America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

The phantasmagoria in the U.S.S.R. has overloaded the circuits. For days on end, there was little room on the front pages for other news, and barely room in our minds for other astonishments and anxieties.

Yet the Big Story is even bigger than it seems. The old order failed in the Soviet Union, and in Eastern Europe two years ago, for reasons that apply everywhere Marxism-Leninism still holds sway. What that system does best is protect the power and privileges of its elite. The means to that end are terror and bureaucracy. The result is chronic inefficiency, an unhappy, unproductive citizenry, and a country severely hobbled as it tries to participate, to say nothing of compete, in the life of the planet. Therefore, despite their internationalist pretensions, Marxist states end up with fortress economies under self-imposed siege. But in an interdependent world well into the Third Industrial Revolution, as the latest explosive advances in technology and communications are sometimes known, autarky and isolation are no longer an option. Just ask the Albanians.

What is happening in the U.S.S.R. comes as a shock partly because the Russians had a reputation, even among themselves, for being passive, obedient, politically "uncultured." A similar image, tinged with racism, persists about the mysterious East: hordes of little yellow people waving little red books. But the miraculous spring of 1989 in China was as much a refutation of the authoritarian stereotype as was the second Russian Revolution two weeks ago. China's democracy movement yielded to the tanks on Tiananmen Square, but many of its leaders -- and, more important, its followers -- will be back. Any form of government that can survive only as long as the authorities are willing to slaughter citizens in the streets can't last forever, or even, these days, for long. For that reason the other Asian politburos, in North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, are also doomed.

And what about Cuba? El Fidelissimo is just 90 miles from exiles who are stepping up their plans for a triumphal return from Florida, while he's 12,500 miles from the nearest country whose ruler still calls him Comrade. The only suspense is whether his political demise will precede his physical one (he is 64 and has smoked too much).

The task for the West is to coax nations with die-hard leftist tyrannies into as much engagement as possible with the outside world. That will accelerate the inevitable transformation of their societies and perhaps even reduce the danger of bloodshed. The more external ties a country has when the internal pressure finally blows, the better the chance that its regime will be dislodged unceremoniously but safely, like the Dzerzhinsky statue in Moscow, rather than come crashing down, killing many of its subjects.

The end of communist history will also bring plenty of complications for the winners of the cold war.

The Iron Curtain made European integration a relatively simple matter, at least in concept: the rich democracies of the West were eligible for / membership in this new club, the European Community; the poor dictatorships to the east were not. But now the Community's neighbors -- newly liberated, thoroughly European and desperately needy -- will request, and deserve, some kind of special association.

NATO was conceived to deter armored columns from the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany (remember East Germany?) from rolling to the English Channel. The alliance has survived the victory of the West and the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact. But unless it can help defuse disasters like the one now destroying Yugoslavia and threatening peace throughout southern Europe, NATO too will end in retirement. Thinking about what will take its place has barely begun.

Japan's relations with the other industrialized democracies, already strained, are likely to become more so. As the Japanese see it, they have put up with a lot of bashing from Europe and the U.S. in part because they need Western protection from the big bad bear. Once the U.S.S.R. no longer poses a significant military threat to shipping lanes, the world is likely to find itself dealing with an increasingly assertive, even obstreperous Japan.

The meltdown of Soviet communism will have disruptive consequences in the Third World as well. For starters, there should be a new designation, since there's no longer a Second World. Whether Azerbaijan and the Central Asian republics remain connected with Moscow or not, their Muslim populations will almost certainly turn increasingly southward in their political attentions, affiliations and machinations. That will make the Middle East an even more interesting place.

And then there's the effect on the U.S. For more than 40 years the U.S.S.R. was the Great Other, the polestar by which the U.S. charted its course in the world. Now, with the Soviet Union virtually out of business abroad and breaking up at home, American foreign policy faces an identity crisis. It won't be as spectacular as the one dominating the news these past two weeks, but its outcome will be just as important.