The Last Empire (33 page)

Questions about Baltic independence had been introduced in Bush's talking points not only with Gorbachev but also with Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk, two other Soviet leaders he expected to meet during the trip. But Gorbachev cited Soviet law, which, as Bush knew, made secession almost impossible. The US president found himself between two fires—on one hand Gorbachev, maneuvering but unyielding on the issue of Baltic independence; on the other, ever more persistent critics at home. Given the pressure from Baltic émigré organizations in the United States and their supporters in the Republican Party, it is easy to imagine that President Bush and his advisers were simply doing what domestic US politics was forcing them to do, hoping that the pieces of the foreign policy puzzle would somehow ultimately fall into place.
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In a manner of speaking, they did. The collapse of the coup revived Bush's hopes that Gorbachev could actually set the Baltic republics free. “A cautious Gorbachev,” he said, dictating his diary entry for August 21, “has to worry less about the problem of his political right—military, KGB, etc. And maybe we can get a breakthrough on Cuba, Afghanistan, Baltics, etc.” The Baltic states, all of which had declared their independence before or during the coup, needed a decision of the Union parliament to make independence fully legitimate, and the
Baltic leaders once again turned for help to the American president. “Should you, Mr. President, advise M. Gorbachev to support such a resolution,” read a letter sent to Washington soon after collapse of the coup by the leader of the Lithuanian parliament, Vytautas Landsbergis, “perhaps this question would be solved quickly and positively.” Landsbergis believed that this was Gorbachev's last chance to prove his democratic credentials. “We do not know whether M. Gorbachev will stay in his position for any length of time, although he may still manage to participate in the question of Baltic independence and save political face to some extent,” argued Landsbergis. He asked Bush for immediate “renewal of recognition for Lithuania.”
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The pressure on Bush to grant US recognition to the Baltic states had been mounting ever since the collapse of the coup. On August 23, Republican senator Slade Gorton of Washington wrote to Bush, demanding recognition and claiming that “any possible tie—any bond between those nations and the Soviet Union—was certainly destroyed by the military action taken against them.” The senator had in mind the introduction of the state of emergency in the Baltic republics during the coup. The United States was indeed lagging behind in recognition of the independence of the Baltic states. Smaller countries, led by Iceland, began granting recognition almost immediately after Estonia and Latvia made their declarations on August 20 and 21, respectively. Yeltsin had Russia follow suit on August 24. Bush then cabled Gorbachev to tell him that the United States could not wait and would recognize Baltic independence on August 30. Gorbachev asked him to hold off until September 2, hoping that his State Council would recognize the Baltics on that day. It turned out, however, that the new council would not meet until September 6.
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Bush could not wait any longer. He made his announcement on the date Gorbachev had originally requested, September 2, the last day of his Kennebunkport vacation. After lunch, enjoying the sea view from his terrace, Bush dictated into his tape recorder, “Today I had a press conference. I recognized the Baltics. I called the presidents of Estonia and Latvia, having talked to Landsbergis of Lithuania a couple of days ago. I told them what we were going to do. I told them why we have waited a few days more. What I tried to do was use the power and prestige of the United States, not to posture, not to be the first on board, but to encourage Gorbachev to move faster on freeing
the Baltics.” In a letter sent to Landsbergis a few days earlier, he wrote, “We never recognized the forcible incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union, and we are proud that we stood with the Lithuanian people during the many difficult times of the last fifty-one years.”
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WHAT TO DO WITH
the Soviet Union was the question at the top of President Bush's agenda when he returned from vacation in early September. The problem was that neither Bush nor his advisers had a clear vision of what they should do next: the White House was as reactive as ever in its treatment of the rapidly developing situation. There was a belief that this was the only reasonable position under the circumstances. Perhaps it was. The president, by his own admission, “did not consider it at all useful for the United States to pretend we could play a major role in determining the outcome of what was transpiring in the Soviet Union.” Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, were concerned that too much activity on the part of the United States could result in another coup. “Demands or statements by the United States could be counterproductive and galvanize opposition to the changes among the Soviet hard-liners,” wrote Bush and Scowcroft later.
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On September 5, the day the Congress in Moscow decided to ditch the Soviet constitution and dissolve itself, Bush convened the National Security Council. Security issues—cuts to nuclear arsenals and security of the Soviet stockpiles—dominated the agenda, but a good part of the meeting was devoted to discussing the broader Soviet strategy that the White House so far lacked. The president opened the meeting by stating that “with the Baltics free at last, and the rush of other independence declarations, it was a complex situation.” Indeed it was. The administration made a clear distinction between its policy toward the Baltic republics and that toward the rest of the Soviet Union. What was good for the Baltics was considered bad for Ukraine. But even if one opted to side with the center against the republics, where was that center to be found—with Yeltsin and his young revolutionaries or with Gorbachev and his seasoned liberal reformers? The press had long been criticizing Bush for backing Gorbachev and neglecting Yeltsin. Should he fully engage with Yeltsin now? “Although Yeltsin was a hero, a genuine hero, how would he look
a month from now?” wrote the president and his national security adviser years later, recalling the dilemma.
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That day Bush asked his aides for advice but also let them know that he preferred caution. “We should not act just for the sake of appearing busy,” he told the gathering. The only person in the room who seemed to be out of sympathy with Bush's cautious approach was the fifty-year-old secretary of defense, Richard Cheney, who took part in the National Security Council meeting. Unlike Scowcroft and the president, Cheney believed that the United States could and should influence the situation in the Soviet Union. “I assume these developments are far from over,” he told the gathering. “We could get an authoritarian regime still. I am concerned that a year or so from now, if it all goes sour, how we can answer why we didn't do more.” He favored a proactive strategy: “We ought to lead and shape the events.”
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Cheney pushed for strengthening the administration's ties with the Soviet republics, which would in fact encourage the dissolution of the USSR, which in turn would diminish the Soviet threat and, in time, the Pentagon's budget. The secretary of defense did not make a distinction between the independence of the Baltic states and that of Ukraine. He believed that the United States should support the new nations if they wanted to be independent. For the time being, he suggested opening American consulates in all the Soviet republics. For him, the fact that American and G-7 humanitarian aid was channeled through the center—a point raised by Scowcroft—was “an example of old thinking.” In their memoirs, Bush and Scowcroft characterized Cheney's proposal as nothing but “a thinly disguised effort to encourage the breakup of the USSR.”

It fell eventually to James Baker, who was a personal friend of Bush's and, as everyone in the White House knew, exercised significant influence on his thinking, to respond to Cheney's challenge. Like Cheney, Baker believed that the American position could influence developments in the Soviet Union. “While events will be determined on the ground, our
words
will—as they clearly did during the coup—have a great impact on how leaders act,” read a memo prepared for Baker by his staffers. Before the meeting of the National Security Council, Baker had released to the press five principles on which US policy in the region was to be based. It was a message to the leaders of the former Soviet republics about American expectations of them.
These included the peaceful character of national self-determination; inviolability of existing borders; respect for democracy and the rule of law; respect for human rights, especially those of ethnic minorities; and, last but not least, respect for the international obligations of the USSR—the State Department was decidedly opposed to scrapping the START agreement that had just been negotiated with Gorbachev.

Baker and his State Department advisers did not want to let Gorbachev down after what he had done to improve Soviet-American relations. To them, Gorbachev and the people around him were known, likable, and predictable. No one in the State Department was well acquainted with Boris Yeltsin or his minister of foreign affairs, Andrei Kozyrev, not to mention the leaders of the other republics. People close to Eduard Shevardnadze had warned the US secretary of state that the center was collapsing and nationalism was on the rise. A State Department memo prepared for Baker after the coup pointed to “the real possibility that these current declarations of independence will now lead to territorial, economic and military disputes between republics.” “We ought to wait on the consulates [[for the republics]] and do what we can to strengthen the center,” said Baker at the NSC meeting. He was also eager to point out the potential problems that the disintegration of the Soviet Union might entail, especially the prospect of violence and bloodshed, as well as the possibility of nuclear proliferation.
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Cheney was not convinced by what he heard. He felt that the administration was missing emerging opportunities. “What should we be doing now to engage Ukraine?” he asked, raising the major problem presented by the declaration of independence on the part of the Soviet Union's second-largest republic. “We are reacting.”

President Bush asked whether Ukraine would join the Union. “Out,” answered Cheney. “The voluntary breakup of the Soviet Union is in our interest. If it's a voluntary association, it will happen. If democracy fails, we're better off if they're small,” he argued.

Baker responded, “The peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union is in our interest. We do not want another Yugoslavia.”

Scowcroft, siding with Baker, asked the secretary of state whether he would support the Union if the alternative was bloodshed. “Peaceful change of borders is what we're interested in, along the lines of [[the]] Helsinki [[Accords]],” came the predictable answer.

Scowcroft followed up, “But if there's bloodshed associated with the breakup, then should we oppose the breakup?” Baker advocated a continuation of existing policy, working with republican leaders without encouraging a breakup. Cheney disagreed: in his view, more could be achieved by intensifying contacts with the republics.

The only agenda item on which President Bush suggested action that day—an extremely important item—was nuclear disarmament. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, who took part in the meeting, believed that as long as nuclear arms were in the hands of the Soviet military and not the politicians, they were safe. Powell's years of involvement in nuclear diplomacy had introduced him to many top Soviet commanders, whom he now tended to trust. He distrusted the new wave of political leaders and did not favor the transfer of nuclear weapons from other republics to Russia. With the center still in place and the army still in control, the United States had one—perhaps final—opportunity to achieve something in nuclear diplomacy with the USSR. Bush asked Cheney to prepare a proposal for the reduction of nuclear arsenals. This would help save money and show that the Bush administration was not merely reacting to developments in the Soviet Union. Bush decided to push as hard as possible in an already familiar direction—that of nuclear disarmament. That was what the American people wanted, and Gorbachev was still in a position to deliver. They would try to keep the Soviet Union going as long as possible.
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JAMES BAKER CAME TO
appreciate the scope of the changes in the Soviet Union since the collapse of the coup when he flew to Moscow for the September 10 opening of a human rights conference under the auspices of the Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). He found the experience “surreal.” Next to the Russian White House, he saw barricades and flowers placed in memory of the three young men who had died less than three weeks earlier. At the conference, he listened to a speech by the foreign minister of Lithuania. “If two months ago,” he wrote to George Bush, “someone had told us an independent Lithuanian Foreign Minister would be making a very positive speech to a CSCE meeting in Moscow in September, we would have asked what he was smoking.”

Human rights had been a thorn in the side of the Soviet foreign policy establishment ever since the Helsinki Accords of 1975, when the Soviet Union accepted the obligation to respect human rights on its territory. Ignoring those obligations, the Soviet authorities had jailed political dissidents who tried to monitor human rights in the USSR. This turned the issue into a tool of Western propaganda against the USSR and a dirty word in the Soviet political lexicon. It was only under Gorbachev that Soviet officials began to warm up to the idea of respect for human rights. With dissidents released from prison, running popular fronts, and even taking power in the Baltics and other Soviet republics, the human rights conference in Moscow underscored the enormousness of the change taking place in the Soviet Union.
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