Post-Coup: What the West Must Now Do : Go faster with Baltic recognition--and faster with aid

Caution can be an admirable quality in a crisis, but as Boris Yeltsin showed from the top of a tank last week, a dash of daring also can work wonders.

Caution in the Soviet crisis has served President Bush and the nation well so far, both in considering formal recognition of the Baltic states and in waiting to see basic economic change in Moscow before sending any money.

The opportunities for long-term stability in the world have not looked better in nearly 75 years. But the risk of the door’s slamming on this grand chance is so real that Bush must turn to daring while daring still can help.

THE BALTIC QUESTION: A chastened President Mikhail S. Gorbachev told his parliament Monday that the failed coup has so changed the Soviet Union that he cannot block independence for any nation that wants it. For once he did not invoke as an excuse for inaction all the red-tape rules that have bound the country’s 15 republics to Moscow.

Their independence may not be fully achieved, but Bush should feel free to recognize Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as so many other countries already have done. There is no point in waiting until next week.

Gorbachev also said that it is time to banish all barriers to a free market, a reversal of policy that he made sound less like an exhortation than a surrender to the inevitable.

In the meantime, British Prime Minister John Major has scheduled in London Thursday a meeting of G-7, the Group of Seven dominant industrial nations--the second in less than six weeks.

The burning question: Should G-7 reverse a July 17 decision to give the Soviet Union a kind of apprentice membership in the International Monetary Fund but no money to see it through a stormy transition to free market economics that could leave millions unemployed or starving or both?

Germany is already committed to $35 billion in aid to Moscow. France and Italy favor economic aid. London is leaning in that direction.

Soviet analysts warn that this winter will bring not only food shortages but also energy shortages and cold apartments. In Washington and Kennebunkport, presidential aides talk of humanitarian aid to get the Soviets through the winter. But borscht kitchens cannot repair the ravages of communism, partly because communism never built enough roads to move food to the people who need it.

THE AID QUESTION: What the Soviets need is capital, technical advice on where to use it and enough aid to smooth the move to prices set not in Moscow but by supply and demand.

Some capital can and must come from shutting down Soviet defense industries and demobilizing much of the army, elements of a military complex that now commands between 25% and 30% of Soviet resources.

In an economy of roughly $2 trillion, even a 50% reduction in defense spending over time could produce $500 billion. But the Soviets cannot wait the years that it would take to whittle the defense establishment down to size.

So billions in aid--at least $25 billion a year--must come from the United States and its allies, an amount that could be syndicated among the industrial nations so that Washington’s share would be less than the cost of a year’s research on Star Wars, a very expensive defense that makes less sense by the hour as the Soviet threat fades.

The hearts of Americans were captured last week by the sparks of bravery and the passionate defiance that analysts had been saying for decades that the Soviet people did not have in them.

The response of America and other Western nations to the scene clearly helped bring down the plotters. But some more tangible form of encouragement must follow, and soon. Now is the time for a dash of presidential daring.