1989 Soviet-Chinese summit - 17 February 1989

Does anybody remember 4 January 1980, a date that is already impressed on the history books and can be checked for its stunning effect on Washington by any researcher who cares to study the flaring newspaper headlines of 5 January 1980.

The President of the United States proclaimed an extremely serious threat to peace and at once announced a series of punishing measures against the aggressor – first an embargo upon the sale of American grain and high technology, on oil and gas to the Soviet Union.

The following April, at the president’s request, the United States Olympic Committee voted to boycott the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow and no Americans took part. All this was done by President Carter in angry response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The high moral indignation of Americans was pretty soon exhausted – in the farming states of the Midwest and the Great Plains anyway when people found they were raising wheat and maize to rot in silos or to be sold at alarmingly low prices – but it took nearly three years for the next president, Mr Reagan to lift the embargo on oil and gas.

So last Wednesday, 15 February 1989, the last Soviet soldiers went home from Afghanistan after a nine-year experience that Mr Gorbachev himself called “a bleeding wound”. There were elegies on the tube and in the papers and many of them, remembering America’s bleeding wound in Vietnam, were even a touch sympathetic.

But what was most notable – there was no gloating in Washington, no "I-told-you-sos" and, since Mr Reagan is no longer in the White House, no applauding mention of "freedom fighters", a phrase that during the past eight years had come to be applied to any army, band of mercenaries, rabble of guerrillas, that fought a government the United States opposed.

On the contrary, most despatches from Moscow and Kabul and the following editorials were busy bracing their readers for the dreaded intensifying of the Afghan civil war, but in the administration, in the Pentagon, in the State Department and no doubt in Mr Bush’s new National Security Council, the Soviet-Afghan war was being earnestly for lessons, the main lesson being one that Americans very reluctantly came to learn over the years in Vietnam. It was a lesson the British discovered too late in the American War of Independence and Napoleon in Haiti – that a crack professional army, if it does not win quickly, is no match for hit-and-run guerrillas fired by nationalism on their own ground.

Edward Gibbon put it brutally and pungently about the last Roman expeditions against the northern barbarians. “All things became adverse to the Romans, their armour heavy, the waters deep, nor could they wield in that uneasy situation their weighty javelins. The barbarians, on the contrary, were inured to encounters in the bogs.”

In the latest adventure of a high-technology army fighting the barbarians, there was only one challenge to the moral drawn by an American military commentator. The moral is “Conventional armies lose unconventional wars.” The challenge is the Stinger,the American-made anti-aircraft missile fired from the shoulder. It was introduced just over two years ago and, for now anyway, the consensus is that the witheringly effective Stingers marked the turning point of the war.

But there’s another element much more difficult to pin down in the American restraint in commenting on the Soviet failure. It’s the stature in the United States, and among the Western allies, of Mr Gorbachev.

As one old soldier put it, it would be senseless at this point to bate or crow over the first Soviet peacemaker. Let’s get it over with and back to Geneva. I believe it would have been a very different story and a very different emotional response in Washington if the humiliated leader had been Brezhnev or Khrushchev.

As it is I’m quite sure that both Mr Bush and his Secretary of State Mr Baker would come down hard on a member of the administration who dared to mutter anything about the evil empire. Mr Baker, by the way, has just been discovering, in a whizzing tour of America’s allies, how widespread is the European respect for Mr Gorbachev and how keen the hopes for his survival.

Mr Baker is of course no newcomer to foreign affairs. Probably no American of either party has had a more thorough briefing in the state of Soviet-American relations over the past eight years as Reagan’s chief of staff and secretary of the treasury, and also as the oldest friend of Mr Bush during his years as head of the CIA and as vice president, but I gather that Mr Baker’s recent trip to Europe banished any prejudice he might have had that this serious and sympathetic view of Mr Gorbachev was the monopoly of a single political party, or of parties edging towards the left.

I’ve been looking over a survey of foreign editors around the world on what they, in their necks of the woods, considered the biggest news stories of 1988. It took a month or more to collect the responses and they go from two international news services, American-owned, both of which put the American presidential election at the top of the list, but then on through London, Luxemburg, through Europe, out to Nigeria, Hong Kong and China.

The most striking thing, once you get away from the polls of American editors, is how low in the rating of importance is the American election. Americans, of course, are not alone as a great power in assuming that the rest of the world thinks first of the effect of some local upheaval on American opinion.

I’ve been mumbling tactfully for years to some American friends the truism that people think first about themselves and their own lives and that in many places on earth people don’t give a first thought, let alone a second, to America or what it thinks of them. But even I was surprised at the answers that came in from these overseas editors.

Here, from a news service based in London, the most important story of the year: Gorbachev’s speech at the United Nations. Second, the PLO’s recognition of Israel, three, end of the Iran-Iraqi war, four, toxic waste dumping, five, the agreement between Namibia and Angola, six, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, seven, the earthquake in Armenia, eight, Bush’s election.

The editors of the leading Hong Kong weekly put as the top six stories: Mr Gorbachev’s unilateral arms cuts, his withdrawal from Afghanistan, his rapprochement with China, the beginning of his talks with the Japanese, his pressure on Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia and on Cuba to get out of Angola. Nine more points down, at the bottom of the list, Bush elected President of the United States.

In Costa Rica, what would you guess was the top story of the year? A stalemate in Nicaragua, the disputed Mexican elections? Not at all. Number one, the proclamation of a Palestinian state, followed by the bombing of the Pan-American jet in Scotland, then the Bush election. In China you’d... I’d certainly think that the decision to hold a Chinese-Soviet summit would be the first, second and third biggest story. It’s number eight. At the top is the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and then the American-Soviet agreement to destroy intermediate-range missiles.

The Associated Press, which serves more newspapers worldwide than any other agency took a separate survey of all its overseas subscribers and the top of the stories for 1988 were these four in order: the United States-Soviet summit in Moscow, the end of the Iran-Iraqi war, the Gorbachev party shake-up and his continuing reforms, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Bush triumph came fifth.

Of course every region is bound to feature political crises or natural disasters or whatever in its own corner of the world. Still, the constant of this survey through Europe and Asia is the overriding fascination with Mr Gorbachev and his actions at home and abroad, and along with the fascination, the feeling which swamps party lines that the success of his revolution is devoutly to be wished.

Everyone knows by now that the watchword of Mr Reagan’s policy towards his new-found friend Mr Gorbachev was “Trust but verify” and it’s certainly the watchword of President Bush, as of his lieutenant Mr Jim Baker, the agile, patient Texan who is not given to spurts of wishful thinking.

But it would be a mistake for Europeans to think that the new administration will not be responsive to new Soviet initiatives or be laggard in offering its own. If, as one foreign editor suggested, 1988 was the most hopeful year for world peace since 1945 that hope is sustained in part by the strong hope of the Bush administration that Mr Gorbachev will survive to succeed.

There’s one point about that worldwide survey of editors which amazed me – the almost casual attention given to the announcement of a Chinese-Soviet summit. Seventeen years ago, at the end of his life, the late Walter Lippman, the seer of American political commentators, was asked what was the worst catastrophe that could happen to the world.

He said “China on the loose”, and I quoted that bleak line at the end of a talk, but then added my own coda, thus, "I can think of something worse – the possibility that China and the Soviet Union, deciding in a year or two that they have more to lose by being at odds than being together, might conclude a pact as unthinkable as the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 which guaranteed the Second World War, as the second get-together would herald the end, or at the best, the last stand of the west."

Well I hope there are more substantial reasons than a trust in Mr Gorbachev for believing that a Soviet-Chinese rapprochement will be anything but the nightmare I feared.

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