In his July wanderings, President Odysseus popped up in (of course) Greece, declaring: “In the new world I have discussed, none of us should accept the status quo in Cyprus. And today I pledge that the United States will do whatever it can to help Greece, Turkey and the Cypriots settle the Cyprus problem, and do so this year. " Greeks and Turks are continuing one of the world’s oldest traditions, contesting Cyprus, as Egyptians, Romans, Persians, Venetians and others have done. But Bush is investing his time, which may not matter, and U.S. prestige, which does, in tidying up that tiny island.
His Cyprus digression is symptomatic. He has become precisely the wrong kind of president for this kind of era and his frenetic diplomacy has become a national embarrassment. In the process of virtually abandoning presidential responsibilities regarding affairs within America’s borders, he has become Gorbachev’s poodle, lecturing the Ukraine and other captive nations about the duty of loyalty to the illegitimate government of the unelected Gorbachev.
Bush has been president for just 30 months and already has traveled abroad more than any predecessor. No president left the country until Teddy Roosevelt, Bush’s pinup, visited Panama to see the digging of the ditch that would facilitate the projection of U.S. power to all points of the compass. TR’s nemesis, Woodrow Wilson, was the first president to go to Europe, whither he went to build a new world order, bearing, as a critic noted, four more Commandments (Wilson called them Points) than Moses published.
Because Bush, 67, is bouncy as a boy, we forget he is one of the oldest presidents. Only four (Harrison was 68 in 1841, Taylor 64 in 1849, Buchanan 65 in 1857, Reagan 69 in 1981) have been as old as Bush was (64) when first inaugurated. If Bush serves two terms he will be the second oldest president (second to Reagan) when he leaves office. The fact that his formative years were long ago may go far toward explaining two aspects of his foreign policy, his continuing obsession with arms control and his reactionary support for illegitimate regimes in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
Arms control, which has never significantly enhanced, let alone guaranteed, any nation’s security, is always either impossible or unimportant. When the Soviet Union had hegemonic intentions, arms control was impossible. If the Soviet Union has permanently forsworn such intentions, arms control does not much matter. But we have a treaty, 700 pages of it, including insufficiently defined terms and unverifiable undertakings with a Kremlin that has an unbroken record of cheating.
When the Soviets cheat on the START Treaty (if the Treaty is clear enough to allow clear judgments about compliance), Gorbachev will be declared innocent, just as he is declared innocent of massacres by his regime’s security forces, on the ground that he cannot control his regime. But if that is so, with whom-with what-have we signed an agreement?
The Soviet Union is a peculiar mendicant. While begging for aid it continues to send billions of dollars’ worth of aid to Cuba. And one reason the START Treaty will have a trivial effect on the Soviet ability to devastate the United States is that it permits the poverty-pleading Gorbachev to continue developing five (or six; we do not even know this for sure) new kinds of strategic missiles. The only sure security against a still-militarized Soviet Union is disintegration of that unnatural congeries of captive nations.
That outcome is devoutly desired by the huge majority of Soviet people who despise Gorbachev’s government. But Bush cannot even bring himself to speak clearly on behalf of the 50-year-old U.S. endorsement of sovereignty for the Baltic republics. The Soviet Union cannot make soap but Bush is dragging it into the making of peace in (today Cyprus, tomorrow the world) the Middle East. However, if peace is even remotely possible there, that is only because the Soviet Union is no longer relevant to that region.
During Bush’s July journeys, aides back home revealed that the fiscal 1992 deficit will be $70 billion larger than this year’s, reaching (stay tuned for more upward revisions) $348.3 billion-not counting an additional $131 billion or so masked by the abuse of the social security and other trust funds. Someone might mention this almost half-a-trillion dollar deficit to Bush between his autumn trips to Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan and South Korea.
When children show signs of hyperkinesis, parents ban chocolate donuts and hope that less sugar and more maturity will bring stability. Presidents who can’t sit still are bigger problems. When a quiet moment menaces Bush, quicker than you can say “Cyprus” he grabs a fishing rod or golf club or the wheel of his speedboat. Better he should read. He might start with a speech given in Los Angeles on July 15, when he was gallivanting abroad:
“The Croatian and Slovenian peoples, by majorities in excess of 90 percent, have indicated their wish to withdraw their republics from the Yugoslavian state … As Americans, who believe in government by consent, our sympathies lie naturally with the breakaway republics. It is for the people, not the state, to determine where the boundaries of civil society shall fall. This same principle of self-determination applies to the Soviet Union’s many republics. I am not speaking here of the Baltic States. [They] were illegally occupied by the Soviet Union at the opening of World War II. They are sovereign states by right and should be freed immediately. I am speaking of the Soviet Union’s other republics. If the people of Armenia, of Georgia, and even the Ukraine, in free plebiscites, should vote to leave the Soviet Empire, then they should be allowed to do so. America should not get into the business of preserving the artificial state structures established by monarchs and dictators.”
So said Ronald Reagan.
Reagan, whose politically formative years were FDR’s years, believed in the presidency as an engine of domestic change, and his foreign policy rested on the rhetoric of freedom, not “order.” Bush has achieved complete emancipation from the policies of his predecessor.
