Campaign Issues

By Strobe Talbott

This is the third in a series of weekly essays analyzing the issues that the candidates are, or should be, discussing.

For more than four decades, the most important foreign policy challenge facing any President has been managing relations with the other superpower. The Soviet Union is the only state that can threaten America's existence; it is the principal U.S. rival for influence around the world; and its totalitarian political system is anathema to American values.

Those facts of international life remain, but today they do not seem quite the immutable laws of nature they did four years ago, when Americans last chose a President. Since then, the Soviet Union has acquired a stunningly new and different leadership of its own. Mikhail Gorbachev is experimenting with ideas that could lead to reforms in the internal regime and improvements in the external behavior of the U.S.S.R. The potential for profound change in the nature of the Soviet challenge demands a thorough, imaginative rethinking of the American response.

With George Bush and Michael Dukakis each trying to establish his toughness, the question of how to cope with the other superpower has too often been reduced to its military dimension. Last week they were back at it, carping over the relative merits of the Stealth bomber and the MX. Bush reiterated his charge that Dukakis was soft on defense. In response, Dukakis doffed a helmet and rode in an M1 tank. In a speech in Chicago, Dukakis conveyed a conservative caution about Gorbachev's reforms and said the U.S. should be prepared to use economic incentives to induce less Soviet repression and international mischief making.

Before Nov. 8 the voters should have a clearer idea of what a Bush or a Dukakis doctrine would be for dealing with the Soviet challenge in the Gorbachev era.

The next President will inherit an accretion of earlier guiding principles named after his various predecessors. Joseph Stalin's probes provoked the Truman Doctrine: "It must be the policy of the U.S. to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." The U.S. set about, through a combination of diplomacy, economic assistance and military alliances, to create an international environment that would "contain" the Soviet empire within its own boundaries, forcing the Marxist-Leninist-Stali nist system to stew in its own poisonous juices. The author of that strategy, George Kennan, believed Soviet Communism "bears within it the seeds of its own decay." Containment, he wrote in 1947, could eventually lead to "the gradual mellowing of Soviet power." But until then, he stressed, "there can be no appeal to common purposes."

In the years that followed, the Soviets continued to push, and the U.S. looked for ways to exert counterpressure. The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 was a vow to use American military force against Communist aggression in the Middle East. After Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba, U.S. policymakers dusted off the 136-year-old Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. (The original version, appropriately, had been occasioned in part by concern over czarist claims on territory along the Pacific coast.)

John F. Kennedy's promise in his Inaugural Address to "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty" was translated into policy as the Viet Nam War -- an unambiguous and, as it turned out, disastrous exercise in containment. Under the Nixon Doctrine of 1969, the U.S. deputized friendly potentates to defend Western interests. The star example, alas, was the Shah of Iran. In that case, as in others, this latest form of containment led American policymakers to rely excessively on the dubious principle that the enemies of our enemies would make good enforcers of the Pax Americana.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the response was the Carter Doctrine -- a threat to oppose, with U.S. troops, Soviet encroachments on the Persian Gulf. Carter's successor had a better idea: he would provide arms to guerrillas battling pro-Soviet regimes. "Support for freedom fighters is self-defense," the President declared in his 1985 State of the Union address. The Reagan Doctrine was born.

Two months later Gorbachev came to power. The most significant act of his tenure has been his decision to pull the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. To hear some enthusiasts for the Reagan Doctrine tell it, Gorbachev was merely yielding to vigorous and effective containment: the U.S. gave Stinger missiles to the Afghan freedom fighters, enabling them to blow enough Soviet helicopters out of the sky for the pragmatic new man in the Kremlin to order a tactical retreat.

However, in the broader context of what is happening elsewhere in the world as well as inside the U.S.S.R., the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan may turn out to be part of something much more welcome. It may mark the beginning of the end of Soviet imperialist outreach. And it may have come about not just because of American counterpressure but also because of ferment within the Soviet power structure itself. In short, Kennan's original prediction of the eventual "mellowing" of Soviet power may finally be coming true.

Underlying the U.S.-Soviet rivalry is an ideological dispute over how a government should treat its citizens. On that critical point, Gorbachev is tacitly conceding a great deal. If he presses his campaign for economic and managerial decentralization, sooner or later some degree of political decentralization must follow.

Thus, according to Kennan's original criteria, there perhaps can, finally, be an "appeal to common purposes" in Soviet-American relations beyond the elemental one of mutual survival. Until now, avoiding nuclear war has been the only common purpose on which the superpowers could continually agree. That is why arms control has been such a central element in superpower relations. Attempts to reconcile the deeper political disputes over the relationship between the individual and the state -- or between the Soviet state and the rest of the world -- have always failed. For example, in 1972 the superpowers signed a "code of conduct" in Moscow that included a commitment by each side not to "obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other." Leonid Brezhnev & Co. made a mockery of that agreement by pouring Cuban proxies into Angola and military advisers into Ethiopia. The Soviet Union has traditionally defined its own security to the detriment of everyone else's. The men in the Kremlin demonstrated over and over that they would not feel entirely secure until everyone else in the world felt entirely insecure.

Gorbachev, by contrast, says that no nation can be secure if its neighbors -- and principal rival -- feel insecure. He calls this "new thinking," and with good reason. It is another major concession. It is an admission that the expansionist policies of his predecessors were an expensive failure.

Gorbachev has already accompanied the reassuring words of "new thinking" and "mutual security" with deeds, not only in Afghanistan but also in Southeast Asia, where Moscow is using its influence with Hanoi to initiate . talks that may end the eleven-year Vietnamese occupation of Kampuchea.

In a speech last week Gorbachev offered to give up some Soviet military facilities in Viet Nam if the U.S. pulls its own naval and air bases out of the Philippines. In and of itself, that trade would lopsidedly favor the U.S.S.R. and is therefore unacceptable. But as a general proposition, the next President should take advantage of Gorbachev's professed -- and already partially demonstrated -- willingness to use diplomacy and political maneuver, rather than the threat of force, to advance Soviet interests. Unlike 1972, when the Soviets' expansionist deeds contradicted their accommodationist words, the next few years -- and perhaps the next summit -- may offer an opportunity to formulate a meaningful, sustainable code of conduct.

The essence of such an agreement would be for the U.S. to de-emphasize containment as a theme in its policy insofar as the Soviets are willing to demilitarize their own international behavior. What that would mean in practice would vary from one part of the world to another. In Europe -- the original front line of the cold war and still the most important potential "regional conflict" -- there should be negotiation that could eventually lead to drastic cutbacks in NATO and the Warsaw Pact in exchange for genuine self-determination for Eastern Europe.

Gorbachev has signaled greater tolerance for diversity in the "fraternal countries" of Eastern Europe. They, more than the Soviet Union itself, should be recipients of aid, trade and credits from the industrialized democracies led by the U.S. The goal of such a policy would be to help Eastern Europe develop more efficient, productive, market-oriented economies. Not only might political liberalization go hand in hand with economic decentralization, but greater prosperity may be an antidote to the kind of crises that have all too often brought in Soviet tanks in the past. Gorbachev has his own reasons for wanting to avert another explosion of unrest in, say, Poland, since his conservative comrades would relish proof that reform breeds anarchy.

The political evolution of Eastern Europe has a military as well as an economic aspect. Gorbachev and his advisers have said they are willing to adopt what they call "nonoffensive" defenses. The West's task is to get the U.S.S.R. to apply that concept in a way that makes the Soviet army not only less of a bully toward Western Europe but also less of a thug in Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact may be the first alliance in history whose sole operational purpose has been to invade its own member states. Only when the Iron Curtain is lifted will the cold war be truly over.

Difficult as such a goal will be to achieve, it is easier to imagine Gorbachev moving in that direction than any of his predecessors, or any of his would-be successors. Largely for that reason, it is in the interests of the U.S. for him to remain in office and succeed in his program, as long as he is demonstrably seeking to ameliorate the repressiveness of Soviet policies at home and abroad. However, it would be premature and imprudent to admit the Soviet Union into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, not to mention the International Monetary Fund, as some Democrats have suggested. The U.S.S.R.'s industry is too hidebound, its agriculture too wasteful, its pricing system too arbitrary and its currency too artificial for that move to make sense. Membership in those organizations entails benefits that the backward Soviet economy cannot derive and obligations it cannot meet.

In general, there is little that the U.S. can do actively and directly to affect the outcome of back-room Kremlin politics. Precisely because he is committed to what he calls "radical" reform, Gorbachev may fail -- and fall. A President Bush or a President Dukakis could end up meeting at the summit with General Secretary Yegor Ligachev, currently Gorbachev's leading opponent.

A healthy dose of new thinking in American foreign policy does not require mortgaging the nation's interests to the vicissitudes of Kremlin politics. Nor does it require rescinding Reagan's or Truman's or, for that matter, Monroe's precepts. A new presidential doctrine does not mean repudiating the old ones so much as updating them to take account -- and take advantage -- of new realities. Whatever else he is, whatever he accomplishes and however long he lasts, Gorbachev already qualifies as the personification of a new reality, and a new challenge to the next U.S. President.