COLUMN LEFT/ GEORGE BLACK : Nixon, Bush and the World as Dulles Saw It : Richard the Shrewd and George the Cowed, echoed by Democrats, still wage Cold War.

Richard Nixon, the incubus of the Republican Party, is back again. First in a widely circulated private memorandum, and then at a Washington conference organized by the Nixon Library, the old reprobate has criticized George Bush for his “pathetically inadequate response” to the crisis in the former Soviet Union.

Nixon’s remarks have been widely interpreted as a further assault on Bush’s tottering credibility. But a more plausible explanation is that this was the shrewd act of one who ardently desires a Republican victory. Nixon knows that Bush is a passive man. Rather like Luigi Galvani’s frog legs, Bush remains inert until forced to twitch by the application of an electrical current. So Nixon has given him a friendly jolt.

Up to now Bush has been cowed by the new mood of isolationism. His retreat from foreign affairs, like his sacking of John Frohnmayer as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, is a craven piece of appeasement of the Buchananite right. It is also, as Nixon pointed out, a cave-in to public hostility to foreign aid.

Prodded on the matter of aid to Russia, the Democrats have offered only lame paraphrases of Nixon’s critique. Bill Clinton praises Bush’s “good instincts” but thinks he has been “too timid.” Paul Tsongas wants emergency aid to help Russia through winter--now four-fifths over. Both men want to send over some bushy-tailed types with Harvard MBAs to make converts to capitalism. Tsongas calls this an “executive Peace Corps”; Clinton calls it the “democracy corps.”

Nixon and Bush, feebly echoed by Tsongas and Clinton, appear unable to see the world as anything but a revamped Cold War battleground, in which unfree nations are to be made over in our image. They do not fundamentally question John Foster Dulles’ view that the United States should “assume the burden and the glory of advancing mankind’s best hopes.” Their disagreements are not those of philosophers but of accountants. Only the size of the public purse has shrunk, not the missionary impulse. “I don’t have a blank check,” was Bush’s sole, peevish response to Nixon’s challenge.

With each new return from the dead, Richard Nixon gives some eloquent sign of how little he has changed. This time it’s his final warning to Bush: “The hot-button issue in the 1950s was ‘who lost China?’ If Yeltsin goes down, the question ‘who lost Russia?’ will be an infinitely more devastating issue in the 1990s.”

Nixon knows whereof he speaks; after all, he cut his political teeth on the witch-hunts of 40 years ago. The Nixonites liked to pin the loss of China on the striped-pants set, fellows from the Eastern Establishment who were born with silver spoons in their mouths--the spiritual ancestors, in other words, of George Bush. And Nixon and company purged the State Department of anyone who grasped that China was a country with a mind of its own, not a model kit waiting only for American experts to find the instructions for assembly.

The Nixonites’ second charge was that Harry Truman had ditched Chiang Kai-shek--just as George Bush now abandons Boris Yeltsin--for the sake of a few dollars. Nixon lavishes praise on Truman for refusing to let budget constraints stand in the way of the defense of Greece and Turkey in 1947. But he conveniently forgets that it was public hostility to high postwar taxes and foreign aid that persuaded Truman to end support for Chiang just two years later.

In 1949, the “who lost China?” brigade was fixated on Chiang as the standard-bearer of Western values. Now, the prospective “who lost Russia?” crew is equally fixated on Yeltsin, the nouveau capitalist. “The bottom line,” says Nixon, “is that Boris Yeltsin is the most pro-Western leader in Russian history.”

There is one essential difference, of course. In 1949, the Asia-first Republicans feared that the fall of Chiang would pose an unacceptable security threat. But many in the Bush Administration would be quite happy with Nixon’s worst-case scenario of a “new despotism” in Russia, since this would allow for the greatest possible maintenance of the Pentagon budget and the smallest necessary adjustment to the Cold War worldview.

Amid this parody of a foreign-policy debate, no one seems willing to ask whether we can “lose” Russia, any more than we “lost” China--for the simple reason that it is not ours to lose. Better to aid Russia generously so that it can freely determine its own future, and recall the question posed by Mark Twain: “Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?”