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THE NEW FOREIGN-POLICY WISDOM HAS HARDENED with the speed of Krazy Glue. It is that, ironically enough, conducting this nation's business overseas has become more difficult with the disappearance of a unifying, clearly defined and universally understood threat that we knew how to respond to--a byproduct of the collapse of Soviet communism. When President Clinton offered a kind of joshing version of this idea, the columnist Charles Krauthammer gave him a terrible clop, claiming that it was rank hypocrisy for liberals now to pretend they had always been such single-minded anti-communists. Some, of course, were and some, of course, weren't. My problem with the currently fashionable theory is different. I think it is the disintegration of order, authority and institutions all over the world that is the defining difficulty right now for our would--be policymakers--not our own loss of purpose in the absence of a familiar enemy.
No one could reasonably argue that our lives have not been transformed by the elimination of the hairtrigger nuclear threat and of the continuous war of nerves that were the particular burden of the great conflict of the past four decades. But it had been ages since we had enjoyed that full measure of national clarity and consensus as to what the best response should be, which characterized the cold war s middle years. So that cannot be what we miss. In fact, I think what a lot of people may be missing most is not so much the clarity of having one clearly identified, mortally dangerous adversary as the ease of having tried-and-true arguments to hurl at each other at home whenever the subject came up. Communism may be said to have played its last dirty trick on the West when it deprived the parlors and the university faculty clubs and the journal s and airwaves and barrooms of all certainty as to who was a hawk and who was a dove, which one a warmonger and which one a peacenik.
Even so, that is not where the big change has come or what it is mainly about. Look at the world from Washington this way. When George Bush came to office, a mere five years ago, there were still: a Soviet empire, a Soviet Union run by a Soviet Communist Party, a Warsaw Pact, a Yugoslavia, a South Africa firmly based in apartheid and run by Afrikaners who still had Nelson Mandela locked up and who gave no sign of ever being willing to substantially change their ways, a Haiti and a Somalia and a great number of other small countries that had what we could reasonably call governments (whether we much liked them or not), and governments and institutions in a host of other places--Japan and Italy to name but two--whose well-understood political habits and familiar leaders seemed all but permanently installed to us.
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Well, surprise...everywhere. If you had told me back then that the rather self-confident and very social Italian ambassador who was accredited to Washington and who seemed without a care in the world would have been put under house arrest in Italy for an alleged kickback scheme and that what looked to be half the rest of his country's government and business establishment would be on their way to jail on similar charges, I would have told you with a condescending smirk that you just didn't understand Italy. I would have asked you what you were going to tell me next, that the Warsaw Pact countries would be begging to join NATO?
Even as we employ the term to mean relatively modest shifts and changes in our federal bureaucratic structure, other places all over the world are truly in the throes of reinventing their governments, not to mention their civil societies. I don't say this is all for the best. Some seem to be reinventing themselves downward, collapsing, disintegrating, finally paying the price for whatever dreadful dispensation has gone before or giving free rein to their societies' most destructive impulses. But from Moscow to Mogadishu, place after place presents a Washington administration with a variation on the same problem: who is in charge, whom should we deal with, whom should we be rooting for? Whose side are we on in capitol X or Y, and, oh, by the way, how many sides are there?
No administration in our time has ever looked out on such a huge number of places that are in the messy process of rewriting their constitutions, rearranging their borders, replacing their governments and the rest, some comparatively peacefully, others in a sea of gore. I think to some extent our government's problem is simply that of figuring out how to deal practically with these unfamiliar and continually shifting and never quite ready or steady entities. Very little, I should think, of the wisdom and lore of the cold-war years is of much use here. And you need only look at how remarkably scrambled the American political players are on all foreign-policy questions these days--old enemies of left and right making common cause against other coalitions of improbable partners--to know that this is true.
Our uncertainty, of course, hasn't noticeably lowered our decibel level; nothing does. People come on the air or onto the printed page in full voice, prescribing positions to take on problems in foreign places whose names they still don't quite know how to spell and which they couldn't pinpoint on a map if their lives depended on it. Well, that's the American way and no harm done. it is also the American way, however, and a much more dangerous custom, to interpret today's foreign-policy dilemma by the standards of yesterday's disaster. We are forever going around telling ourselves what the lesson of some episode was, as if it were easily transferable to some wholly different circumstance. Postwar America prided itself on having learned forever the lesson of Munich, but Munich turned out to be a treacherous guide to much of the postwar international terrain. And after the inglorious exit from Vietnam, we took that unhappy engagement as our next lesson. As we had once said "Remember Munich," so we now spoke of practically every place an American government might want to send a box of cartridges as being prospectively "another Vietnam." That doesn't work either. None of the old-shoe platitudes does. This is the administration's problem and ours. The Clinton years are going to have to be given over to reinventing foreign policy precisely because the rest of the world is reinventing itself. The problem, as of the moment, is that the reinvention has just begun and that we find so many of the countries and cultures we deal with in midchange.
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