In just a few frustrating days last week, the Soviet Union showed why Bush’s dream of a new world order isn’t likely to come true anytime soon. The problem with this latest incarnation of collective security, like others before it, is that it glides over the question of who identifies the bullies - and who decides how to deal with them. Preaching “multilateralism” suggests to your partners that they have an equal say in making those judgments and leaves you open to inconveniences like the Soviet peace proposals. Even if the administration felt sure that the cold war was over and it could do business with Gorbachev, it should have recognized that it was enlisting a partner with very different interests in this conflict given Moscow’s record of arming Iraq and historical desire for more influence in the Middle East.
The reason the Soviet moves caught the White House off guard is that Bush has in mind a different concept: a world in which the United States leads, and the allies follow. It isn’t a “new” order at all, but the same system the president and other men of his generation recall so nostalgically from the postwar period. It’s the multilateralism of NATO, the IMF and the World Bank, where the United States paid the bills and called the shots. It’s the model of the Korean War, which took place under U.N. auspices and included 16 nations but was always an American production. After all the months spent hammering out U.N. resolutions before the war began, Bush showed what his new order boils down to in responding to the Soviet plan: he decided on a get-out-by-Saturday ultimatum, then quickly called the allies to get them on board.
There’s still a great deal to be said for America trying to exert a strong leadership role. Operation Desert Storm shows that, in pursuit of a good cause, the United States can still deploy more firepower, enlist more diplomatic support and generate more international sympathy than any nation on earth. The idea that economic power is what counts most in today’s world, so fashionable before this war began, now seems woefully shortsighted. Would the Japanese or the Germans ever have been able, let alone willing, to take the lead in countering a strategic menace like Saddam? And although U.S. values may not be as universally applicable as we’d like to think they are, we exert our influence about as judiciously as a powerful nation with independent interests and domestic pressures can be expected to.
Still, we shouldn’t be under too many illusions about our ability to keep the world following our lead after this conflict is resolved. The obstacles run deeper than the danger of renascent anti-Americanism; resentment comes with the territory for a superpower. The financial reality is that we can’t pay all the bills anymore, and that means we won’t be able to call the tune on issues of vital interest to those who can, like the Japanese and the Germans. And few other conflicts will lend themselves so readily to Bush’s mix of unilateralism and multilateralism as the war against Saddam. This one was easy. Apart from the territorial integrity of the moderate Arab states, the coalition partners all had only one vital interest, and it was shared: ensuring reliable supplies of cheap oil. Is it possible to imagine such teamwork in dealing with any other of today’s flash points? The Baltics? Yugoslavia?
In his State of the Union address last month, President Bush movingly expressed the faith in American exceptionalism that has been the real core of our foreign policy for most of this century. “We have a unique responsibility to do the hard work of freedom,” he said. “Among the nations of the world, only the United States has both the moral standing and the means to back it up.” Americans love that kind of stuff; it’s often needed to rally public support for risky foreign ventures. But there are dangers in expecting that the rest of the world will always see things our way. Maintaining order after this war will be a difficult job, and it will call for more than the president’s admirable gift for telephone statesmanship. It will require a clear-eyed evaluation of where the interests of our coalition partners - the Soviets, in particular - depart from ours, as well as where they converge.
