Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 13, 1990 TAG: 9003133555
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: LAWRENCE L. KNUTSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The fear: Too much encouragement to tiny Lithuania could provoke a Soviet crackdown, do serious damage to President Mikhail Gorbachev's program of economic and political reform and even weaken his tenacious grasp on power.
And since there is little the United States could do to affect the outcome in Lithuania and in other independence-minded Soviet republics, there might be real danger in trying.
Secretary of State James Baker set the tone for U.S. policy in Capitol Hill testimony last week, sayingthat the United States "ought not to gloat too much over our success."
"It is not overly productive to stick a stick in their eye just for the hell of it," Baker said.
"The fear is that the unraveling of the Soviet Union is not necessarily a success for us," said Ilya Prizel, professor of Soviet studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
"If it ends up in a civil war, how do you deal with a civil war in a superpower that sits on thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons?" Prizel asked.
The administration's careful litany on Lithuania, as delivered by the White House and State Department on Monday, goes like this:
The United States recognized the independence of Lithuania and two other Baltic states in 1922 after the victors in World War I carved them out of the fallen Russian empire.
That diplomatic recognition has never been withdrawn.
The United States never accepted the secret 1940 non-aggression pact between Germany's Adolf Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin folding Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into the Soviet empire.
It still regards their transformation into Soviet republics as illegal.
But in the last analysis, Washington is prepared to recognize Lithuania diplomatically and exchange ambassadors with it only if negotiations with Moscow give it the attributes of a nation-state.
"We would want any recognition to take into account a final government that was in control of its own destiny, and much of that has yet to be negotiated with the Soviet Union," said White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater.
Diplomatic recognition would follow "once that government is in effective control of its territory and capable of entering into and fulfilling international obligations," said State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler.
"I think it's a prudent and correct policy," Prizel said. "We cannot jump in ahead of the Soviet Union. We should understand that we can provoke the Soviets, but we cannot deter them.
"The best thing to do is to lie as low as we can and let the situation evolve in a way that Moscow does not find provocative," Prizel said.
"It's one thing for a Soviet leader to get rid of the outer empire in Eastern Europe," he said. "But it's quite a different thing to preside over the disintegration of the Soviet Union."
by CNB