Ask Any Bosnian

...As the President clearly understood, open American support for the Baltic independence movement would have had the same result...

...To have championed Yeltsin early on would have been to encourage the disintegration of the USSR into groups that hate one another with a force quite beyond the American experience...

...Besides, the authors agree that by "staying with Gorbachev was long as he did, Bush increased the chances that Gorbachev himself would remain in power long enough to achieve his greatest accomplishment: the peaceful transfer of power...

...He worried as well that dramatic defense cuts were attenuating ties to nato, a military alliance that had not—and still has not—discovered a new mission...

...People who doubt our ability to support the kind of national health system every comparable society has had for decades did not, for example, see the incongruity of supposing that the Soviet Union, dissolved into its ethnic components, could succeed almost instantly in building democratic and capitalist institutions...

...policy toward the lands of the former Soviet Union—do not really know how to judge Bush...

...As far as possible, we have checked information about each meeting, conversation, or episode with a variety of sources...

...It was on the issue of German reunification that George Bush's natural conservatism deserted him...

...He erred, they argue, in supposing that of all Soviet politicians, Gorbachev was "the one whose beliefs were most compatible with American ideals...

...It's tempting to say, 'wouldn't it be great if the Soviet empire broke up?' But that's not really practical or smart," Bush is reported to have told Scowcroft...

...Certain newspaper columnists argued that Baltic secession-ism was a moral issue...

...He was, I must admit, entirely too prudent...

...But the authors—Michael R. Beschloss, a historian and CNN commentator, and Strobe Talbott, a former Time editor whose Oxford roommate, President Bill Clinton, recently appointed him ambassador-at-large, with responsibility for U.S...

...They are wrong...

...German unity was one of those concepts, like freedom of immigration, that many of us in the West instinctively supported, but wanted a lot less when we thought about them seriously...

...When Bush visited Poland and Hungary in July 1989, the authors observe, "He was nervous about how rapidly the Iron Curtain was coming unraveled, and he tried to use his influence to shore up the holdovers of the old regime, whom he saw as forces for gradual change, against the longtime dissidents, who struck him as being recklessly impatient...

...and other documents...

...Two things undermined Bush's original plan to distance himself from Gorbachev...

...Lithuania, the only one of these entities with long-term historical claims to sovereignty, has enjoyed little more than 20 years of it during the past six centuries...

...Bush resented Yeltsin's propensity to upstage him...

...It was Bush's friend, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, with his vision of diplomacy as an ongoing international political campaign, who continually urged this necessity upon the President...

...government to agitate for a specific change of leadership in the Soviet Union...

...He and his apparent alter ego, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, in fact seemed to be nostalgic for a Cold War that had become stable and predictable...

...Yet in foreign relations conservatives are even more disposed than Americans in general to be unrealistic...

...It was Yeltsin, not Gorbachev, who was willing to repudiate the Communist Party, endorse the right of all the republics to go their own way, and support the radical measures necessary to introduce genuine democracy and free market economics...

...At least not yet...

...Scowcroft "often muttered to colleagues that the very word republic sent shivers up his spine...

...The authors seem reconciled to it, albeit not actually enthusiastic...

...By the spring of 1991, they insist, "that was demonstrably no longer true...

...Some may see in his mentality a lack of vision...

...And it is hardly clear that the breakup of the federation, as distinct from its Soviet embodiment, was truly in our interest, given the possibility that fractious republics and breakaway military units might come to possess nuclear weapons...

...We often saw our sources within days—sometimes even within hours—of the closed-door meetings, negotiating sessions, telephone calls, and other diplomatic exchanges described in these pages," Beschloss and Talbott tell us in their Preface...

...Estonia and Latvia had never been sovereign before their brief summer of independence from 1918 to 1940...

...Second, and more important than the machinations to promote closer Soviet-American ties, was the upheaval that transformed Europe in the fall of 1989—above all, the collapse of East Germany...

...Advocacy of a primarily moral foreign policy, moreover, tends to be hypocritical: This planet is full of injustices and the newspaper columnists evince interest in a very few of them, giving every appearance of making their selection on political no less than moral grounds...

...Surely this was worthwhile...

...Ask any Bosnian...

...Whatever his shortcomings may have been, George Bush knew this, and that understanding saw him through the events retold in At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Little, Brown, 498 pp., $24.95...

...We have used direct quotations only when our sources had firsthand, immediate knowledge of what was said...

...George Bush did not rejoice in such disturbances...

...Why did such an otherwise cautious President fail to restrain West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the great leap into the unknown he insisted on taking...

...The enemy is instability...

...Surely it was not the business of the U.S...

...Do our ideals, or our interests, require the republics to "go their own way...

...The sort of wisdom that comes naturally to fans of the Chicago Cubs makes them, as most of us, uneasy...

...Indeed, much as fear of change had earlier made him keep the Soviet leader at arm's length, it now made him embrace Gorbachev and the remnants of the whole Communist order...

...But that was the least of the errors he might have committed: Had he pressed aggressively to dismantle the Communist bloc, he would have put Soviet reformers in an impossible position, provoking an earlier and perhaps better-prepared hard-line coup than the one that sputtered out in August 1991...

...1 suspect that Baker, and probably his Soviet counterpart, Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, had a strong hand in shaping At the Highest Levels, which to a large extent is the story of their efforts to concoct agreements that high officials on both sides disliked...

...On taking office, he attempted to reverse what, according to the authors, he privately described as his predecessor's "sentimentality" toward Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

...Beschloss and Talbott strike me as a bit unfair to Bush, too...

...In Poland, he encouraged General Wojciech Jaruzelski to run again for president...

...Perhaps he persuaded himself that no attempt to salvage any other aspect of the status quo was worth making...

...I also wonder how many of the scenes the authors describe were stitched together speculatively, with fragments contributed by several participants...

...That's a pity, because in few areas is the status quo more desirable than in foreign affairs...

...The information they provided was not just reproduced from fresh memory but often drawn from written talking points...

...Bush doubted the prospects for reform in the USSR and worried, not unreasonably, that the Soviet leader's fundamental aim was to strengthen his country along essentially Communist lines...

...A At the Highest Levels appears to have been written by an omniscient narrator: Conversations are quoted at length and, because virtually all of the authors' informants demanded anonymity, without attribution...

...It is furthermore to Bush's credit that, recalling the empty gestures of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles before the 1956 revolt in Hungary, he refused to mislead the Baits into thinking the United States could protect them from their neighbor...

...Bush's chief concern—and here he allowed no compromise—was to keep a reunited Germany in nato...

...on the contrary, they frightened him...

...If these three have an inalienable right to be national states, so do a disturbingly large number of other would-be nations yearning to be free...

...In any case, the Soviet republics have gone their own way, and a new, highly unstable world has come into being...

...Of course, anonymous testimony is usually self-serving, yet so is every kind of testimony...

...Was it...

...Writers & Writirig ASK ANY BOSNIAN BY ROGER DRAPER The columnist George Will once said conservatism is a philosophy suited to fans of the Chicago Cubs, who know from experience that the hopes of April are likely to be forgotten by July...

...After meeting leaders of the non-Communist opposition in Budapest, he said, if the authors are correct, "These really aren't the right guys to be running the place...

...A more serious problem is that anonymous informants are more likely to lie than those who come forward in public...

...But as Bush and Scowcroft saw it, the main difficulty posed by Yeltsin, particularly after he became the bearer of Russia's national aspirations, was that he could never lead the Soviet Union...

...Would anyone wish to have foreign intervention in our politics...

...First, it played poorly in the press and among allied governments, so it soon became obvious that the Administration would have to take additional steps to pacify what a Bush staffer, Robert Black will of the National Security Council, is quoted as calling "the wild beast of public opinion...

...Nevertheless, they recognize that only when Bush overcame his inclination to restrain and resist change did he err seriously in Europe...

...Even inside the White House, however, there was unhap-piness with Bush's refusal to "diversify our investments" by cultivating regional figures, especially Boris N. Yeltsin...

...Ultimately, though with much ambivalence and even inconsistency, they concede a degree of merit to Bush's creed: "The enemy is unpredictability...