America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

The Bush Administration may be forgiven for reacting slowly to the phantasmagoria of 1989. No one saw the collapse of communism coming, and no one could be sure that it would continue, much less spread. The next stage, however, is more predictable: sooner or later what started in the Soviet Union will engulf Moscow's clones in the Third World. This time there will be no excuse for the U.S. to be caught flat-footed.

Yet the Bush Administration is not even thinking about the matter in a serious, coordinated way. Neither the National Security Council, which is the President's personal think tank, nor the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, which is supposed to look over the horizon of foreign policy, is engaged in a systematic review of U.S. strategy for dealing with Marxist- Leninist regimes outside Europe. Instead, the regional experts of the + bureaucracy are nibbling away at their own pieces of what should be seen, and addressed, as a global challenge -- and opportunity.

One way for the U.S. to signal a comprehensive approach would be to maintain full-fledged embassies in four far-flung corners of the Third World that have long been color-coded red on American maps: Afghanistan, Angola, Cuba and Viet Nam. By snubbing those governments in various ways, Washington is doing more than just underscoring its disapproval of their leaders; it is also stubbornly reaffirming the implication that they are minions of Moscow.

That bedrock contention of the cold war simply does not stand up these days. Insofar as the Kremlin still calls the tune, it is sounding retreat. In the past year the U.S.S.R. has removed its army from Afghanistan, prevailed on Viet Nam to withdraw its troops from Cambodia, and helped begin extricating the Cubans from Angola.

Some puppets, having had their strings loosened or even cut, can be expected, like Pinocchio, to misbehave as badly as ever. Fidel Castro, for example, is almost as much at odds with Moscow as he is with Washington. But that is no argument for a diplomatic boycott. Quite the contrary. The U.S. would have more clout with such miscreants if it dealt with them directly, through American ambassadors who could remonstrate with local officials and gather intelligence.

In other contexts, conservative American Presidents have argued that maintaining diplomatic relations need not constitute an endorsement of the powers that be or the political system of a country. The Reagan Administration justified its intensive diplomacy toward racist South Africa as "constructive engagement." Last year George Bush sent two high-level envoys to toast a Chinese leadership that had just slaughtered thousands of its citizens. The President explained that preserving U.S. leverage over future developments in that largest of Third World communist nations meant avoiding the temptation to "isolate" its government. Bush was properly criticized not for the principle he was enunciating but for the gratuitous, maladroit way he applied it. Simply keeping his ambassador in Beijing should have sufficed.

By the same token, Bush could send ambassadors extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Kabul, Luanda, Havana and Hanoi to engage the leaders there constructively rather than treating them like avatars of Moscowcentric world communism, a phenomenon that no longer exists. For the U.S. to stop & withholding or hedging recognition of those regimes would be a big step toward recognizing how much the world is changing.