The Really “Wrong Mistake”: Bush’s Overinvestment In Gorbachev

The Center for Security Policy today decried President Bush’s decision effectively to acquiesce in Soviet coercion of Lithuania. By failing to act at this critical juncture in any way to create real costs for Gorbachev’s escalating economic warfare campaign against a people seeking nothing more than the freedoms and opportunities for which the United States has long stood, the President has made a fundamental — and extremely ill-advised — foreign policy choice: He has thrown good political capital after bad in his investment in the Soviet leader.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director said, "Abandoning those in the Soviet Union who seek personal liberties, economic opportunity and the end of communist domination — of whom the Lithuanians are but a small part — is deplorable. Doing so in the name of propping up Gorbachev is worse yet; it amounts to lashing U.S. interests inextricably to an increasingly unpalatable individual bent on pursuing policies anathema to American values and long-term interests."

The Center believes that the following are among the warning signs of the whirlwind now being sown by the Bush Administration’s overinvestment in Gorbachev:

• Gorbachev clearly perceives U.S. fecklessness over Lithuania as a green light for whatever oppressive steps he deems necessary to bring that country to heel. The exaggerated importance being attached by the Bush Administration to pending arms control negotiations, the summit, etc., bodes ill for U.S. interests in each of these areas.

 

• As Li Peng, the "Butcher of Beijing," toasts Gorbachev for his "resolve" in suppressing the Lithuanians — a gesture morbidly reminiscent of the Scowcroft-Eagleburger toasts in China after the Tiananmen massacre — it should come as no surprise that the forceful character of the Soviet crackdown is intensifying. KGB border patrols, increased naval activity and takeovers of key installations combine with a wholesale cessation of supplies from the USSR to Lithuania to create a first-class effort to strangle the latter’s economy and, inexorably, its people.

 

• Simultaneously, Gorbachev is abandoning market economic reforms (e.g., the further postponement of price reform), stifling "glasnost"-style reporting on Lithuania, purging the Communist Party of reformers, consolidating his personal power in a way not seen since Stalin and denying autonomy of action on the part of relatively democratically elected local officials in Moscow.

Gaffney added, "President Bush’s inability even to impose ‘Potemkin’ economic sanctions in response to Gorbachev’s crackdown on Lithuania amounts to writing a blank check. The price we will ultimately be asked to pay for choosing ostensible ‘stability’ over freedom (in what is in fact becoming an increasingly unstable Soviet Union) can only be calculated by looking at the costs incurred when the West made a similar choice in the past — for example, at Munich and Yalta."