The questions rolled onto the op-ed pages like so many battle tanks. What exactly was this New World Order? Could it be just a cloak for American hegemony? Fashionable notions like “American decline” were hastily cast aside, replaced by older phrases like “world policeman” and “pax Americana.” Where, in the new scheme of things, did the Soviet Union fit–or Germany, or Japan, or the United Nations? Was military muscle, recently thought to be a bit passe, in fact what counted in the world, and economic power overrated?
The sober truth was that, however gratifying, this was not a major war and the coalition victory was not a decisive turning point in recent history. Yes, it was a brilliantly devised and executed campaign that should rapidly find its way into the military textbooks. And yes, it was an emphatic reminder of what almost everyone has known since at least 1989: that there is only one superpower in the world and the United States is it. Given all the recent moans about America’s economic troubles, the reminder couldn’t have been more timely. General Schwarzkopf has not conquered the savings and loan crisis, but he has put it in a certain perspective.
Nevertheless, superpowers–even unchallenged superpowers– can’t be expected to do this sort of thing very often. Anyone who thinks the gulf war is just the first in a series of police actions by a resurgent United States had better turn off his television set. For one thing, it does not detract a shred from the American accomplishment in the gulf to point out that the conditions for it were in many ways ideal: flat, treeless terrain nicely suited for air attacks and tank battles, a host country with lots of jet fuel and lots of empty real estate for half a million soldiers. Second, the defeat of Saddam Hussein occupied a goodly portion of the entire American military. No one will remain a world policeman very long if he has to keep making this sort of effort to bash the bad guys. And on the home front, no population would stand for it. So don’t expect to see the 101st Airborne descending on the mountains of Kashmir to keep the Indians and the Pakistanis from each other’s throats.
With luck, what can be expected is that future Saddams will find their appetite for adventure somewhat dulled. One reason George Bush was so determined to punch this bully in the nose was to deter the other bullies in the schoolyard. “To some degree, the United States may need to intervene less than it has in the past, simply because its capacity and will have been so clearly demonstrated in this case,” says Adam Roberts, professor of international relations at Balliol College, Oxford.
One thing the war did not demonstrate was the capacity and will of the Soviet Union. Its eleventh-hour peace initiative was not malicious; it was simply ineffectual. When Bush virtually ignored it, Gorbachev did not press the case with any vigor. As one Western diplomat in Moscow said, “The war has showed them yet again that they’re just not a key player.” When Gorbachev started talking about the New World Order, he envisioned an era of cooperation between the two superpowers in sorting out world affairs. Now the world has one real superpower and one former superpower so preoccupied with its internal difficulties that it casts very little shadow on the outside world. “I never believed the Soviet Union was able to be a pillar [of a New World Order],” says Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department official now at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The Soviet Union today is a question mark, not a pillar, and you can’t expect to rest much on this question mark.”
Many Soviets have drawn the same conclusion. “Events of recent days have set a tombstone over the romantic dreams of cooperation between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. in establishing a ’new world order’,” wrote the liberal newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda last week. “After the Persian Gulf, Moscow and Washington will never trust each other to the extent necessary for such cooperation.” Col. Nikolai Petrushenko, one of the hard-line officers who denounced Eduard Shevardnadze for his accommodating foreign policy, was even more emphatic. “What new world order?” he demanded. “The 21st century will be a struggle for military dominance, pure and simple. The American imperialists are on the march, and we have to stop them.” He did not say where they’d find the money.
The war has also been something of a disaster for the world’s two economic darlings, Japan and Germany. Even as the coalition forces marched into Kuwait City, the Japanese Diet was still debating the conditions under which it would contribute an additional $9 billion (for a total of $13 billion) to the war effort. All the talk of Japan putting on a world political hat to match the size of its pocketbook suddenly seems a trifle premature. “With the end of the cold war,” former Defense minister Koichi Kato told NEWSWEEK, “people began to say that international financial power would replace military capability, and that this would be the era for Japan and Germany. But that kind of transition has been postponed at least for the coming 10 to 15 years. Pax Americana, centered on the huge U.S. military capability, will continue for some time to come–whether for better or for worse we cannot yet judge.”
The Germans, too, seem off in a world of their own. They are obsessed by the huge costs of rebuilding what used to be East Germany. They are bound to Moscow in an awkward embrace by the huge Soviet Army still stationed in the east and by the investments German banks and businessmen are making in the U.S.S.R. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher quickly endorsed Moscow’s peace plan for Iraq and then declared last week that “the new world order can only come about if the Soviet Union plays an equal role in dealing with international issues”–a role that the Soviet Union seems in no position to perform. The German “special relationship” with the United States, an early product of reunification, was an early victim of the gulf crisis, as Britain and even France rushed forward to be helpful and Germany hung stalwartly back. In the months and years ahead, Washington’s relations with both Bonn and Tokyo could be embittered by “what did you do in the war?” overtones.
So the Soviet Union has turned in on itself, Japan and Germany have moved off to the side, and the New World Order, at least for the time being, seems to spring pretty much out of George Bush’s Rolodex. Hegemony, however, is hardly the word for it. A lust for worldwide consultation is one of this president’s passions. It was no accident that he moved swiftly to mobilize the United Nations in the gulf crisis, and no surprise that the Security Council voted for war powers before the U.S. Congress did. The United Nations came out of this episode with a justifiable burst of pride. But it did not command the armies that got the hard job done.
The world has been transformed in the last few years, but as historian Stephen Ambrose points out, the United States has often seemed a bystander. Gorbachev began a new Soviet revolution, the people of East Europe won their freedom, Germany put itself back together again. Now, with its success in the gulf, America has left the audience and once more come onstage as the star performer. And that, perhaps, is the war’s chief significance. It has not greatly changed the world, but it has changed the way the world looks at America.
How much confidence do you have in the ability of the United States to deal wisely with present world problems?
Current 5/85 Very great 39% 19% Considerable 49% 49% Little 6% 19% Very little 5% 12%
Does success in the Persian Gulf War make you feel the U.S. should be more willing to use military force in the future to help solve international problems?
32% Yes 60% No
From the NEWSWEEK Poll of March 1, 1991
