TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050691/0506640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 130 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 76

Two Centuries of New World Orders


By Richard Brookhiser


    President George Bush calls it "a responsibility imposed
by our successes" in the cold war. Columnist Pete Hamill calls
it the new world odor. Fleeing Kurds, burying their dead in
mountain tent cities, call it misery.

    Welcome to the new world order.

    If huddled refugees have become the emblem of his foreign
policy, Bush has only himself to blame for giving it a sonorous
title with the word new in it. The principles -- and the
problems -- of the new world order have a long history in
American foreign policy -- or better, foreign policies, since
America has traditionally pursued two. The NWO echoes both.

    The first tradition of American foreign policy,
appropriately, is America first. It was often isolationist, as
in George Washington's warning in his Farewell Address against
permanent alliances. But it was not necessarily so. (Washington
had been interested in westward expansion since colonial days.)
Our interests might compel us to pick fights; as America
expanded in the world economy, and as weapons became
transoceanic, we also came to have interests in such things as
peace and stability. But we would continue to stay out of fights
that did not directly concern us, and our concerns did not
automatically include every instance of injustice in the world.

    Over the years this principle of self-interest was
inflected by an idealistic impulse: America as leader and light
of the world. We associate this with the crusading spirit of the
World Wars and the cold war, but it too goes further back. The
Spanish-American War began not only to remember the Maine but
to cleanse Cuba of Spanish concentration camps. Earlier still,
there were Americans who wanted to aid Hungarian rebels against
the Habsburgs or Greek rebels against the Ottomans.

    Both impulses have shared a very American respect for
legalistic thinking -- not surprisingly, since so many American
diplomats were Wasp lawyers. They searched, as George Kennan put
it, for "formal criteria of a juridical nature by which the
permissible behavior of states could be defined." The rest of
the world was often baffled by our devotion to this search, even
as it made the rest of the world baffling to us. "To the
American mind," Kennan added, it was "implausible that people
should have positive aspirations more important to them than the
peacefulness and orderliness of international life." Still,
whether we were being hardheaded or softhearted, we put our
faith in rules, since both our power and the world's happiness
seemed to benefit from them.

    The gulf war, the first crisis of Bush's NWO, was in fact
a display case for the weaknesses and the strengths of typical
American behavior. Our pussyfooting diplomacy before the
invasion of Kuwait was intended to be a simple lawyerly
proposition. Because we wanted to be honest brokers, we assured
Saddam that we had no position on the precise location of the
Iraq-Kuwait border. The only problem with our offer was that
Saddam, who is not a Wasp lawyer, took it to mean that we didn't
care whether there was an Iraq-Kuwait border.

    Once he erased it, all the strands of our foreign policies
knotted together. Self-interest rose to the defense of our oil
supply. Saddam's treatment of Kuwait and his casual lobbing of
Scuds into Israel stirred Bush to outrage. Our diplomats had
rounded up a sheaf of United Nations resolutions to give
Operation Desert Storm a firm foundation of paper.

    Last month, in a speech in Montgomery, Bush outlined four
principles for the NWO. His hopes for the future were as old
fashioned as his actions had been. Principles 1 and 2, "peaceful
settlements of disputes" and "solidarity against aggression,"
reflect the American obsession with legality. Principle 3,
"reduced and controlled arsenals," reflects the interests of a
commercial power, dependent on peaceful world trade, that is
eager to reduce its military spending. Bush's last principle,
"just treatment of all peoples," comes out of the idealist
tradition with, like the first three, a legalistic tinge.

    If Americans keep behaving like Americans, we will keep on
encountering the same problems. One potential problem, as Kennan
suggested and Saddam demonstrated, is that other countries will
misunderstand us -- although the gulf war should clarify our
notion of the boundaries of "permissible behavior," at least for
the time being.

    The most serious problems with the old/NWO, however, are
likely to be of our own devising. They will arise whenever we
tilt too heavily to one side or the other of our national
character. Too often, American idealism metastasizes into
utopianism. Making the world safe from aggression, or even from
injustice, is not the same thing as making it safe for democracy
-- an exercise in political evangelism that is an altogether
more difficult task. Woodrow Wilson approached the peace talks
ending World War I as the consummation of a democratic crusade.
Their failure ruined Central Europe for 70 years.

    The opposite error is to leave jobs half finished in the
name of a foolishly consistent prudence. This is the
impracticality of practical men, and this is clearly what
controlled the Bush Administration's first response to the
plight of the Kurds. Not wanting to become bogged down in Iraq's
internal affairs, we left the Kurdish rebellion to its fate. We
should have seen that a six-week air war was already a massive
intervention in Iraq's affairs. If Saddam was dangerous enough
to be bombed out of Kuwait, then his internal enemies, the Kurds
and the Shi`ites, ought to have been helped to win themselves
some breathing room.

    The double impulses of our old approach to world order
make for contradictions. Together they can save the U.S. from
empty moralizing or mere self-seeking.

    It is very American to think that all history begins
yesterday. Thinking so, we repeat old mistakes or balk at
burdens that seem brand new. Bush could do a better job with the
NWO. Americans have been tinkering with it for 200 years.