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nuclear weapons or the mastering of modern information
~~the paradox:~~
technology. Thus proliferation is a permanent temptation
and a permanent danger, ~~while~~ at the same time, the cost of war,
at least among major powers, has risen to near prohibitive
levels.

Then, too, the elements of national strength are no
longer homogeneous. Communications are instantaneous, and
economies are global. Every day a trillion dollars moves in
world financial markets, only 5 percent of which is
generated by commercial transactions. Global well-being is
becoming both interconnected and precarious: a bank clerk in
Singapore managed to create $27 billion in derivatives in
three days and bring down a major international bank. But
political loyalties remain imprisoned in the nation state.
And with the breakup of old empires, conflicts have even
shriveled to the ethnic level where their intensity
magnifies almost in proportion to their global relevance.

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shrinking. Such dichotomies complicate the evaluation and,
even more, the operation of any conceivable balance of power
under modern conditions.

Not just the United States but every major nation finds
itself in a transitional stage. The traditional European
nation state lacks the scale to deal with the entire
spectrum of contemporary problems. Russia is living within
borders it has not known since Peter the Great. China is
emerging as a world power for the first time in several
centuries while its leadership is changing. Japan is
reversing a pattern of political withdrawal. Many economic
powerhouses--especially in Asia and the Middle East--are
politically fragile.

How is American foreign policy to be defined in such a
period? Theoretically, the United States could pursue a
pure interest policy in the manner of Britain throughout
most of the 19th century: a posture of "splendid isolation,"

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maintaining good relations wherever possible but throwing
its weight to the side that confers certain advantages at a
specific moment (which, in the British case, was generally
the weaker side). This would be a latter-day version of the
European balance-of-power diplomacy. There are, however,
huge obstacles to this. The first is that, whereas Britain
conducted this policy primarily in Europe, we would have to
conduct it globally. Secondly, Britain had a leadership
group that had trained itself in the conduct of public
policy. America has neither such a leadership group nor any
similar tradition of hard-headed, purely interest-oriented
policy. Third, when communications are instantaneous,
economics global, and politics democratic, it is probably
not possible to conduct the same kind of cold-blooded policy
in every part of the world simultaneously. Fourth,
international stability is increasingly affected by splinter
groups with no interest in the global equilibrium at all,

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usually ethnic groupings which, in fact, are using the major powers' desire for global order to achieve their own parochial objectives.

For the United States to practice its version of "splendid isolation" on a global basis under these circumstances would exhaust us physically and psychologically. A nation founded by people who have traditionally believed in the universal applicability of their values cannot simply abandon the Wilsonianism that had dominated 20th century American foreign policy.

Finding our way through this maze would be difficult enough were Americans at one in assessing the international situation. We are, however, divided, especially along generational lines. The generation that won the Cold War had its seminal experience in the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. They believed in a constructive American role and in the beneficent role of American power.

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The generation whose seminal experience was the Vietnam War
holds a quite different view. The Vietnam War--the defining
experience of their generation--is viewed not just as a
terrible mistake but as an indictment of American power in
general. Just as many who used not been the outcome of
America's role in World War I as rationale for the brands of
nonintervention policy in the 1920s and 1930s, current
debates American policy--whether in the Balkans or the Caribbean, in
Africa or Asia--can best be understood in the context of a
generation that views the world through a lens largely
provided by a local and unsuccessful conflict. They also
by abducting a specific policy or by flexing their

That difference in perspective is sharpened by one of
the fundamental changes in human consciousness through which
our period is living: the change of the process of learning
from books to pictures and from reading to viewing which
roughly marks the borderline between the generations I have
described. To learn from books, one requires concepts that
will extend multilaterally
in extreme renunciation