America Abroad

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.