1989: A Truly Presidential Agenda

1989: A TRULY___________ PRESIDENTIAL AGENDA George Lisha liberal" or "conservative," the new president of the United States will have to act in a policy universe in which the simple ideological polarities of the Reagan and Brezhnev eras are being replaced in all quarters by a new set of no less contrasting realistic and Utopian visions. If he is to demonstrate leadership—as opposed to mere competence—he will have to shape a new, bipartisan foreign policy consensus, and he will have to show the will and the ability to break with established practice if the American people—and other concerned peoples— are to have a real opportunity to learn from trying antecedents. If proponents of policies are to mediate between past and present, they will have to resist the temptation to stand on precedent (all too easily paraded as realism) and make room for fresh precepts and propositions (always vulnerable to charges of utopianism). The larger demands reflect the urgency of relating U.S. foreign policy to the reform effort going on inside the Soviet Union. The question whether the Gorbachev revolution can survive long enough to have a chance to succeed is of a piece with the question whether the next U.S. president can and will act soon enough to initiate an equally far-reaching foreign policy revolution. To do this, he will have to overcome, no less than his Soviet peer, those who would preserve their influence or interests by adhering to a self-confirming vision ofworld reality. Both newly elected presidents had better join forces because, were the Gorbachev revolution to be thwarted in a spectacular fashion, today's Soviet conservatives might George Liska is professor of political science at SAIS and the Homewood campus of TheJohns Hopkins University. His earlier contributions to the SAIS Review were among the essays collected in Rethinking U. S. -Soviet Relations (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Michael Clark has edited this article out of a longer manuscript. 35 36 SAIS REVIEW well appear in retrospect as but the moderate precursors to the extremists who would ride a domestic wave of reaction to despairing action abroad. In the event, today's unyielding American conservatives might well live to see the Soviet power system dissolved, but only after the United States had paid the price of military victory. When anticipating the international implications of the Gorbachev revolution, one must begin by realizing that, like all issues critical for high policy, the reform issue is a matter ofspace and time. An effort to reform or transform an existing order that is hurried through in the face of mounting temporal and geopolitical pressures is more likely to prove disruptive at home and abroad than a reform undertaken in a more elastic setting. The attitude of the West— above all the openness, excessive caution, or covert hostility of the United States—will thus be as decisive as or more decisive than the domestic reasons for success or failure in determining the kind ofheightened self-assertion abroad the Gorbachev era will give rise to: the milder complement to success or harsher compensation for failure. The challenge is accordingly to devise an American strategy capable ofaccommodating the Soviet reform process while enhancing truly vital U.S. interests , reappraised by architects willing to consult long-range historical antecedents in order to see beyond immediate outcomes in time and reorder strategic priorities in light ofreconfigured perceptions ofgeopolitical space. Such a farseeing strategy would supplement, and should on occasion supplant, the pragmatic approach of policy managers who seldom look beyond the technological and operational requirements of a constant measure of sufficient, or also superiority-conferring, security. Fixated on the immediate geopolitical setting of policy, they are incapable of adjusting to more than marginal variations in rising and declining tension . This problem-solving approach is least likely to produce a radical reexamination of national options, unlike one that seeks to reconcile the military and strategic requirements of physical security with the material needs of economic prosperity in a political context that is recognized as independently changing and deliberately changeable. This difference between Gorbachev's approach to the Soviet institutional and economic crisis and the United States' approach to policy...