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Then there's the question of prepositioning for the postwar order. Bush rightly fears that if Saddam lives to fight another day, the U.S.'s friends -- especially Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia -- will be in danger. Gorbachev calculates, just as correctly, that if he helps Iraq avert a cataclysmic defeat, the Soviet Union will have considerable influence over, and claim on, a state that everyone agrees must remain a major player in the area. He will also have enhanced Soviet standing in the eyes of those countries, like Pakistan, where opposition to the anti-Saddam coalition is growing.
Finally, Bush and Gorbachev have different objectives at the most personal level. So far, Bush has benefited from his role as a war President. He hopes to expunge forever the word wimp from the vocabulary of his critics. Gorbachev, by contrast, desperately needs to refurbish his credentials as a peacemaker. In December he could not even go to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize because of all his troubles at home. After troops from the Ministry of Interior slaughtered unarmed Lithuanians last month, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, who won the prize in 1975, said her late husband's name should be stricken from any list of laureates that included Gorbachev's.
Now, thanks to the Baghdad-Moscow shuttle, Gorbachev is getting the sort of headlines he's used to, as a bold wheeler-dealer rather than as a brutal head cracker.
While Gorbachev's objectives are different from Bush's on many points and incompatible on some, they're not, at root, necessarily directed against the U.S. That is the distinguishing feature of the current, and probably coming, phase of Soviet-American relations. It's also the key difference from the past. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev all defined Soviet gain in terms of Western, and more specifically American, loss. Gorbachev has shown that while he will go his own way when he feels it necessary, he will also look for areas where he and Bush can move in tandem. Call it Soviet Palmerstonism. It leaves plenty of room for tension, but it's still a big improvement on the perpetual enmity of the cold war.