Why it’s in U.S. interest to help former Soviet republics

For over two years we have been warned of impending chaos once the Soviet Communist regime finally collapsed. Yet only now has the Bush administration committed itself to a major aid program. Why?

Much of the answer is found in domestic politics.

George Bush has been a success in foreign policy, but the slumping economy has most Americans demanding more domestic attention. Heading into an election year, Bush’s Democratic and Republican rivals hope to score on the president’s seeming international preoccupation.

Now, in the face of this assault , the administration finally has come out with a clear policy on the former Soviet republics. It was not Bush’s voice, but Secretary of State James Baker’s, that made the policy announcement in a speech this month at Princeton, and the aid plan he described is still sketchy. But, at last the administration has spoken with confidence and authority.

It may have been the campaign of one of Bush’s Republican rivals, Pat Buchanan, that broke the administration’s fever of irresolution. A gentle and affable man in his personal dealings, Buchanan in public cannot resist the thrills of hyperbole. So, out came his 1992 campaign battle cry, “America First” just at the moment Americans were observing the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and remembering the folly of the original “America First.”

That protectionist and isolationist movement in the 1930s damaged the world economy and this country’s defense preparedness. One of the biggest “America First” rallies took place on the night before the Japanese planes hit Hawaii. It is hard to imagine why anyone might think he could construct a reputable Neo-isolationism by shaking the bones of “America First.”

Regardless, Bush must have been pleased to hear the rattle from the graveyard, for Buchanan not only hurt his own cause, but also the isolationist arguments of certain Democrats. Suddenly the president has some new space to be a statesman.

The country should want to give the president some space on this issue. The several billion dollars of mostly in-kind resources the administration plans to deploy to stave off starvation and civil unrest, and to help secure nuclear arsenals in the former Soviet Union, will not stall our economic recovery at home.

It is more likely to test our patience. Conditions approaching anarchy may disillusion our giving spirit. We probably will see some of our effort wasted, some supplies stolen, and a certain amount of bungling at our own end as a novel relief enterprise is set up. But the difficulties only underscore the need.

Moscow television, according to visitors, is showing nightly what happens when government stops functioning in a society without established charities and voluntary associations, let alone businesses.

Much truck, train and plane traffic is halting. Food increasingly is in the hands of hoarders, black-marketeers and gangsters. Many coal shipments are not getting through. Medicine is disappearing, and some hospitals are closing. Chaos threatens, of a kind that we Americans do not understand because we have never experienced anything like it.

America can afford to ship our grain and dairy surpluses a n d must be certain they are delivered to those who need them. We are able to send large quantities of medicine, a n d we have better transportation to get emergency supplies to where they are most essential. We may even find ourselves dropping foodstuffs out of airplane doors as we did to aid another former foe in the Berlin Airlift of 1948.

The administration’s attempts to get our Western allies, including Japan and South Korea, to share the relief burden, and to get the World Bank and International Monetary Fund involved in a long-term stabilization program for the new republics, are as sensible as they are overdue.

However, unmentioned by Baker is one international instrument the United States continues to neglect, the United Nations. U.N. peacekeeping unites–which could help protect food shipments–have proven their worth in the past and do not risk American lives. U.N. nuclear inspectors have shown in Iraq that they have nerve a s well a s knowledge

Yet the United States is still falling behind, for instance, on our financial obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency. This is the U.N. unit responsible for the Iraq nuclear inspections, for helping to thwart nuclear proliferation elsewhere, and for answering the growing number of requests for nuclear-safety assistance in the volatile former Soviet East bloc: all high-priority tasks.

Yet we are at least $20 million overdue in our agreed payments to this small but effective body; not much in our budget, but a lot in theirs.

One stunning danger that results from such oversights, as we learned from the recent visit to Seattle by the lAEA’s director general, Hans Blix, is that Eastern Europe and Russia are at risk of one or more Chernobyl-style nuclear-reactor accidents.

If such accidents happen now, there is little chance of the massive, if inadequate, response that the Soviet central government mounted at Chernobyl in 1986. Instead, new accidents could continue unchecked for weeks, with inestimable medical, economic and environmental results, including worldwide fallout. Surely it is worth payment of a few million dollars to try to help prevent such occurrences.

In the case of existing nuclear weapons, the administration is right to seek consolidation of all missiles and tactical weapons within one republic, Russia. But one hopes we will try to deal simultaneously with nascent issues of unrest in the republics that are home to the weapons now.

If a regional army general or republican officeholder faces a choice of seeing his population starve or selling weapons, technology, and technicians’ talents to an aspiring nuclear state, such as Iran or Libya, we may be unable to stop the transaction in time.

There is one still larger private worry in Washington, the one alluded to by the word “fascism,” which one hears in public warnings.

The greatest popular threat to democratic forces in Russia now comes from the head of the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Shironovskii. Those who have spent time with him say he is a Russian racist, a demagogue hostile to the West, who will apply the traditional Russian cure for anarchy: tyranny.

What he needs are food riots and military support. We alone cannot stop him or someone like him, of course. But for the United States to play a humanitarian role in helping prevent conditions giving rise to such a new and volatile dictatorship– in a country with 30,000 nuclear weapons–would seem a very prudent investment.

It is another irony of this century that the people of the former U.S.S.R., our archrival for 45 years, look most admiringly to the United States as a friend. If we can assist them now in their hour of transition, we will be much closer to a lasting reduction of global military risk and an increase in economic cooperation.

This is the reachable prospect–the reward for so many years of resolute U.S. foreign policy–that must be kept in view through the short-term gloom of our domestic recession.