The current of power that for nearly 50 years ran between Pennsylvania Avenue and Red Square is sputtering in irrelevance. On the day after the leadership of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union voted to surrender its 72-year stranglehold on political power, the official American response to the momentous development no longer mattered.
President Bush, on the West Coast last week to carry water for his defense budget and the preposterous Strategic Defense Initiative, assumed a cautious pose, and that may not be the worst stance he could take.
Events are in the saddle inside the Soviet Union and the nations of the tattered Warsaw Pact. The ruminations of elected officials, academics and governmental timeservers ring hollow as the real message is delivered by the citizenry in the squares of Moscow, Prague, East Berlin and Bucharest.
Despite his State of the Union rhetoric, Bush had no more to do with the Revolution of `89 than did Oprah Winfrey. He is running to the front of the same parade that threatens to stampede Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
All around Bush are men who quiver in the absence of an enemy. The Washington-to-Moscow bipolar world that existed for 40 years supplied a surety that has been exploded by masses of humanity walking toward democracy and economic reform.
”There is a sense among people right now that they can achieve anything, or stop anything, by popular initiative,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former senior National Security Council aide to Henry Kissinger.
”Certainly that was the feeling in Germany. The wave of history came on a wave of people. They have accomplished things no one thought possible, or certainly that no one could have predicted.”
Like many, Sonnenfeldt believes the next steps for Eastern European countries-legislatures and constitutions and elections-will require more traditional, institutional ways of doing business.
”Not everything can be left to the streets,” says Sonnenfeldt, now a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, a centrist Washington think tank. ”Countries will necessarily get into the business of building up structures for their societies.”
Whatever happens, checking in with official sources or self-proclaimed experts is a fool`s errand, at least for now. No more vivid example of the phenomenon exists than the saga of Egon Krenz, a clean-shaven East German bureaucrat with an allegedly reformist bent.
After the old East German regime collapsed in November, the American government thought Krenz showed promise as a leader. Thinking the same way, the American press chronicled his rise to power.
Nobody checked with the East German people, who quickly rejected Krenz and plunged him back into oblivion. After the drama of the Berlin Wall, they were not inclined to follow the lead of a Communist timeserver, no matter how smooth his reformist rhetoric.
”Most of this official response from the White House or the Congress or the State Department is pretty perishable stuff,” Sonnenfeldt says.
”Too much was made, I think, of Bush`s supposedly tepid response to the collapse of the Berlin Wall last November. Events were moving at a dizzying rate.”
Sonnenfeldt, who served in a foreign policy capacity in every administration between Kennedy and Reagan, has a theory as to why just about everyone missed the story in the Warsaw Pact.
”You talk about a bipolar world,” he says. ”The main thing we were wrong about was the fragility of the other pole, the state of the Soviet Union.
”There was a belief that, as with all previous totalitarian states, it would take a total war to alter that state. In the end, it was exposed as a house of cards.”
For the historic moment, conventional ways of doing business are as uncertain as conventional wisdom. For that reason alone, keeping out of harm`s way in Eastern Europe is likely the best approach for Bush. After five years of reform, Gorbachev clings to power in Moscow. A former shipyard worker and a former journalist are holding the reins in Poland. A playwright is the president of Czechoslovakia.
None of this makes sense to the foreign-policy experts. None of this computes to the men and women schooled in telling Bush how to think about the world.
Many of them have transferred their expertise to China, where they`re assuring Bush he`s right to pander to the aging hardliners responsible for last June`s slaughter in Tiananmen Square.
In Sonnenfeldt`s words, ”A lot of presumptions and premises didn`t turn out to be good ones.” That assessment could serve as an epilogue for the Revolution of `89 and beyond.
