President Bush said Wednesday that the United States will support democratic and market reforms in the Soviet Union "wherever they are" and sought to reassure Americans about the disintegrating superpower's nuclear arsenal.
Bush commented on the chaotic changes at the outset of a meeting with his Cabinet on the problems with the U.S. economy. "We can't make any predictions on the evolution of all this. That's their business," Bush said."Our main interest is in democratic and market reform, continuation of that," he said. "They are going to sort these matters out themselves. We will support democrats and reformers wherever they are there. And that means at all levels."
Bush was meeting later with his Soviet ambassador, Robert Strauss, and Secretary of State James Baker, who embarks Saturday for Moscow to confer with Soviet and republic leaders.
Strauss was testifying on Capitol Hill, a day after CIA Director Robert Gates presented a bleak picture of the winter facing the Soviet peoples.
"We want this humanitarian question of humanitarian aid to go forward in order to promote peaceful reform," said Bush. "We've got just a plain interest in seeing that people are fed."
Gates had depicted a Soviet Union shattered by shortages of food and fuel, its military disheartened and without discipline and its once commanding leader reduced to a figurehead. That portends a winter of social unrest unmatched since the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, Gates said.
White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said Wednesday that Bush had not talked to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev or Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the past few days and there were "no plans at this point" for Bush to make any calls.
"The situation is dangerously unstable," Gates told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. "The economy is in a free fall with no prospects for reversal in sight."
For the leaders of the increasingly independent Soviet republics, at least in the short term, "we are deeply concerned that the enormous economic and social challenges may overwhelm them," Gates said.
He added that discipline and cohesion in the formerly powerful Red Army were disappearing. Shortages of food, fuel and housing for troops were undermining morale and the reliability of the forces was "dubious," he said.