America Abroad

When Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush met in Madrid last week, they had plenty to talk about but little business to transact. It is no longer clear what authority Gorbachev has to enter into international agreements, or even what the constitutional procedure is for ratifying the strategic-arms- reduction treaty the two Presidents signed last July. That was barely three months ago, but it was, as they say in Moscow, B.C. -- before the coup. Since then, with the rapid disintegration of the U.S.S.R., the very term Soviet leader has become something of an oxymoron. So has Soviet Union.

Two weeks ago, the vice president of the Russian Federation, Alexander Rutskoi, quietly informed U.S. Ambassador Robert Strauss about an early version of a speech that had been prepared for Boris Yeltsin to deliver last Monday, on the eve of Gorbachev's departure for Madrid. The draft declared the U.S.S.R. defunct and Yeltsin's government the protector of 25 million ethnic Russians in the outlying republics.

That message would have intensified fears that resurgent Russian imperialism would fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Soviet power. Under the pretext of "protecting" their ethnic kinsmen, some Russian nationalists might try to seize other republics' territory. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the spectacularly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, has even made claims against Poland and Finland on the grounds that they once belonged to the Czars. You're not likely to dismiss Zhirinovsky as a nut case if you're a Pole, a Finn -- or one of the 6 million Russians who voted for him in the republic's presidential election last June.

Strauss notified Washington about what Yeltsin might say, and Bush fired back instructions for him to register official American concern with Rutskoi and Yeltsin's foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev -- in effect, an appeal to make the speech less provocative. In the version Yeltsin finally delivered, he announced a new round of radical economic reforms, virtually dissolved most of the Soviet ministries and nominated himself to the vacant post of Russian prime minister. But he stopped just short of proclaiming Russia the successor state to the U.S.S.R., effective immediately.

The situation in the former Soviet Union is the most dangerous in the world today, much more so than the one in the Middle East. In fact, it was precisely the late, unlamented U.S.-Soviet rivalry that invested the Arab-Israeli conflict with its greatest peril. As long as the two armed camps each had a glowering superpower at its back, a regional crisis could escalate to global conflagration. The end of the cold war has made progress toward a peaceful settlement more imaginable but also, in one sense, less crucial. While there is every reason to hope for success in the new round of talks, it is comforting to know that if failure there leads to another Middle East war, U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces will not go on alert against each other.