Clinging to The Cold War

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The cold war is over. Intellectuals, diplomats and government officials agree. So does business; last week General Motors signed a $1 billion deal to sell auto parts to the U.S.S.R. Now would somebody please tell Congress? Old thinking dies hard on Capitol Hill, and there are days when the lawmakers seem to have missed the news.

Certainly George Bush has so far failed to get the message across, in part because of his own ambivalence. At his summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the President proclaimed, "We've moved a long, long way from the depths of the cold war." But asked last week if the cold war was over, Bush fudged: "Well, I don't know -- we've got to wait and see." Ever since the summit, the President has heard grumbling -- and not only from right-wingers -- that he failed to "jam it to them while they're weak," in the words of Wisconsin Democrat Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Aspin predicts "potential problems" for both the chemical-weapons treaty signed at the summit and an eventual pact to reduce strategic nuclear warheads. But the biggest trouble at the moment is a bipartisan rebellion against a trade agreement that would grant Moscow most-favored-nation trade status (which actually means access to American markets on terms equal to those enjoyed by most other countries).

Under Gorbachev, the U.S.S.R. has fulfilled the one explicit condition that Congress laid down for granting MFN status to the Soviet Union when it passed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1974, which was intended to permit freer emigration. In 1989, 71,190 Jews left the country. As recently as three years ago, a mere 914 emigrated. However, congressional leaders of both parties have raised a new condition: movement toward granting Lithuania's demand for independence from Moscow.

That approach is particularly surprising since Soviet-bashing no longer commands wide support among voters. Only a fourth of those who responded in an April poll for TIME and CNN by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman said the U.S. "should pressure the Soviet Union to give Lithuania its independence." Almost two-thirds judged the issue to be "none of our business."

So why is the hard line now developing in Congress? Part of the explanation is that some conservatives would be left with little to do since one reason for their existence is to promote hostility toward the Kremlin. Other legislators who have no nostalgia for the cold war nonetheless think Bush has tied U.S. policy too closely to Gorbachev's political survival, and thus made concessions unwarranted by Soviet weakness. Bush invited such criticism by linking Lithuania and trade relations in May, then unlinking them at the summit without getting Soviet concessions in return.

A still larger number of Congressmen say they support any nation's right to self-determination. Their lofty concern apparently does not extend to Quebec, Slovakia, Palestine or other areas where minorities are seeking nationhood, perhaps because U.S. voter rolls do not include large numbers of French- Canadians, Slovaks or Palestinians. Though Lithuanian Americans have been highly vocal, they are small in number and there is no organized Lithuanian lobby in the U.S. But millions of Americans of East European ancestry nurse a long-standing and understandable grudge against Moscow.

Most important of all, Democrats like Majority Leader George Mitchell and Speaker Tom Foley have been probing for an issue on which they can score points against the highly popular Bush. They are being joined by Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole who share the irresistible congressional tendency to bicker with the President -- any President, on almost any issue that comes to hand. It is difficult to remember now, but little more than a year ago many Congressmen, including some of those currently most critical of Bush for allegedly caving in to the Kremlin, were blasting the President for not moving rapidly enough to end the cold war. They would do well to bear in mind that George Bush is still the shrewdest poll reader in America, and that he may know something about his countrymen's desire to move beyond the cold war.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett and Nancy Traver/Washington