initiatives that neither Moscow nor Washington wanted. A free hand for each empire
within its respective sphere was reaffirmed, as suggested by the symmetry of Bush's
assault on Panama during the Romanian crisis that liquidated Ceausescu, but left a neo-
communist government of old Comintern types like Iliescu and Roman in power. Bush
would also support the Kremlin against both Armenia and Azerbaijan when hostilities
and massacres broke out between these regions during the following month. Bush's
reciprocal services to Gorbachov included a monstrous diplomatic first: just as the
communist regime in East Germany was in its death agony, Bush despatched James
Baker to Potsdam to meet with the East German "reform communist" leader, Modrow.
No US Secretary of State had ever set foot in the DDR during its entire history after
1949, but now, in the last days of the Pankow communist regime, Baker would go there.
His visit was an insult to those East Germans who had marched for freedom, always
having to reckon with the danger that Honecker's tanks would open fire. Baker's visit was
designed to delay, sabotage and stall German reunification in whatever ways were still
possible, while shoring up the communist regime. Baker gave it his best shot, but his
sleazy dealmaking skills were of no use in the face of an aroused populace. Nevertheless,
after Tien An Men and Potsdam, Bush was rapidly emerging as one of the few world
leaders who could be counted on to support world communism.
During the early months of 1990, certain forces in Moscow, Bonn, and other capitals
gravitated towards a new Rapallo arrangement in a positive key: there was the potential
that the inmates of the prison-house of nations might attain freedom and self-
determination, while German capital investments in infrastructure and economic
modernization could guarantee that the emerging states would be economically viable, a
process from which the entire world could benefit.
A rational policy for the United States under these circumstances would have entailed a
large-scale committment to taking part in rebuilding the infrastructure of the former
Soviet sphere in transportation, communications, energy, education, and health services,
combined with capital investments in industrial modernization. Such investment might
also have served as a means to re-start the depressed US economy. The pre-condition for
economic cooperation would have been a recognition by the Soviet authorities that the
aspirations of their subject nationalities for self-determination had to be honored,
including through the independence of the former Soviet republics in the Baltic, the
Trans-caucasus, central Asia, the Ukraine, and elsewhere. As long as long as the Soviet
military potential remained formidable, adequate military preparedness in the west was
indispensable, and should have featured a significant committment to the "new physical
principles" anti-missle defenses that had inspired the original Strategic Defense Initiative
of the 1983. Obviously, none of these measures would have been possible without a
decisive break with the economic policy of the Reagan-Bush years, in favor of an
economic recovery program focussed on fostering high-technology growth in capital-
intensive industrial employment producing tangible, physical commodities. The single
US political figure who had proposed such a program for war-avoidance and stability was
Lyndon LaRouche, who had put forward such a package during a press conference in
West Berlin in October, 1988, in the context of a prophetic forecast that German re-
unification was very much on the agenda for the immediate future.