Out with a Bang

GEORGE BUSH HAS NEVER been much on quoting, let alone trying to rewrite, great poetry. Consciously or unconsciously, though, he now seems preoccupied with turning one of T.S. Eliot's most quoted lines on its head. In The Hollow Men, Eliot predicted that the world would end "not with a bang but a whimper." Bush appears determined to have his world -- or his presidency, which for him is the same thing -- finish with a very big foreign policy bang.

The President wound up 1992 and welcomed 1993 with a kind of 16,600-mile victory tour. The last TV image of his tenure, or so he might have hoped, to stick in people's minds would be the Sunday ceremony in Moscow, where he and President Boris Yeltsin were to sign the most sweeping nuclear-weapons- reduction treaty ever concluded. The accord does not quite justify Yeltsin's description of it as "the document of the century." The collapse of the Soviet Union has greatly reduced the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the prime danger has shifted from missiles raining on Washington and Moscow to nuclear proliferation or the nuclear capability being built by states like North Korea and Iran. Still, the START II treaty will in effect wipe out decades of an escalating arms race by reducing the number of U.S. and Russian warheads to the levels of the 1960s and 1970s. It is an accomplishment that any President, American or Russian, can view with pride.

But START II was only the end of a remarkable week for Bush. He flew to the Moscow summit from Somalia, where he had welcomed the New Year by visiting U.S. troops and the Somalis they are helping. One was a skeletal child in a refugee center who is nine, or so a camp aide told Bush, but has the size of a five-year-old. Essentially a photo opportunity, the visit still served to underline a major policy challenge that Bush will leave for his successor: the use of American military force for purely humanitarian missions in countries where the U.S. has no economic or strategic interests at stake.

Even as he packed for Somalia and Moscow, Bush issued warnings to two aggressors. After a U.S. plane shot down an Iraqi jet over the no-fly zone the U.N. imposed in southern Iraq, the President warned Saddam Hussein not to think he could take advantage of the impending change of Administration in Washington to test international restraints.

More important, and more problematic, Bush issued the first explicit threat to use military power in the Balkans. In a letter to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic that was purposely leaked, Bush bluntly stated that "in the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the United States will be prepared to employ military force" -- and not just "against the Serbians in Kosovo" but also "in Serbia proper." Kosovo is a province where, it is widely feared, Milosevic might start Bosnia-style "cleansing" of the ethnic Albanians, who constitute 90% of the population, an action that could well ignite a wider Balkan war.

It would have been an impressive flurry for a President looking forward to pursuing foreign policy initiatives through four more years of power. It seemed unprecedented in the case of a Commander in Chief for whom New Year's Eve marked the beginning of his last three weeks in office.