Soviet Policy: Beyond Containment

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This is the third in a series of weekly essays analyzing the issues that the candidates are, or should be, discussing.

For more than four decades, the most important foreign policy challenge facing any President has been managing relations with the other superpower. The Soviet Union is the only state that can threaten America's existence; it is the principal U.S. rival for influence around the world; and its totalitarian political system is anathema to American values.

Those facts of international life remain, but today they do not seem quite the immutable laws of nature they did four years ago, when Americans last chose a President. Since then, the Soviet Union has acquired a stunningly new and different leadership of its own. Mikhail Gorbachev is experimenting with ideas that could lead to reforms in the internal regime and improvements in the external behavior of the U.S.S.R. The potential for profound change in the nature of the Soviet challenge demands a thorough, imaginative rethinking of the American response.

With George Bush and Michael Dukakis each trying to establish his toughness, the question of how to cope with the other superpower has too often been reduced to its military dimension. Last week they were back at it, carping over the relative merits of the Stealth bomber and the MX. Bush reiterated his charge that Dukakis was soft on defense. In response, Dukakis doffed a helmet and rode in an M1 tank. In a speech in Chicago, Dukakis conveyed a conservative caution about Gorbachev's reforms and said the U.S. should be prepared to use economic incentives to induce less Soviet repression and international mischief making.

Before Nov. 8 the voters should have a clearer idea of what a Bush or a Dukakis doctrine would be for dealing with the Soviet challenge in the Gorbachev era.

The next President will inherit an accretion of earlier guiding principles named after his various predecessors. Joseph Stalin's probes provoked the Truman Doctrine: "It must be the policy of the U.S. to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." The U.S. set about, through a combination of diplomacy, economic assistance and military alliances, to create an international environment that would "contain" the Soviet empire within its own boundaries, forcing the Marxist-Leninist-Stali nist system to stew in its own poisonous juices. The author of that strategy, George Kennan, believed Soviet Communism "bears within it the seeds of its own decay." Containment, he wrote in 1947, could eventually lead to "the gradual mellowing of Soviet power." But until then, he stressed, "there can be no appeal to common purposes."

In the years that followed, the Soviets continued to push, and the U.S. looked for ways to exert counterpressure. The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 was a vow to use American military force against Communist aggression in the Middle East. After Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba, U.S. policymakers dusted off the 136-year-old Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. (The original version, appropriately, had been occasioned in part by concern over czarist claims on territory along the Pacific coast.)