BUSH’S SOVIET CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST: URGENT COURSE CORRECTION REQUIRED IN LIGHT OF KREMLIN CRISIS

(Washington, D.C.): The announcement
that a “State Committee for the
State of Emergency in the USSR” led
by career Communist apparatchik Gennady
Yanayev has removed Mikhail Gorbachev
from power is a warning to the
West — and an opportunity.
This statement is, in all
likelihood, merely the opening salvo in a
power struggle that will reverberate
across the Soviet Union and beyond for a
long time to come. Still, it is
imperative that the United States and its
allies respond swiftly and
appropriately by aligning themselves
at last with the genuine, democratic and
free market form at the republic and
local levels within the USSR.

Warning to the West:
First, this event demonstrates
the bankruptcy of the policy President
Bush and other Western leaders have
pursued so assiduously -one of massively overinvesting
in the Gorbachev regime. They
have done so in political, economic,
financial, technological and diplomatic
terms, all in the mistaken belief that
such steps would ensure that the
“moderate,”
“reformist” Gorbachev would
remain in power.

In fact, the same forces that
have now chosen to remove Gorbachev from
the Soviet presidency have long
been his only visible means of
political support.
Evidently, the Soviet KGB, military and
Communist Party have now concluded that
it is no longer expedient to perpetuate
the arrangement whereby Gorbachev fronted
for the Kremlin’s central authorities.

Perhaps this was due to the
latter’s perception that President Bush
would — as he has done elsewhere (for
example, in China, Iraq and Yugoslavia)
— choose to maintain close ties with
totalitarians, no matter how repressive.
Particularly in light of the stance the
President struck toward Moscow center
during his trip to Kiev, the
totalitarians may have concluded that
there was no point in accepting whatever
risk might have been posed to their
control by the “All Union
Treaty” scheduled to be signed
tomorrow.

An Opportunity:
Second, the United States and its allies
have accordingly been given an
opportunity to abandon misbegotten
policies that have, taken together,
exposed the West to considerable peril.
Ill-advised decisions to: dismantle
arrangements which denied the Soviet
Union access to militarily relevant
Western technology; provide
taxpayer-guaranteed financial and
economic assistance to the USSR; and
embark upon inequitable, unverifiable
arms control agreements must now be put
on indefinite hold.

More importantly, the West must now
belatedly make common cause with those
radical reformers in the Soviet Union
whose future has been significantly
complicated — if not jeopardized — by
the hands-off policy the United States
and its allies have adopted heretofore.
Washington should do this by announcing
immediate adoption of a combination of
incentives aimed at rewarding and
encouraging toleration of those seeking
structural reform and disincentives to
their repression:

• The new U.S.-Soviet Trade
  Agreement, Most Favored Nation
  status and all other bilateral
  accords for providing technical,
  financial and economic assistance
  to the USSR
  (especially to its strategic
  energy sector) should be
  suspended indefinitely.
  The utility of such arrangements
  to the West in light of the
  now-manifest character of the
  Soviet government must be
  thoroughly reconsidered.
• The United States — and
  as many of its allies as can be
  persuaded to follow suit —
  should extend formal
  recognition of the independence
  and sovereignty of those
  republics that have
  broken with Moscow center —
  including the Russian republic.
  This should be accompanied by an
  expression of American
  willingness to enter into trade
  and other arrangements with those
  whose bona fides concerning
  commitment to democracy and free
  markets are well established.
• Senate consideration of the
  START and CFE treaties should be
  suspended until the prospects for
  Soviet compliance with these
  accords — never great even
  under the Gorbachev
  regime — can be carefully
  analyzed and appropriate
  amendments considered.
• Under no circumstances should the
  notion that Soviet adherence with
  these treaties must be purchased
  by the United States be used as a
  pretext for pushing them through
  the Senate, tumultuous events in
  the USSR notwithstanding.

The Center for Security
Policy hopes that the Bush Administration
will learn the bitter
lessons of a year ago. In August
1990, it was obliged to reverse course
sharply as a despotic regime misread
Washington’s seeming signals of support
for central control and authority — come
what may. Just as years of miscuing
Saddam Hussein, compounded by an
appalling statement by U.S. Amb. April
Glaspie, seemed to invite his aggression,
so the United States’ unalloyed support
for Gorbachev and clear preference for
stability over freedom — implicit, if
not explicit, in President Bush’s Kiev
address last month — has demanded a new,
and more farsighted American policy.