US Foriegn Policy and Defence Spending - 9 February 1990

For some years now, my bedtime reading has been mostly diaries, written by Englishmen or Americans before and during the First World War, and others before and during the Second World War.

It's only now, after four months of the revolutions in Eastern Europe that I've noticed a change in what the diarists write about that is common to all of them.

Before what we call the Great War, and then again in the 20 years between the wars, the diarist is busy putting down what you might call the personal plot of his life, which is what diaries are supposed to be about – his relationships, his travels, his amusements, what he had to eat, his arguments with friends, and his opinions about what his own government is doing. Foreign countries – an Englishman in America, an American in France – came in as refreshments. Descriptions of places, landscapes, historical sites and, always, the oddity of foreigners' ways.

But once the Big War starts, the personal plots begin to run in tandem with the bigger plot abroad. Almost instinctively, they write less and less, almost as if it were tasteless, about their own life, their own discomforts and the disruption of their normal habits.

I find that something of the same sort – is it embarrassment? – overtakes me when I come these days to do A Letter From America. It will pass, but for the time being it seems almost self-indulgent to go on about events, stories, problems, that are exclusively American.

As if anyone outside this country really cared about the fight in Congress over the social security trust fund or the parlous conditions of the underpinning of our cities, what we used to call the grid and now call the infrastructure, the crumbling sewage pipes, water mains, the electrical wiring systems, the very rocky condition of hundreds of great bridges across the rivers of this country which, as the first travellers discovered, is a continent of a thousand rivers.

This sensitivity is not a personal quirk. The new Congress has been in session barely two weeks but on every other issue that comes up for debate or enquiry, somebody expresses a common concern about how the issue will be affected by the reunification of Germany, by Poland's need for capital, by the coming turmoil of the Romanian elections, by the effect on immigration policy of the Soviet's throwing open the gates to departing Jews. And most of all, by the overriding question of Mr. Gorbachev's survival.

And so I find, down from the curiosity and anxieties of Congress, to the men and women in the streets, here in San Francisco, the Chinese are celebrating their New Year. The year of the horse. And a great, brilliant, multi-coloured parade is coming up but the people I run into don't seem to talk much about it or about the coming race for the governorship in California.

The Greek grocer down the street, the next taxi driver, the lawyer friend, a doctor's wife, a caddy, a waiter, two joggers stopping to chat in the little park across the way, they're not breathless with curiosity. It's not like waiting for the invasion of Europe, but they casually and immediately say, not "How are things back in New York?" but, "How do you stand on Gorbachev? Is he going to make it?"

And I've also discovered how deep grow the roots in ordinary people I've known for some time whose national origin has rarely, if ever, come up. The Armenians in a California valley only three hours' east from here are suddenly organising and meeting and subscribing to send money, help – they're not sure what sort of help – to the Armenians in Azerbaijan.

I know a taxi driver in Los Angeles who, for several years, has always picked me up at the airport there, to take me off into the hills to the friends that I stay with. I've known from the beginning that this man came here from Latvia in 1958. He's in his late 50s. But Latvia, as he says, who knows from Latvia? It never comes up.

We talk normally about baseball, football, the latest sporting hero, the density of traffic on the innumerable Los Angeles freeways, but, this time, we were no sooner in his cab than he said, "I don't see how Gorbachev can possibly let Latvia go. The whole Baltic coast is a munitions factory, missiles, tactical nuclear weapons, tanks, the whole enchilada".

Now I don't know whether he's right or wrong but the interesting fact is that for the first time in our acquaintanceship, he talked about the motherland and where it stands in the Soviet turmoil.

It's the same with the Americans from all the other republics, at least with the ones you run into buying groceries, waiters, television rental shops, department stores. I never knew till now that I knew any Lithuanians, Moravians, Georgians, not to mention the Croats and the Serbs who, practically extinguished after the First World War, are coming to life again and wondering if freedom might come to apply to them.

An old historian, long retired, who has not been consulted about affairs for a long time, now gets calls from young historians wanting to bone up on the clauses in the Treaty of Versailles that abolished or fused old nations and set up new ones.

For his part, this old man says ruefully, "It could be that we've moved after 40 years from a post-war world into a pre-war world".

In his gloomier or more pensive moments, he can even foresee a series of uncontrollable uprisings of the old Balkan peoples which, along with the ferment in Czechoslovakia or Romania, and the other rebellious republics could produce such runaway belligerence in the whole of Eastern Europe that Mr Gorbachev, or a successor we supported, might come to call on the Nato allies and the remnants of the Warsaw forces still loyal to him. And that would be a Third World War none of us had imagined.

I've not heard of anyone else who's gone so far or in that direction. The Bush administration, I'm pretty sure, has not, in its most perceptive contingency plans, foreseen American armies battling alongside Mr Gorbachev's forces to bring some sort of order out of the chaos of Eastern Europe.

The White House and the Pentagon are talking still about the Soviet Union as being – under somebody other than Mr Gorbachev – the main potential threat to the United States.

Not, you understand, with anything like the old Reagan bogeyman fear. This administration does genuinely want Mr Gorbachev to succeed all along the line, and has proposed, in the president's budget, cuts in defence, including the closing of many army and navy bases and overseas airfields that were undreamed-of in Mr Reagan's philosophy.

But as we've pointed out at the beginning of every new administration, for Lord knows how many years, the president's budget is a dreamlike blueprint which is at once banished by the Congress in favour of its own ideas of who should get how much, for what.

The Democratic opposition wants more and more drastic cuts in defence spending, their argument being what is by now an old one – that the Cold War is over, Mr Gorbachev is no possible threat to anyone, either on this side of the ocean or in Europe, so why not go ahead and ruthlessly reduce nuclear arms and junk the controversial stealth bomber, for instance, which costs such vast amounts of money?

It's a point worth noting in the Democrats' enthusiasm for stripping the armed forces to pre-Cold War limits that they stress the huge amounts of money that could be saved on nuclear arms, planes and missiles and the holy Star Wars research, because the proposed closing-down of military bases hurts them where they live.

The secretary of defence, Mr Cheney, in testifying on the budget before the appropriate committee the other day, said that before he made up the long list of domestic bases he was going to shut down, not a single congressman had called him and said, "Please close down the one in my constituency".

The Democrats are, in theory, all for closing down the bases but not any that employs the people that vote for them. It's the old joke of where to place the dumps for the disposal of nuclear wastes. Everybody wants to see it done, but not in my backyard.

This, let's not forget, is an election year for a third of the Senate and a whole new House of Representatives. And the closing of bases, not to mention the homecoming of thousands of troops stationed abroad is going to give a big boost to the unemployment rolls.

Between the two conflicting parties on this crucial question of defence spending, the country – the people, according to the polls – go along with Mr Bush and his secretary of defence. The popular wisdom still sees the six-month tumult in Eastern Europe as a rousing battle, or choice, between dictatorship and freedom – freedom being defined as the sudden, glorious arrival of American-type democracy.

The administration, certainly Mr Bush, at first responded in that way, with much congratulating rhetoric but, in private, they have gone far to see other, more complicated, more threatening, alternatives, not the least of which is set out in papers and memoranda reminding the White House and the Pentagon that the defeat of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union as the one controlling political party would signify not simply the end of a 70-year-old tradition of autocratic rule, but the overthrow of centuries in which Russia was ruled by hereditary tsars.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, we should remember, there were multi-party elections for an assembly and when it came to be seated, the Bolsheviks discovered they had only about a third of the seats. So Lenin abolished it.

In shorter words, the Russians have lived through centuries of autocracy, have no experience of a government of several competing parties. The prospect that this huge change will occur in the next few months is, to say the least, very doubtful. Hence, Mr Bush's warning not to let down our guard.

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