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In its unrelenting hostility to Cuba, Nicaragua and Viet Nam, the Bush Administration gives the impression of flying on an automatic pilot that was programmed back in the days when the Soviet Union was still in the business of exporting revolution. Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas and the rulers in Hanoi are all, in varying ways and to varying degrees, disagreeable characters. But so are plenty of other leaders with whom the U.S. deals. The U.S. might be able to cope with these particular bad actors more effectively if it stopped treating them as Soviet clones. That very notion has lost its meaning in the past year.
In general, such American fresh thinking as there has been is too much focused on the question of what the U.S. can do to "help" Gorbachev. There is also the issue of what he can do to help the U.S., its allies and the rest of the world. He has already done a lot, simply by presiding over a Soviet Union that is easier to see anew as a great big country with great big troubles and that is trying to get out of the 20th century in one piece.
The cold war has been not only a multitrillion-dollar (and ruble) expense but also a grand obsession. It has distorted priorities, distracted attention and preoccupied many of the best and the brightest minds in government, academe and think tanks for nearly two generations. There is a long line of other issues awaiting their turn, and some have been waiting none too patiently.
The indebtedness and poverty of the Third World threaten the trend of democracy there. The indebtedness of the U.S., both to itself and to foreigners, threatens its prosperity at home and its influence abroad. The consequences of Japan's emergence as an economic superpower could end up dwarfing the current, suddenly fashionable concern over the reunification of Germany. The U.S. may have won the cold war against the Soviet Union, but it has gone a long way toward losing the trade and technology war with Japan. Meanwhile, the environment, while also newly fashionable as a subject of political rhetoric, is not being treated by policymakers, legislators and citizens with anything like the seriousness and urgency it deserves.
The U.S. and its principal partners have no coherent strategy for dealing with these and other mega-issues. Until now, the cold war provided an alibi.
No longer.
Even as he is thanked by the masses, Gorbachev is quietly cursed, only half- jokingly, by some in the foreign-policy elite for having kicked the centerpiece out from under the big top of American diplomacy. All of a sudden, the think tanks and back rooms of the policymaking establishment are filled with a new kind of head scratching. Some who have spent their careers fretting about the end of the world (the big bang of nuclear Armageddon) are suddenly lamenting "the end of history"; now that the good guys have won and the Manichaean struggle is over, humanity will have nothing but a lot of boring technical and local problems to deal with. It is a silly idea but a telling one, for it underscores the dilemma facing all Western foreign-policy thinkers * and doers, starting with George Bush: the fading of the cold war in and of itself does not provide a road map or a compass for the post-cold war era.