A Sour Look at the 'American Century'
By Robert G. Kaiser
Moscow -- After the 1996 presidential election in Russia, Mikhail S. Gorbachev looked about as dead as Elvis Presley. He had insisted on running that year, though many warned him that this was fruitless. He was rewarded with the votes of 0.51 percent of the electorate. His future was behind him. Foreigners continued to show him respect, but his countrymen paid him no heed.
No longer. Russian television filled his office with lights and cameras last Thursday for an extended interview. Earlier in the week he appeared on the popular Echo Moscow radio station. A long interview appeared last month in the weekly Argumenty I Facti. "The situation has changed here, thank God," he told this visitor, who followed the TV interviewers into his office at the Gorbachev Foundation on Leningrad Prospekt. "I can talk here now." He was clearly delighted to again have a Russian audience, even if, as he seems to believe, his political career is over.
But this man who did so much to end both the Cold War and Soviet communism is far from delighted with the state of the world. "Politics is being conducted in a terribly clumsy way everywhere," he complained -- no leadership, no creativity. He was especially upset with the United States, a country he now visits regularly (usually to make speeches for money -- money he needs to maintain the Gorbachev Foundation).
"One serious disease is the inferiority complex. In Russian we call it a lousy condition. And there's also a victor's complex. I think that our much-respected United States finds itself a victim of this complex at the moment." The proof of this, Gorbachev said, was America's decision to revert to bombs to try to resolve the crisis in Kosovo.
"Tell me," he said impatiently, his intense brown eyes burrowing in on his guest, "is Kosovo really such a big conflict that it required that all the power of NATO -- which now commands two-thirds of the world's military forces -- should be aimed at it?" Gorbachev thought the policy was doomed to fail -- indeed, had already failed. The bombing hadn't forced Slobodan Milosevic to accept NATO's terms and hadn't in any way helped the Kosovars -- quite the contrary.
He interpreted the bombing campaign as the result of a decision by NATO to "take on the job of ruling the world, including even the functions of the gendarme. This is how it was perceived. . . . Europe was humiliated. Russia was humiliated. And China." To Gorbachev, a war made no sense.
"If the president got so nervous -- if he is so vulnerable to psychological moods and depression -- then he should submit his resignation," Gorbachev said of President Clinton. "You can't lose your nerve" and be a president, he said, recalling his own time of trial when a group of Communists tried to oust him in a failed coup attempt in 1991. (That coup attempt "was not like Monica-gate," he observed.)
The issue behind the crisis in Yugoslavia, Gorbachev said, is how to accommodate the desires of many ethnic groups for self-determination when they live in recognized states dominated by some other group. He called it the question of "how to reconcile self-determination, political independence and the territorial issue -- the state."
"This question hasn't been solved yet," Gorbachev said, noting many examples of ethnic minorities trying to assert self-determination or independence from established governments -- from Chechens in Russia to Kurds in Turkey and Palestinians in Israel. "All the more reason why methods like this [bombing] shouldn't be used."
Gorbachev offered no defense of Milosevic and sharply criticized the governments of Europe for letting the crisis in Yugoslavia drag on for 10 years. At the same time, he said that other cases of strife between ethnic groups within one nation often took many years to resolve. The Middle East was a case in point. "Yasser Arafat used to be identified as the leader of a terrorist organization, and now he is a Nobel [peace prize] laureate," Gorbachev (also a Nobel laureate) observed. "This is what the world is like," he said. "The way out [of such situations] is not as simple as they wanted it to be in Washington."
Gorbachev heard Bill Clinton give a speech last year in which Clinton expressed the hope that the 21st century, like the 20th, would be "an American century."
"Then where should Russia go?" Gorbachev asked. "To Mars? Or where? What about China? If you translate this goal into policy, it becomes obvious at once that it's a dangerous policy."
Gorbachev said American policy resembled the policies of his forebears among Soviet leaders. The idea of a world dominated by America "would be a repetition of our Communist utopia, when we tried, through a global Communist revolution, to make everybody happy -- with consequences familiar to all of us."
The end of the Cold War opened the way to a safer, saner world, Gorbachev said, exuding pride in his own part in that process. But he believes the world's political leaders have been unable to exploit that opening. "Frankly speaking, I am deeply worried by what is going on," he said.
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Carl Remick