At the Highest Levels

...And he was unwilling to fork over the kind of massive aid packagethat Gorbachev and many in the U.S...

...If there was a fatal flaw in the Bush approach, it was in his fear not so much of instability as of change itself...

...Gorbachev, too, had his problems with hard-line party traditionalists and radical democrats like Yeltsin...

...He betrayed a typically Russian attitude towards the restive non-Russian republics, unable to grasp the depth of their national aspirations...

...The syntax is pure Bush, and so, unfortunately, is the politics...

...At times it's hard to know how many of the phenomena Kotkin describes are due to centuries of culture, and how many to the point at which the given cultures find themselves...

...proved uncooperative in its policies towards Baltic independence...

...Bush preferred dealing with General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the man whose imposition of martial law had elicited nearly a decade of American economic sanctions against Poland, to dealing with Lech Walesa and other representatives of Solidarity...

...Will the Chinese, for example, become just as lazy as Westerners once they reach their earning potential...

...Bush's administration shared the president's worldview, sought the same goals, and was generally loyal to the chief...

...As it turned out, the U.S...

...In effect, Clinton neutralized the incumbent's natural advantage in international affairs by arguing that Bush's policies ignored America's historic commitment to democracy...

...He failed to move more expeditiously on economic change, not out of fear of moving too fast, but because he believed to the end that socialism could be made to work...

...Both Robert Gates and the Central Intelligence Agency emerge with their reputations enhanced...

...According to the authors, Jaruzelski changed his mind about not running for the Polish presidency when he sensed that his candidacy had the blessing of the American president...

...He threw his weight around during the Gulf War, constantly threatening to withdraw from the anti-Saddam coalition if the U.S...

...CI State James Baker declared on "Meet the Press" that the United States would not be at all opposed if the Warsaw Pact were to intervene in Romania, then in the final convulsive days of the Ceausescu dictatorship...

...Kotkin admits in a footnote that it's difficult to say whether a century from now his subjects will be seen as diasporas or as immigrants...

...Bush's lack of enthusiasm for the anti-Communist revolution that swept across Eastern Europe in 1989 is truly dismaying...

...Yet in the end Gates was vindicated, as were the CIA's Soviet specialists, who early on predicted that Gorbachev would fail to overcome his country's mushrooming domestic crisis and urged the administration to establish friendly relations with political figures like Yeltsin...

...Ultimately, Bush's discomfort with radical change must be weighed against his overall shrewdness in managing relations with Moscow during the years of Soviet decline...

...George Bush took great pride in his reputation as an experienced and prudent foreign policy hand, and while properly suspicious of congressional intrusion in international affairs, he was overly prone to base his policies on deal-making with other elites and, for an American, unusually cool toward the prospect of democratic change...

...The Soviet Union, by contrast, was a decrepit colonial power on itslast legs, its president reviled by a society on the brink of collapse and resentful of an economic system that defied common sense...

...But it's not entirely fair to accuse Bush of having lacked a moral compass in his approach to the world...

...He ensured that the various arms and troop level agreements did not weaken NATO, insisted that reunified Germany remain within the Atlantic Alliance, and pressed the Soviets to withdraw support from their clients in the Third World...

...Clearly Bush was apprehensive that the pell-mell rush to freedom might endanger Gorbachev's political future...

...ichael Beschloss and Strobe M Talbott have given their study of the Bush-Gorbachev years an altogether appropriate title...

...Though let's not get carried away...

...But Bush's personal unease with the new democratic forces found him siding with the Communists being swept aside...

...Clearly he achieved that modest goal...

...But the lowest point came on December 24, 1989, when Secretary ofor feudal ones exercising monopoly government power...

...its officials openly badmouthed Gorbachev to their American counterparts, and consistently sought to undermine their man's foreign policy...

...In this decision, the president's personal relationship with Gorbachev no doubt played an unintended role...

...National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft's dozing off during a meeting with Boris Yeltsin, one of a string of petty humiliations inflicted by officials who regarded the future president of Russia as a boor and demagogue whose antics were making life difficult for their main man, Mikhail Gorbachev...

...Buoyed by the continued high esteem of the outside world, Gorbachev at home was petulant, ungracious, and bewildered by the succession of domestic troubles that emerged in the last years of his rule...

...In the very first days of his term, the authors report, Bush treated with some seriousness a plan advanced by Henry Kissinger and Gorbachev adviser Alexander Yakovlev for a joint U.S.-Soviet venture to maintain the European status quo, a concept especially unsettling at a time when freedom for Eastern Europe seemed a real possibility...

...urged...

...Bush once said that he hoped he would be remembered as having left the world a little better than when he took office...

...Bush at times gave the impression of fearing the former and ignoring the latter...

...Indeed, at one point Baker spiked a speech Gates was to deliver questioning Gorbachev's prospects...

...Gorbachev's repeated displays of ignorance of the basic workings of a market economy must have reinforced Bush's instinctive caution in advancing aid to the ex-Communist world...

...just as clearly he could have done much more...

...Although subsequent events put an end to any talk of a Washington-Moscow global condominium, it is clear that the idea of Americans and Soviets stage-managing the pace of events held a profound appeal for Bush...

...The book reinforces the impression that Bush was determined to distinguish himself from the style and policies of Reagan, however incoherently he did so...

...When, after much delay and considerable domestic criticism, George Bush gave formal recognition to the Baltic states, he commented that "when history is written, nobody will remember that we took forty-eight hours more than Iceland or whoever else it is...

...wound up being the thirty-seventh country to recognize the Baltic countries' new independence, which candidate Bill Clinton cited as evidence of Bush's preference for "a foreign policy that embraces stability at the expense of freedom...

...He groused at the slightest hint of triumphalist rhetoric from American officials, despite Bush's solicitude toward bruised Soviet egos...

...They were right on both counts...

...It was, of course, a fundamentalist argument of the Cold War's critics that Western democracies and the Communist states were developing along increasingly symmetrical lines...

...There were many low points in the Bush administration's dealings with the Soviet Union: the infamous "Chicken Kiev" speech, in which the President lectured the leaders of soon-to-be-independent Ukraine about the dangers of "suicidal nationalism...

...Not only was Baker proposing that the Soviets become the guarantor of East European democracy...

...Still, it's a sharp reminder of the administration's shortcomings: however capable it proved in prosecuting traditional campaigns like the Gulf War, the Bush team was ill-equipped to deal with the collapse of Soviet power...

...after all, the Gorbachev era had brought steady American gain and steady Soviet retreat on all fronts...

...M eanwhile, Gorbachev was no longer comporting himself like a Nobel laureate or Time magazine's "Man of the Decade" (an honor that Talbott, a Time editor until his recent appointment to President Clinton's foreign policy team and a devoted Gorbophile, must have helped engineer...

...Gorbachev's regime, by contrast, was deeply divided...

...Yet the evidence, as exhibited in At the Highest Levels, reveals two radically different societies growing ever more different...

...Yet present throughout is the assumption that despite obvious differences between democracy and state socialism, at the crucial "highest" levels the two systems functioned remarkably alike...

...Clinton himself, however much he accentuates the vocabulary of human rights, compassion, and high purpose, cannot disguise the fact that his foreign policy differs little in essentials from his predecessor's...

...And although Talbott is on record as hostile to the basic Cold War view of the Soviet Union as totalitarian and expansionist, the book is on the whole positive about the achievements of George Bush, the last of the Cold War presidents...

...f At the Highest Levels lacks the gripping pace of The Crisis Years, Beschloss's history of U.S.-Soviet relations during the Kennedy years, it is far more engaging than Talbott's several books on the politics of arms control (though it, too, contains many tedious pages on that overrated subject...

...If they are like the Japanese, the answer is probably yes...

...Fortunately, the Soviets rejected the idea out of hand (some in the Kremlin thought it a provocation), and the "Baker Doctrine" was laid to rest...

...the administration's reluctance to support freedom for the Baltic states...

...The United States was a confident, successful world power, whose people backed their president in his foreign policy and accepted their country's economic system...

...The end of the Cold War brought uncertainty and opportunity...

...A team of CIA analysts warned that Gorbachev's half-way reforms would bring about a coup by hard-liners or the breakup of the union...

...even if the latter is the case, it's only all the more reason to agree with New York economist George Sternlieb that "there's nothing wrong with New York that a million Chinese wouldn't cure...

...Bush the centrist had his hard-line critics in the form of advisers like John Sununu and the Republican right wing...

...Bush and Baker ridiculed Reagan officials as primitive anti-Communists (Bush is quoted as having told Gorbachev that Ronald Reagan had been surrounded by "marginal intellectual thugs") yet overly willing to forge sweeping and ill-advised deals with Gorbachev...

...Bush officials made Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz the object of a whispering campaign, labeling him the worst secretary of state since Edward Stettinius, the last man to hold the post under Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...he subsequently suggested that the two superpowers adopt a new doctrine to allow intervention in the other's sphere of influence for "just cause...

...Gates, who served as a deputy to Brent Scowcroft before being named CIA director, was widely maligned as a retrograde hard-liner given to doom-and-gloom predictions that America faced a "long competitive struggle" with the Soviets despite Gorbachev's reforms...