Out with a Bang

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

GEORGE BUSH HAS NEVER been much on quoting, let alone trying to rewrite, great poetry. Consciously or unconsciously, though, he now seems preoccupied with turning one of T.S. Eliot's most quoted lines on its head. In The Hollow Men, Eliot predicted that the world would end "not with a bang but a whimper." Bush appears determined to have his world -- or his presidency, which for him is the same thing -- finish with a very big foreign policy bang.

The President wound up 1992 and welcomed 1993 with a kind of 16,600-mile victory tour. The last TV image of his tenure, or so he might have hoped, to stick in people's minds would be the Sunday ceremony in Moscow, where he and President Boris Yeltsin were to sign the most sweeping nuclear-weapons- reduction treaty ever concluded. The accord does not quite justify Yeltsin's description of it as "the document of the century." The collapse of the Soviet Union has greatly reduced the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the prime danger has shifted from missiles raining on Washington and Moscow to nuclear proliferation or the nuclear capability being built by states like North Korea and Iran. Still, the START II treaty will in effect wipe out decades of an escalating arms race by reducing the number of U.S. and Russian warheads to the levels of the 1960s and 1970s. It is an accomplishment that any President, American or Russian, can view with pride.

But START II was only the end of a remarkable week for Bush. He flew to the Moscow summit from Somalia, where he had welcomed the New Year by visiting U.S. troops and the Somalis they are helping. One was a skeletal child in a refugee center who is nine, or so a camp aide told Bush, but has the size of a five-year-old. Essentially a photo opportunity, the visit still served to underline a major policy challenge that Bush will leave for his successor: the use of American military force for purely humanitarian missions in countries where the U.S. has no economic or strategic interests at stake.

Even as he packed for Somalia and Moscow, Bush issued warnings to two aggressors. After a U.S. plane shot down an Iraqi jet over the no-fly zone the U.N. imposed in southern Iraq, the President warned Saddam Hussein not to think he could take advantage of the impending change of Administration in Washington to test international restraints.

More important, and more problematic, Bush issued the first explicit threat to use military power in the Balkans. In a letter to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic that was purposely leaked, Bush bluntly stated that "in the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the United States will be prepared to employ military force" -- and not just "against the Serbians in Kosovo" but also "in Serbia proper." Kosovo is a province where, it is widely feared, Milosevic might start Bosnia-style "cleansing" of the ethnic Albanians, who constitute 90% of the population, an action that could well ignite a wider Balkan war.

It would have been an impressive flurry for a President looking forward to pursuing foreign policy initiatives through four more years of power. It seemed unprecedented in the case of a Commander in Chief for whom New Year's Eve marked the beginning of his last three weeks in office.

Bush aides insisted that the President was largely reacting to the pressure of events in the Balkans. Milosevic is reinforcing Serbian police and military units in Kosovo, and there are reports of rising tensions between Serbs and Albanians inside the province. Yeltsin, for political reasons of his own, was eager to wrap up a START II treaty with Bush rather than wait for several months while newly inaugurated President Bill Clinton's arms-control negotiators familiarized themselves with the complex details of, say, missile- silo construction.

True, but not quite the whole story. Initially, Bush was so dejected from losing the election that he intended to do nothing until his term ended. Aides, however, argued that inactivity would allow the Democratic winners to rewrite the history of his Administration and portray it as a total failure. Their urgings got Bush's juices flowing again, and he plunged into a new round of international activism both as a kind of occupational therapy and as a chance to leave the White House in a blaze of glory.

Foreign policy brought Bush his greatest successes, and it is the area in which a President can act more or less on his own, without being greatly hampered by even the balkiest Congress. Small wonder, then, that Bush should spend his last days in office trying to cement his place in history by doing more of what he does best -- and, not incidentally, what he enjoys. Had it not been for the final flurry, people might well have remembered something else as the last notable act of the Bush Administration: the Christmas Eve pardons of several Iran-contra figures, which aroused considerable controversy, including accusations that the President was participating in a cover-up. How much better for the final memories to be of Bush's striving to lift the nuclear curse and succor the starving in Somalia.

BUT BUSH IS ALSO LEAVING A frightening load of unfinished business for Clinton. Bush's lieutenants deny that their boss is intentionally trying to set a policy line that Clinton will find hard to reverse. Except in Somalia, the outgoing President's moves have followed up on policies already established rather than striking out in new directions -- and fall within guidelines Clinton embraced during the campaign. Even the Kosovo warning essentially formalized a decision already made and reported to draw a line in the Balkans: Belgrade had better not try to repeat in Kosovo or in Macedonia, a former Yugoslav province that has declared independence, the aggression that is destroying Bosnia. Said a senior State Department official: "This Administration is striking a balance between not letting problems fester and not handcuffing the new Administration."

Clinton's aides have been kept informed, but the same State Department official admits that "they're not consulted," at least in the sense of being asked for ideas or approval. Even so, no one on the Clinton team has registered any complaints. On the contrary, the President-elect has praised the START II treaty and issued his own warning to Saddam Hussein not to test American resolve. Clinton could hardly attack Bush's latest maneuvers without repudiating his own campaign criticisms of the President for not having been tough enough on Serbia or helpful enough to Yeltsin.

It may be, however, that Bush is trying to put pressure on Clinton in a more subtle manner. Though Clinton has often pledged to follow an active foreign policy, he has also spoken of the necessity to avoid spending all his time on international affairs and vowed "a laser beam" focus on the U.S. economy. Bush may be trying to signal his successor -- and the American people -- that foreign policy cannot be treated as an unwelcome distraction, that the U.S. must play a leadership role in making the world a safer place; no other country can. "The new world could, in time, be as menacing as the old," Bush told a Texas audience in mid-December. "A retreat from American leadership, from American involvement, would be a mistake for which future generations, indeed our own children, would pay dearly."

Bush's closing flurry will bequeath Clinton quite as much new business as it removes from the agenda -- maybe more. Even if a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia starts by Jan. 20, as Pentagon officials still hope, it will be up to Clinton to determine when and how the rest can be pulled out without letting Somalia sink back into the starvation, looting and clan warfare that the American and other Western soldiers were sent to relieve.

As for Kosovo, Clinton will need to decide first whether to back up Bush's warning, and if so, how. Though there have been reports in Western Europe that the Bush Administration has drawn up contingency plans to intervene with as many as 100,000 American ground troops in Kosovo, officials deny that. Pentagon aides say the U.S. would rely primarily on bombing Serbian air bases, other military installations and supply lines.

However done, intervention would mark the most stunning shift yet from the old doctrine that anything happening within a nation's borders is no business of foreign powers. The fighting in Bosnia and Croatia could be regarded as international, since these areas had declared independence; in Somalia there was no government left to tell anyone to stay out. Kosovo, however, has been part of Serbia for centuries; for all its current Albanian majority, Serbs regard it as the cradle of their nationhood. To Bush and others, that consideration is overridden by the danger that Serbian aggression in Kosovo could ignite a general war drawing in Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria and even Turkey.

Well before any involvement in Kosovo, the U.S. could find itself embroiled in Bosnia. Bush is seeking U.N. approval for a resolution enforcing a no-fly zone that Serbia has been violating, and the Pentagon talks not just of shooting down Serbian planes and helicopters but also of bombing the bases from which they fly. Contingency plans are being drawn up to establish safe havens for refugees, presumably protected in part by U.S. forces.

Some West European allies, notably Britain, are balking even at enforcement of a no-fly zone, but a deadline of sorts looms. Islamic nations insist that $ unless the U.N. and Western powers do something effective by Jan. 15, they will take action of their own, probably by sending arms to Bosnia's Muslims, perhaps even volunteers to fight alongside them. Some weapons are obviously reaching Bosnia now, despite an international embargo, and the Muslims have been emboldened to talk about an offensive to relieve the siege of Sarajevo -- at the very time that U.N. officials on the ground are begging for a truce to save civilians who are beginning to perish in the harsh Balkan winter. Clinton could take the oath of office as fighting flares to a new intensity, civilians begin to die en masse of hunger and cold, and the pressure on Washington to "do something" reaches a crescendo.

MEANWHILE, THE START II agreement can certainly not be considered a done deal. Clinton should have little trouble selling it to the U.S. Senate. The benefits far outweigh the few concessions Bush made to nail down the treaty, most of which were economic and technical. For example, while agreeing to retire all its giant multiple-warhead SS-18 missiles, Moscow balked at destroying the silos from which they would be fired, on the grounds that it simply cannot afford the cost. Solution: Russia will keep some of the silos but pour 16.4 ft. of concrete into the bottom of each so that it cannot again house a multiwarhead monster. Bush was able to get this and other relatively minor concessions because the benefits of speed in reaching an agreement were obvious. Better to strike a deal with Yeltsin while he still holds power, and lock Russia into a treaty that any future government would find difficult to repudiate, than to wait and take a chance with some hard-line nationalist successor.

Getting the treaty past the Russian parliament, however, may not be so easy. While Russia would scrap every last one of its multiwarhead land-based missiles, the central components of its nuclear arsenal, the U.S. would keep 50% of its submarine-based warheads, which occupy a roughly similar place in the U.S. arsenal. The disparity can be justified because the land-based missiles are far more suitable for launching a first strike, and thus uniquely destabilizing. Nonetheless, Russia is giving up more than the U.S., and the imbalance is triggering attack by Yeltsin's critics, eager for any ammunition that might bring him down.

A worse problem is Ukraine. It is one of three non-Russian former Soviet republics -- the others are Belarus and Kazakhstan -- that house nuclear weapons but are supposed to give them up under the START I treaty, signed in 1991. Lately, Ukraine has been making noises about keeping some of its nukes. U.S. experts are unsure whether Kiev is bargaining for Western concessions, such as more financial aid, or simply wants the clout of being a nuclear power. If the latter, Ukraine could derail the arms-reduction process: START I cannot go into effect unless Ukraine ratifies it, and the reductions called for in START II cannot begin until those specified in START I are finished.

Bush's closing blitz may not remove, or even greatly lessen, Clinton's problems. Nonetheless, the retiring President is right in insisting that the U.S. must remain involved in world affairs. Perhaps if Bush had devoted to domestic issues a fraction of the energy and initiative he has lavished on foreign policy, it might be he rather than Clinton who would get to follow through on some of his current -- and troubling -- efforts.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Arms Control Associsation}]TIME Graphic by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: DISMANTLING THE STRATEGIC ARSENAL

With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister and Bruce van Voorst/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow