BACKGROUND
Easing Of US-USSR Relations
Leaves Arab World Stranded
HELEN DAVIS
Foreign Correspondent
L
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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1989
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ate last month, Israel's
Ambassador to Wash-
ington, Moshe Arad,
made some uncommonly
perceptive observations
regarding the subtle changes
that have occurred in Israel's
relations with the United
States.
Although the Bush ad-
ministration will continue to
view Israel as a strategic al-
ly, "I do not deny that today
we are operating in a dif-
ferent atmosphere," Arad
said. "The principal subject
that occupies President Bush
is relations with the Soviet
Union, and the United States
attitude toward- [the Middle
East] should be understood in
this context!'
Israel's conflict with the
Arabs, he said, was no longer
generally perceived against
the backdrop .of superpower
rivalry, suspicion and
hostility.
While traces of the Cold
War persisted in superpower
attitudes toward Middle East
affairs, these factors were
neither as intense nor as im-
portant as they were three or
four years ago, when the Mid-
dle East conflict was regard-
ed in terms of the stand-off
between Washington and
Moscow.
The bottom line of Arad's
message was that the Arab-
Israeli conflict no longer car-
ried the seeds of a superpower
confrontation.
The single most important
cause of this sea-change has
been the advent to power of
Mikhail Gorbachev, who has
given every appearance of
sparking a new Russian
revolution.
He has radically altered the
Soviet agenda, swept away
old taboos and unilaterally
withdrawn Moscow from its
wasting battle with
Washington for global
superiority and for the hearts
and minds of regional allies.
Unless appearances are
very deceptive indeed, the
Soviet Union — along with its
Warsaw Pact allies — are now
on course for a ,complete nor-
malization of relations with
Israel.
Indeed, there is already
speculation that, along with
the 50,000 Soviet Jews who
are expected to emigrate this
year (up from 8,000 in 1987
and 19,000 in 1988), Soviet
Ambassador to Syria Zhotov
will be assigned to Tel Aviv
when full diplomatic rela-
tions are restored between
the two countries.
All this was unthinkable
just four years ago, and many
Western observers — with
good reason — remain deeply
suspicious of Soviet
intentions.
Is Gorbachev sincere in re-
nouncing Moscow's global
ambitions? Will he survive if
he is unable to provide tangi-
ble, material improvements
domestically? And if he does
not survive, what will be the
fate of his sweeping reforms,
particularly toward Soviet
Jews and Israel?
In the absence of a fortune
teller's crystal ball, these
questions are impossible to
answer. What can, however,
be stated with certainty are
that the Soviet leader has
already passed considerable
"tests of sincerity" that would
lend credibility to his claims.
It would be impossibly
naive for the Bush ad-
ministration to simply accept
Gorbachev's stated doctrine
as an immutable fact of life
and proceed to discard its
defenses. At the same time, it
would be foolish to ignore the
unmistakably positive.
developnients that have
marked the Gorbachev years
so far.
In this regard, the Bush ad-
ministration is neither naive
nor foolish.
Those in Jerusalem who in-
sist on conducting what Am-
bassador Arad describes as a
weekly check on the level of
passion between the United
States and Israel might well
be disappointed at the
barometer readings over the
past nine months.
They cannot have failed to
detect the hand of the incom-
ing Bush team in the decision
of the dying Reagan ad-
ministration to open an of-
ficial dialogue with the
Palestine Liberation
Organization last December.
They must have been fur-
ther disappointed by the
Bush administration's in-
sistence on some sign of
Israeli movement toward
peace; by Secretary of State
James Baker's emphatic re-
jection of Israeli claims to
"Greater • Israel;" by
Washington's anger over the
abduction of Sheik Obeid; by
the United States failure to
veto yet another United Na-
tions resolution deploring
Israeli actions last week.
What they may have failed
to grasp is the implication of
a truly fascinating observa-
tion by Francis Fukuyama,
deputy director of the State
Department's policy planning
staff.
In an article published
recently in National Interest,
a Washington quarterly,
Fukuyama pointed out that
two major political ideologies
of the 20th century — Marx-
ism and fascism — had been
decisively defeated, leaving
Western-style democracies
supreme.
The world, he suggested,
may now be witnessing not
only the end of the Cold War,
but also "the end point of
mankind's ideological evolu-
tion and the universalization
of Western liberal democracy
as the final form of human
government."
dispute
Many will
Fukuyama's sweeping conten-
tion that mankind has solved
all its problems, that "history
is dead" and that political
pundits are now facing "cen-
turies of boredom!'
It is nevertheless difficult to
dismiss the possibility that —
in the short term, at least —
he may be right; that the
ideological struggle between
East and West has been
superceded by a new
pragmatism; that the threat
of a superpower-inspired
nuclear holocaust is further
from reality than ever.