The New World Flux
Cohen, Mitchell
There are two oddities to George Bush's "New World Order": (1) he didn't create it and (2) it doesn't exist. There is a new flux, but not a new order in the world. Its sources, all of which...
...But to claim that Bush (and Reagan) "undid communism" is to ignore or to refuse to understand Soviet decline in the Brezhnev years and to ignore that America's right-wing governors championed swollen defense expenditures on the basis of eternal struggle with a relentless Titan—who turns out to be a Titanic...
...Since there is not now, and will not be, a unipolar world economy, isolationism is simply untenable...
...The second legacy is noninterventionism, which should be firmly and intelligently maintained, for it 452 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions is well-founded on unhappy experience with Washington's imperial misadventures, from Vietnam to Central America...
...he acclaims himself for victory in the Gulf...
...Bush (like Reagan) honors himself for communism's fall...
...However, when noninterventionism drifts into isolationism, when it becomes a left-wing "America Firstism," it no longer represents a serious politics...
...he knew nothing of cold wars...
...Yet he (like Reagan) misunderstood both the USSR and Saddam...
...This administration is adept at international crisis management—after misconceiving pre-crisis policy and all the while having no coherent domestic agenda at all...
...Yet we live in, and are interlocked with, an interdependent economic world...
...Yet a new world order depends, first and foremost, on what happens in the Soviet Union...
...it presumes that the United States should work with other states toward a community of nations and refrain from the use of force, though recognizing that sometimes, unfortunately, circumstances arise in which it may be unavoidable...
...It is not only a matter of transition from a communist to a noncommunist regime but of how Soviet political culture—whose authoritarianism has deep roots in Russian history—reinvents itself...
...This has led some blinkered pundits to speak of a "unipolar" world...
...He presumed world socialism to be on the morrow, which would resolve all issues of world politics...
...Which makes a good reason for nervousness in times of transition...
...It is precisely Soviet weakness that our conservatives, wedded to crude models of totalitarianism, didn't—couldn't—grasp...
...It assumes that America is in the world but ought not to behave as if it owns—or should own—the world...
...When Bush boasted that the Gulf War disposed of the "Vietnam syndrome," some leftists abetted him, declaring "No Vietnams in the Mideast...
...they allowed him to conflate dissimilar circumstances...
...A residue of such thinking remains within those who are unable—disdain—to address seriously the less momentous but persistent problems of contemporary international affairs, like governing the interaction of states...
...In the past, this country has been either isolationist or dominant in international politics, going from one extreme, before World War II, to the other, afterward...
...Calibrated engagement, measured nonintervention...
...The first is the refusal within part of the left to recognize that international relations have autonomous dimensions, that all is not simply reducible to imperialism versus anti-imperialism or capitalism versus socialism...
...The American left will have to reckon with these changes too...
...q FALL • 1991 • 453 Donna Binder/IMPACT VISUALS 454 • DISSENT...
...It is Bush's luck, but hardly his doing, that these—or some of their climactic moments—occurred during his presidency...
...At least two legacies need to be addressed...
...Besides, should the left speak the language of isolationism or should it propose that imaginative multilateral support for Soviet change and a new world view for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would be excellent starting points for a new world order...
...It requires left criticisms of Washington to be sharply focused...
...Moreover, Desert Storm postponed a reckoning: the coordinates of post–World War II American foreign policy were communism and anticommunism, and they have been dissolved...
...Washington is now the planet's premier military power...
...It requires a balancing act...
...There is an alternative to left-wing "America Firstism" —what I will call "engaged noninterventionism...
...Tocqueville suggested that our century would find Russians and Americans facing each other on the world stage...
...In an increasingly interdependent world, neither extreme is a viable option, and to pursue either would be perilous...
...Why not blame Bush for what he does do...
...Within the antiwar left, proponents of reasoned alternatives to the use of force were sometimes drowned out by voices insisting that Saddam Hussein could do nothing that wasn't George Bush's fault...
...Similarly, they cannot fathom that the festering malaise of America's Old Domestic Order doesn't dissipate with victory in the Gulf...
...Anything except a policy of American laissez-faire vis a vis Eastern Europe might have triggered unfortunate responses in Moscow...
...It is also a question of geopolitics...
...After all, unless fighting Hitler was a mistake, one cannot say that every use of American power is a priori wrong...
...Its sources, all of which preceded the Gulf War, are the drama in Moscow, the collapse of the Eastern bloc, German unification, and the 1992 integration process in Europe...
...This refusal was captured by Trotsky when, on becoming the first Bolshevik foreign minister, he declared that he needed only to issue some revolutionary proclamations and close shop...
...Washington's response to the internal transformation of the USSR—incantation of standard economic dogma—has been singularly unimaginative...
...Either extreme "maximizes America's ability to decide its fate alone," as Charles William Maynes noted last year in Foreign Policy...
...This was not a bad thing...
...It is not an easy formulation, especially for a weak left in a country run by men with a record of global bluster...
...The politics of Eastern Europe's liberation were played out in the Kremlin and East European capitals while Washington watched...
...Such voices damage the credibility of the left and also impede serious criticism of an administration whose sins are legion, beginning with its pre-August 2, 1990 Gulf policy, which yielded only bad and worse options after Baghdad's aggression...
Vol. 38 • September 1991 • No. 4
