America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Rarely have the prospects for diplomacy seemed so bright at the beginning of a new year. High hopes for 1989 are the result of high drama in 1988. Twice, just as the curtain was coming down on the old year, a major figure stepped to the edge of the footlights and delivered a soliloquy intended to persuade the world that he is tired of playing a villain. He pledged that the policies he represents had changed in fundamental and salutary ways. And the audience, including a skeptical American President, applauded.

First came Mikhail Gorbachev. In his speech to the United Nations last month, he promised to change practically everything about the Soviet Union except its name (and, presumably, its leader). Asked at a press conference the next day whether he believed Gorbachev was sincere in trying to remake the Soviet Union into a less threatening country, Ronald Reagan replied, "Yes, I do." Coming from the longtime and unabashed cold warrior, in the midst of his own swan song, those three words were almost as significant as Gorbachev's hour-long oration.

The star of last year's other showstopper was Yasser Arafat. His performance in the theater of self-transformation was more drawn out, and the applause more restrained. Gorbachev's act was tough to follow in more ways than one. The idea of meaningful change is easier to accept when it comes from someone with a relatively fresh face and a reputation for boldness and candor. Decades of familiarity with Arafat's role as both Jekyll and Hyde have bred if not contempt then at least deep suspicion. The effect of Arafat's trademarks -- the kaffiyeh, the pseudo uniform, the cultivated scruffiness, the holster (empty or otherwise) -- often hovers between the silly and the sinister. He is the sort of survivor who tends to give survival a bad name. His longevity has often seemed the consequence not of constancy but of artful dodging.

Coming from Arafat, flexibility sounds like double-talk. It is double-talk. That is often the language of politics, particularly in the Middle East, where the vocabulary of straight talk is almost always made up of fighting words. Arafat may still be talking out of both sides of his mouth, but there is an important change in the ratio: there are fewer euphemisms for terrorism and more code words for a negotiated settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Arafat's critics, especially in Jerusalem, have grumbled about the "ambiguities" of his concessions. Yet Israel's own position has also been ambiguous over the years. For a decade after the 1967 Six-Day War, a succession of Labor Prime Ministers seemed willing to yield portions of the territory the Israeli army had seized in the West Bank of the Jordan River, . where many Palestinian Arabs live, in exchange for recognition and security. During that period, Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization regarded Israel itself as an integral part of the larger territory of "occupied" Palestine that they were sworn to "liberate."

The P.L.O. has now accepted Israel's right to exist, and the U.S. -- in its own contribution to the finale of 1988 -- has accepted that acceptance. But Israel's new government is steered by Likud's Yitzhak Shamir, who refuses to budge from one inch of the West Bank. If only his position on that key issue were a little more ambiguous. The recent diplomatic progress between the Arabs and the U.S., however welcome, could still end up being a sideshow to the tragedy of the principals passing in the night. As the P.L.O.'s leaders are becoming less rejectionist, Israel's are becoming more so. Israel may be undergoing a self-transformation of the wrong kind.