America Abroad

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 She was part of the first contingent of Cuban soldiers to be withdrawn from Angola as part of a negotiated settlement to 13 years of fighting.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.