President Bush showed the wiliness of the ”Bush Doctrine” last week as he went on his first Cold War offensive, drinking cold vodka and delivering warm toasts to his communist hosts.
Those Eastern European nations that allow political variety and private markets and decentralize their economies will be rewarded, he declared.
And those that don`t can stew in their own economic failure.
Bush was concerned not to antagonize communist hard-liners in the Soviet Union. He didn`t overpromise the people in Poland and Hungary, the two East bloc states he visited early in the week.
But his message was understood and appreciated by many who heard it.
”When someone is starving you just don`t give them fish, but give them a fishing pole,” said George Konkogy-Thege, a graduate of Karl Marx University in Budapest, Hungary, who gave a variation of a familiar saying as he stood in the steamy, jostling crowd at the university to hear Bush.
Several weeks ago, in a speech to the Polish-American enclave in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck, Bush declared that his goal was the reintegration of the communist world into the community of nations.
White House Chief of Staff John Sununu says ”the birth of the Bush Doctrine” was at the President`s inauguration in January, when Bush, after speaking of conciliation with Congress, also said he was extending his hand to other nations.
Considering the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981, and the stark black-and-white film of Soviet tanks rolling into Prague in 1968 and Budapest in 1956, the desire to make Europe whole again is an ambitious, perhaps naive goal that depends totally on the Soviet Union.
”We`re walking a very fine line,” a senior administration official said late last week. ”We`re trying to wean countries out of the communist bloc, something that hasn`t happened since 1945, and it depends largely on Soviet tolerance.”
So far, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev seems willing to tolerate that, though in France 10 days ago, he issued a mild warning that nations under Soviet influence may reform but must still remain socialist. ”The overcoming of socialism,” he said, could lead to ”confrontation, if not something worse.”
Still, the Soviet leader, whose own problems include a stricken economy, ethnic turbulence in the Soviet Union and restive client-states in Eastern Europe, also talks of a ”common European home.”
A spirit of competition with Gorbachev seemed to be prompting Bush, but each day he spent in Eastern Europe this week he repeated, in one fashion or another, that he did not come to irritate or threaten.
That was because the ghost of China hovered over every stop.
”We know every reform is easily reversible,” a White House adviser said. ”We don`t want to get them nervous.”
The political sophistication of average Polish citizens was also evident as they related their situation to pro-democracy student protests in Beijing. ”Their tragedy is our tragedy. We are afraid of it,” said Jan Jablonski, a 51-year-old worker who listened to Bush`s speech under the stark memorial outside the gate of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, a reminder of the antigovernment demonstrators killed there in 1970.
Partly in response to that, Bush advised the Poles, who gave him an affectionate welcome, that both ”courage and restraint” is needed.
If the speeches fell short of inspiring, the President`s advisers claimed it was intentional, that no speech be too strident, either.
European news media reaction was favorable, and Sununu, conscious of the political reaction in the U.S., claimed that other leaders had complimented Bush for his ”feel for Europe.”
Indeed, it was Bush`s second successful trip to Europe in less than two months. In the first, he deflected a confrontation with West Germany at the NATO summit in Brussels.
That disagreement ended in a compromise to put off negotiations with the Soviets on battlefield nuclear weapons in Europe until some initial progress was made in talks on limiting conventional forces.
The administration also linked talks on conventional arms with economic promises last week when Secretary of State James A. Baker III announced a new NATO proposal to reduce combat aircraft and helicopters in Europe.
Bush`s ad hoc policy of offering incentives to lure communist nations staggering under heavy military budgets and poorly functioning economies prompted some debate about the amounts of money he was offering.
If reforms continue in Poland, where shoppers have to stand in line for salt and sugar, the nation of 37 million is to get a $100 million investment fund for its private markets. Hungary is slated for a similar $25 million infusion.
”There is a problem that if we get a lot of money at the wrong time, the communist system gets strength. Then they become more arrogant and it stops the process of reform,” suggested Stanislaw Obertaniec, a newly elected Solidarity member in the Senate from the industrial region of Salesia in western Poland.
”I`m divided,” he said. ”First I think Poland needs a plan like the Marshall Plan. But as an opposition member I ought to be careful to whom you give the money, to see first if they`re sincere.”
He added that many brigades of Soviet troops are stationed in his province, a steelmaking center, and then he pointedly made a comparison, saying the only U.S. presence there is in the form of a $1 million grant for a local clinic to diagnose breast cancer.
Bush, after a much photographed but somewhat stilted lunch at the home of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, told reporters, ”I rejoiced in his hospitality.”
The President appeared to take away the same feeling from Poland and from Hungary, though the advancement of his doctrine of friendly persuasion shouldn`t be overstated.
Hungary, for instance, is much further along toward a market-oriented economy than Poland. On the other hand, its nine opposition parties have not coalesced into a strong or coherent alternative to the communist government, as Solidarity has in Poland.
And Solidarity has another tricky problem. It doesn`t want to be enticed too quickly into the Polish power structure for fear of leaving itself open to criticism for the inevitable future disruptions of inflation and unemployment. The Bush plan does not and cannot solve any of those problems alone, and the administration showed a foreign policy sophistication of its own when the President kept insisting he wanted to help each nation to help itself.
The extension of the Bush doctrine elsewhere in Eastern Europe also may take some time.
There is a large geographic difference, to cite one complication. Hungary, for instance, shares no border with the West, but Poland is the traditional buffer between Russia and Germany. Any change in Poland-especially Bush`s call for the Soviets to withdraw their troops there-is likely to be viewed with more suspicion than a withdrawal request from the government in Budapest.
Next in line to feel the lure of the Bush doctrine might be, in descending order, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Bulgaria.
Yugoslavia, which is not part of the Warsaw Pact, has gone its own mixed economic way and Albania, once tied to Maoist China, is a closed society that one administration official said is ”off the map.”
Without tying his name to the doctrine, Bush had raised the issue of helping Poland and Hungary in Paris at the annual economic summit of the world`s seven richest nations last week. But the difference in political and economic agendas quickly became evident when France insisted on introducing questions about a future North-South summit between the world`s richest and poorest states. The U.S. was trying to avoid that.
Beneath all of this, for all the warmth with which crowds greeted Bush, lies the broader specter of a weakened U.S. role in Europe.
Europeans are not holding their breath for U.S. leadership on Eastern Europe. West Germany has been restructuring its loans to Poland for several years.
And while Bush campaigned last year as an environmentalist, the European environmentalists known as ”Greens” have been campaigning for years and doubled in strength in last month`s European Parliament election.
As the continent prepares for 1992, when the nations of Western Europe are to remove most of their trade and employment barriers, they will become even more reliant on one another and less on the United States.
