Bush's slow reaction.

ONE MONTH before the coup attempt in the Soviet Union, President Bush met with leaders of the three Baltic nations in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. In addition to Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, Chief of Staff John Sununu, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and Deputy Security Advisor Robert Gates were in attendance. But Bush dominated the meeting. The first words out of his mouth were somewhat defensive. "This is the fifth meeting we've had with Baltic leaders in the last year," he told them.

Maybe so, but the meeting had always been awkward. Although the United States has never recognized the Soviet annexation of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia--Baker lies to note that the three Baltic flags still fly in the State Department lobby with those of all the other nations of the world--the Bush Administration found itself in the position of withholding recognition from the governments these countries have freely chosen for themselves on the odd grounds that this would be injurious to reform in the Soviet Union. Aware of Bush's caution, the Baltic leaders did not ask for recognition then, but they did ask for the White House to nudge Mikhail Gorbachev in the right direction. This they never got. According to Baker, it was up to the Balts to find a way for Gorbachev to "save face."

When they quoted this line at a press conference after leaving the White House, Baker denied having said it, and at a later meeting in Berlin with the foreign ministers of these same states he expressed some irritation that his comments were made public. The incident is significant, not so much for any effect on policy but for what it reveals about the Administration's mindset going into that dramatic week in August. The idea was that reform and democracy were emanating from Gorbachev and the Kremlin and that the various Republics were irritants, a theme Bush gratuitously sounded in his speech in Kiev.

Dangerous Tilt

NOW, it's not fair to blame Bush for not foreseeing the power grab in Moscow. But it is fair to note that the way events played out demonstrated that the President and his key advisors (the exceptions being Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Vice President Dan Quayle, and Robert Gates) had not attached the proper weights to the players and movements inside the Soviet Union; it is even arguable that the Administration's tilt toward the center encouraged the coup leaders. And the most grievous misreading was of the man of the hour: Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

"The fact that George Bush's official schedule allotted only 15 minutes with Boris Yeltsin during the President's visit to Moscow shows how behind the curve he has been," says Adrian Karatnycky, a foreign-policy advisor with the AFL-CIO and author of The Hidden Nations. "What he failed to grasp is that the only instruments for the democratic reforms he wants to see in the Soviet Union are from democrats who want to separate from that Union."

True, there have been a number of other legitimate considerations operating here. For one thing, while a democratic Russia is certainly in America's long-term interests, in the short term the U.S. had foreign-policy considerations (e.g., support during the Gulf War) that only Gorbachev could address. For another, Gorbachev was the man with his finger on the nuclear button. Even Yeltsin needed Gorbachev as a pretext for opposing the coup leaders.

The problem in all this was not the Administration's dealing with Gorbachev, but its dealing with him exclusively. From the start Bush and his advisors invested far too much political capital in the person of a Communist Party leader who no longer has a party. Partly this was just the structural bias of governments: Bush had to prefer dealing with the leader of a single Soviet Union to dealing with 15 leaders of separate Republics whose histories mean nothing to him and whose grievances are viewed as obstructionist; when Baker went to Belgrade to thump for something as ridiculous as Yugoslavia's "territorial integrity," it was a warm-up for his treatment of the Soviet Republics.

This was especially true of Bush's treatment of Yeltsin, who like Gorbachev was mistakenly viewed in terms of his person rather than the forces he represents. "Bush's attitude with Yeltsin is sort of his attitude toward Newt Gingrich," says one Administration official. "I mean he agrees with him and all, but somehow he's just not his type of guy--troublesome, sort of uncouth, doesn't play by the rules, and so on."

The administration's view of the Republics forces it into a number of blunders that in hindsight look shameful: the shabby treatment of Lithuanian President Kazimiera Prunskiene when she came to Washington for a White House meeting in May 1990 and had her limousine denied entrance to the grounds; the appointment of Robert Strauss as Bush's envoy to Moscow, another Establishment type who is simply not equipped to deal with the Russian reality today; the decision to include the Baltic states in granting the Soviets Most Favored Nation status; and the baffling reluctance to recognize the democratic governments of the Baltics even after everyone else had. All this was symbolized by Bush's speech in Kiev, in which the President condemned "a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred."

When the memoirs are written, that speech--delivered on August 1, less than three weeks before the coup--will go down as the low point of George Bush's foreign policy. As it happens, the offending line was not in the original drafts of the speech; it was inserted later, probably by Scowcroft (whose New York Times oped piece the day before the coup, "Bush Got It Right in the Soviet Union," will go down in history as only slightly less ridiculous than Chamberlain's "peace in our time" comment). The point is not just that Bush had the moral case backward, elevating an artificial union based on seven decades of brute force over the legitimate aspirations of real nations. It was that the Kiev speech showed Bush really didn't know what he was talking about. The threat to glasnost was not from the Republics but from the hardline unionists. And to speak of "suicidal nationalism" in the Ukraine, was, despite all the qualifiers, an unwarranted slap in the face to those who are transforming the USSR into the kind of society we can live with.

The irony of the situation is that it is Yeltsin the separatist and not Gorbachev the unionist who is the key to any future union or confederation. Yeltsin knows force must be replaced with consent if his own nation, Russia, is to prosper. Thus Yeltsin has already made arrangements with a number of Republics, and they know that August was not the first time he showed his mettle. Back in January, when Gorbachev sided with the hard-liners and tried to crack heads in the Baltics, Yeltsin's appeal to Russian troops not to fire on civilians (essentially asking them to disobey orders) prevented a great deal of bloodshed. Today Russia has bigger problems than occupying its neighbors, and if there is a threat it comes from the Kremlin and not the Russian Parliament.

The Real Enemies

BEFORE these events, everyone talked about the danger of Russian nationalism and ethnic rivalries," says Ojars Kalnins, a spokesman for the Latvian embassy here. "But when things did break down, it's interesting that nowhere did ethnic tensions break out. All the aggression was directed at Communism and Sovietism. Those are our enemies--not Russians."

The prism through which he continues to view the Soviet Union is America 1861, even though the more apt analogy is America 1776. At a press conference a week after the coup had folded, Bush was still capable of the gratuitious snipe, responding sarcastically to a reporter's question about a Ukrainian group by saying, "You're asking me about some public-works committee in downtown Kiev, and you want to know if we support them." But there are signs of change: Bush let Gorbachev know right away that the Soviet leader's initial post-coup appointments, since reversed, were not acceptable. He also had good intelligence about the mechanisms of the coup itself, from the start raising questions about its chances for success--in stark contrast to his treatment of Peking after Tiananmen Square.

In policy terms, this is bound to have implications. Aid for the central government has become all but impossible, and there will undoubtedly be some public shift toward the democratic forces in the Republics. And the strong desire of the Republics to have ties with the U.S. means that Bush will still come up a winner. "It's better to be lucky than right," says one Bush official, "and fortunately for us events are taking care of themselves."

Mr. McGurn is NR's Washington Bureau Chief.