A WORLD TRANSFORMED
By George Bush and Brent Scowcroft
Knopf, 590 pages, $30
`A World Transformed” is in the “just published” category, but already there is a little cult of celebrity for co-author George Bush’s expression ” `dance’ on the Wall.” It is what President Bush refused to do after the rampart of the Eastern bloc, the Berlin Wall, was demolished in 1989. This strategic sensitivity to Russian feelings, in refusing to gloat over the thumping of the Soviet empire, goes to the heart of Bush’s gentlemanly and finely calculated presidency. (German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was not always so delicate. He complained to Bush about the constraints the Soviets wanted to clamp on a reuniting Germany: “What worries me is talk that Germany must not stay in NATO. To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t.”)
This memoir of Bush’s presidency is a joint venture, narrated by Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. A third voice (in a different typeface) represents the combined narrative of both authors. Yet another element is a series of diary entries in Bush’s unmistakable speech. In the midst of the anti-glasnost coup in 1991, after Hurricane Bob has bypassed his family vacation home in Maine, the compulsive diarist records:
“The hurricane’s gone by. Mother and Bar and all are okay. The Soviet Union is in turmoil. Eastern Europe is worried. But life goes on. August nineteenth. A historic day.”
The first of the four crises detailed in the book, the massacre in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, left Bush with the least room for maneuver, though it also highlights his fundamental decency and disarming frankness in the very lengthy letter he addressed to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, pleading his respect for China’s “history, culture and tradition” while asserting American principles such as freedom of speech. He adds a nice touch with “freedom from arbitrary authority.”
Ultimately Bush and Scowcroft saw China as too powerful to alienate by cutting off most-favored-nation trading status. In this Bush was bitterly opposed by the Democratic leadership in Congress, which would, he notes, reverse itself on China’s status in President Clinton’s first term–“So much for bipartisanship.”
“A World Transformed” gathers steam with the next crisis, the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The occupied Baltic states acted first–an obvious first domino, but a difficult one: “(T)he Baltics . . . was the area where we were inclined to apply the most pressure and display the least understanding and where the Soviets were the most paranoid and least willing to accommodate.”
The powerful Baltic-American lobby wanted “not just freedom for the Baltics, but freedom now,” and Bush struggled with Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis, and more successfully with Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene, to point out that “this was not the only question. . . . I wanted Soviet troops out of Poland, and Vaclav Havel should have a chance to fulfill freedom for Czechoslovakia.”
Much of Bush’s strategy was inseparable from his relationship with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Bush grew ever friendlier and more intrigued by Gorbachev, always aware that the Russian was a sincere but deeply flawed reformer, and above all one under constant domestic threat. How long before he was replaced? “We sensed we were running against a clock, but we did not know how much time was left,” Scowcroft writes.
The collapse of the East German state required even greater finesse. Not only was Moscow panicky at the thought of an entire front-line state defecting from the socialist bloc (though Gorbachev, like Bush, knew when not to use force), but some U.S. allies were uncomfortable with the idea of a unified Germany. French President Francois Mitterrand may have been worried, but British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was bouncing off the walls: Would East Germany be in the European Community? Would a unified Germany be in NATO? Thatcher told Bush (“darkly predicted,” actually) that Germany would be ” `the Japan of Europe, but worse than Japan. Japan is an offshore power with an enormous trade surplus. Germany is in the heart of a continent of countries, most of which she has attacked and occupied. Germany has colossal wealth and trade surpluses.’ “
” `We don’t fear the ghosts of the past; Margaret does,’ ” Bush confides to Kohl.
This is as good a point as any to note that while neither Bush nor Scowcroft are great portraitists, they do present world leaders in true colors: Kohl was jovial and had a great military mind, Thatcher was a furious strategist who clearly saw Bush as less her equal than Reagan had been; Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was the Energizer Bunny of allies; Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu was ignored by the Europeans at Group of Seven economic meetings (“a curious cultural gap that I’ve never been able to understand,” Bush writes).
Given the leading role Bush played in the Western coalition’s victory in ejecting Iraqi occupation forces from Kuwait in 1991, one might have expected that story to be the book’s strongest point, but it is not. The invasion and the careful architecture of the alliance–again, always kindly trying not to step on the floundering Gorbachev’s toes–is well told, but the story of this war is well known. Most valuable is the authors’ case against determinism. The victory was certainly not inevitable, and here again Bush’s most frustrating troubles were at home. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) dismissed the crisis as a non-event: ” `one nasty little country invaded a littler but just as nasty country,’ ” and Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) didn’t want to fight, but to “stick to sanctions–a couple of years if necessary.”
Meanwhile, Bush writes, King Hussein of Jordan was telling Thatcher that ” `the Kuwaitis had it coming.’ ” With most Arab allies at their most docile, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens complained that the U.S. was not doing enough to destroy Iraq’s Scud-missile launchers. Arens wanted “a direct link with (Gen. Norman) Schwartzkopf, an Israeli team on one of our aircraft carriers, and, at a minimum, an Israeli general posted at Schwartzkopf’s headquarters,” Scowcroft writes. Of even less help was the incident in which Israeli troops killed 21 Palestinian demonstrators on Temple Mount in Jerusalem; Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir did not consider this excessive force, and he and Bush “shot letters back and forth.”
“Kuwait is liberated,” Bush informed the country on Feb. 27, 1991, and told his diary the next morning: “Still no feeling of euphoria.” Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein portrayed the American cease-fire as a capitulation and stayed in power.
Not long after, Bush’s friend Gorbachev was upstaged, then shoved aside by Boris Yeltsin as the “Evil Empire” came crashing down. America was victorious in three of the four crises Bush describes, but the former president sees that history is a race without a finish line, and his book ends on a note of wistfulness and warning.
