructuring of their own. To some extent that means demilitarizing their economies and therefore their foreign policies. This has already caused strains with Cuban Leader Fidel Castro, who managed to miss two of Gorbachev's speeches during the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union in Moscow last November.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin is trying to acquire influence among countries whose enemies the U.S.S.R. has traditionally supported. In the Middle East there are signs that the Soviets may finally be willing to put more pressure on the Arabs. Gorbachev has publicly urged Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization to recognize the existence and "legitimate rights" of Israel. A Soviet consular delegation is now in Jerusalem, sent officially to discuss Russian Orthodox Church property in Israel but also as a possible prelude to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, which Moscow broke off during the Six-Day War in 1967.

In the gulf, Moscow is trying to keep lines open to Iran -- in hopes, no doubt, that the U.S.S.R. will fare better with a post-Khomeini leadership than it has with the Ayatullah himself. But the Soviets are also cultivating better ties with the conservative and moderate Arab states of the region.

On the Korean peninsula, Moscow remains the Communist North's principal supplier of military aid, including modern MiG-23 warplanes, but the Soviets want to cultivate trade and other ties with South Korea. That is largely why Soviet Olympians will be going for the gold in Seoul this summer rather than staying home. As a result, the U.S.S.R. has an incentive to use its leverage to prevent an attempt by the North to disrupt the Games.

The Kremlin would like to improve relations with China as well as with the six member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Singapore, Brunei, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia). Moscow has appointed one of its ablest younger diplomats, Oleg Sokolov, as ambassador to Manila. Sokolov has been doing his best to fan opposition to the strategically crucial U.S. naval and air bases in the Philippines. But Soviet diplomacy will not fare well in Beijing and with ASEAN so long as the Kremlin's ally in the area, Viet Nam, is hunkered down in Kampuchea and intimidating other neighbors with its bloated military power. So the Kremlin's Deputy Foreign Minister for Asia, Igor Rogochev, another polished, new-breed diplomat, has been putting out quiet but unmistakable signals to officials in Hanoi that the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan might provide a "model" for the Vietnamese to follow in Kampuchea.

In all these cases, the Soviets want to play both sides against the middle -- and against the U.S. if they can get away with it -- but apparently not at the cost of greatly increased regional tensions, much less global ones. Armacost recalls that George Kennan, in formulating the concept of containment four decades ago, predicted that over time the Soviet Union would pay more attention to reform at home and consolidation of its position abroad than to expansionism and adventurism. Concludes Armacost: "To some degree, that's what's at work here." And if that is the case, then Gorbachev represents not just a challenge but also a welcome and promising change for the U.S. and its friends around the world.