Enough Bear Stroking

By Charles Krauthammer

Just over a year ago in Stockholm, Russia's Foreign Minister delivered a shocking speech announcing a return to empire and cold war. No more Mr. Nice Guy for "Greater Russia," declared Andrei Kozyrev. "The space of the former Soviet Union . . . is essentially a post-imperial space, where Russia has to defend its interests by all available means, including military and economic ones."

The speech created a sensation. Western delegates were stunned -- until Kozyrev explained an hour later that he was playacting. The speech, he said, was one Moscow hard-liners would deliver were they to seize power. He was warning of the dark future awaiting the world should Yeltsin fall.

Well, Yeltsin did not fall. The Soviet-era hard-liners Kozyrev warned against fell. Some are in jail. But now it is Kozyrev himself declaring last week that Russia should keep its troops in neighboring republics: "We should not withdraw from those regions that have been in the sphere of Russian interest for centuries."

This time he is not kidding. And because he is not, Kozyrev, a man who truly represents Russian moderation, has given the world a measure of how far Russian moderation has traveled in the past year. For months Russia has been interfering in neighboring republics, notably Georgia and Azerbaijan, to bring them under Russian domination. Withdrawal from the Baltics is stalled. And Belarus, which agreed to scrap its currency and restore the ruble, is in effect being economically annexed.

Market reform is in retreat as well. The day after President Clinton finished his Moscow summit, Yegor Gaidar, chief architect of economic reform, resigned. Four days later, Boris Fyodorov, the other major reformer, was purged from the government. The ruble is collapsing. The Prime Minister talks of a return to wage and price controls.

All this is acutely embarrassing for Clinton, who had trumpeted Yeltsin's commitment to reform during his Moscow visit. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, in particular, waxed enthusiastic about the assurances he had received that reform would continue. Assurances from whom? From the doomed Gaidar and Fyodorov, with whom Bentsen had excellent meetings.

Within a week of the trip to Moscow, the President's Russia policy had collapsed. Russia's slide is not, mind you, a failure of Clinton's personal diplomacy. There are limits to personal diplomacy. (Something politicians often have difficulty recognizing: "Lord," said Senator William Borah after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, "if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.") Personal diplomacy cannot reverse the trajectory of a great power. Russia's retreat is an aftershock of the December elections in which the totalitarian parties campaigning against reform and for empire won about half the vote.

The people have spoken, and Yeltsin has listened. Clinton has not. He keeps campaigning for Russian democracy, but he refuses to acknowledge what the people voted for in a democratic election. Why did Clinton spend so much of his Moscow trip cheerleading for economic reform? That is Yeltsin's job. Why should an American President expose himself and his country to blame for the suffering such reform inevitably brings?

By the same token, now that the Russian people have spoken, it is time to change our attitude to Russia's foreign policy too. During the fight to the , finish between the Soviet-era Congress and Yeltsin, it made sense for the U.S. to back him to the hilt. That meant bending over backward not to offend Russian nationalism: leaning hard on Ukraine to disarm; raising no fuss when Russian troops intervened in Georgia, Tajikistan and Moldova; keeping the East Europeans out of NATO.

We gave bear stroking a try. It did not work. Despite our extraordinary deference to Russian national feelings, the antireform and anti-Western parties did exceptionally well in free elections. Yeltsin is accommodating to reality. Time for us to follow suit.

Yeltsin still represents as moderate a government as Russia is going to produce. But that highlights all the more clearly the limits of Russian moderation. It would be foolish, therefore, to continue a purely Russocentric policy that bets the house on the hope that with enough Western coaxing and acquiescence, Russia will turn into a Western democracy, a Cyrillic England. It is far more prudent for the West to demonstrate some firmness, to show we will respect Russia's national interests but not its imperial impulses.

If Russia tires of reform, that is her business. But if Russia hungers for empire, that unfortunately is our business. As leader of the West, we must be the one to say no. Instead, for fear of offending Russia, we say no to the pro-Western Poles, Czechs and Hungarians seeking admittance to NATO.

Russia needs to be told that it does not have a veto over NATO membership. That only an imperial Russia would take offense at East Europeans finding shelter in NATO -- the Polish army, after all, is no threat to Moscow. And that if Russia insists on military pressure on its neighbors, it will pay a high price, economic and diplomatic, in relations with America.

The current unpleasantness is neither Yeltsin's fault nor Clinton's. But it is a fact. The free ride given Russia, based on hopes for a kind of Russia that is not, has got to end.