America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

When Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush met in Madrid last week, they had plenty to talk about but little business to transact. It is no longer clear what authority Gorbachev has to enter into international agreements, or even what the constitutional procedure is for ratifying the strategic-arms- reduction treaty the two Presidents signed last July. That was barely three months ago, but it was, as they say in Moscow, B.C. -- before the coup. Since then, with the rapid disintegration of the U.S.S.R., the very term Soviet leader has become something of an oxymoron. So has Soviet Union.

Two weeks ago, the vice president of the Russian Federation, Alexander Rutskoi, quietly informed U.S. Ambassador Robert Strauss about an early version of a speech that had been prepared for Boris Yeltsin to deliver last Monday, on the eve of Gorbachev's departure for Madrid. The draft declared the U.S.S.R. defunct and Yeltsin's government the protector of 25 million ethnic Russians in the outlying republics.

That message would have intensified fears that resurgent Russian imperialism would fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Soviet power. Under the pretext of "protecting" their ethnic kinsmen, some Russian nationalists might try to seize other republics' territory. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the spectacularly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, has even made claims against Poland and Finland on the grounds that they once belonged to the Czars. You're not likely to dismiss Zhirinovsky as a nut case if you're a Pole, a Finn -- or one of the 6 million Russians who voted for him in the republic's presidential election last June.

Strauss notified Washington about what Yeltsin might say, and Bush fired back instructions for him to register official American concern with Rutskoi and Yeltsin's foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev -- in effect, an appeal to make the speech less provocative. In the version Yeltsin finally delivered, he announced a new round of radical economic reforms, virtually dissolved most of the Soviet ministries and nominated himself to the vacant post of Russian prime minister. But he stopped just short of proclaiming Russia the successor state to the U.S.S.R., effective immediately.

The situation in the former Soviet Union is the most dangerous in the world today, much more so than the one in the Middle East. In fact, it was precisely the late, unlamented U.S.-Soviet rivalry that invested the Arab-Israeli conflict with its greatest peril. As long as the two armed camps each had a glowering superpower at its back, a regional crisis could escalate to global conflagration. The end of the cold war has made progress toward a peaceful settlement more imaginable but also, in one sense, less crucial. While there is every reason to hope for success in the new round of talks, it is comforting to know that if failure there leads to another Middle East war, U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces will not go on alert against each other.

The bad news is that the U.S.S.R., paradoxically, poses a greater threat to world peace in its present divided and weakened condition than it did, not so long ago, when it seemed so strong and monolithic. Throughout the '70s and most of the '80s, the Soviet Union was what political scientists call a "rational actor," a single entity with a clearly identified central leadership and a predictable, if often disagreeable, pattern of behavior. Sharing the planet with Leonid Brezhnev was no fun, but the West knew that by dealing with him, it could manage its relations with a nation of 280 million.

Now, instead of concentrating on one man in the Kremlin, the outside world must open channels to a multiplicity of actors, not all of them rational.

Gorbachev would obviously prefer presiding over the largest country on earth to becoming the custodian of little more than a drafty fortress on the banks of the Moscow River. His friend Bush would rather have one phone number in his Rolodex than a dozen.

But it is too late for that. The incredible has become the inevitable. The Baltic states are gone; Ukraine and several other republics are going, and there is probably no stopping them. What one of Gorbachev's advisers, Yevgeni Primakov, calls a "unified economic space" is a lost cause, at least during the coming phase. The U.S.S.R. is, and always has been, a unified economic disaster area, and that, not ethnicity, is the main reason so many of those 280 million people want out. The U.S.S.R. has to go much further in falling apart before the pieces will have the incentive to reconstitute themselves as a loose confederation or commonwealth.

But while the dismantling of the old structure is irreversible, it need not -- indeed, must not -- be precipitous. Imagine a civil war like the one in Yugoslavia, only played out across 11 time zones, with the Russians in the role of the Serbs and nuclear weapons in the background. Yeltsin can help avert such a horror by reassuring Russia's neighbors both inside and outside the old U.S.S.R. that independence won't unleash the forces of tribalism and irredentism.

Gorbachev, diminished as he is, has his own important contribution still to make. Using what is left of his office, he can supervise an open-ended negotiation over territory, borders, security and the rights of minorities. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? That's why Gorbachev's experience in Madrid last week may come in handy at home.