THE CHALLENGE OF BUILDING THE NEW WORLD ORDER

By Henry Kissinger (1080 words) 1099 w1d1t5

We keep talking about a new world order as if it were already
here, but what has in fact happened is that the huge success of
American foreign policy has forced us to rethink all our previous
preconceptions.

We have also run out of the concepts which sustained us through
the Cold War. There is no longer a single ideological challenge;
there is no longer a specific geopolitical challenge; there is no
clear-cut enemy.

Instead there is a world of four, five, or six power centers
more-or-less equal in their capacity to effect events -- and not
just in terms of their military potential. The US finds itself in
a position unprecedented in its history in that it can neither
withdraw from nor dominate the world.

Therefore, we must now face just how unique the American
approach to foreign policy has been. We are the only major nation
that is largely populated by immigrants, that has never had a
powerful neighbor, that has never been under physical threat, or
whose origin can be dated precisely.

As a result, we have evolved ideas about foreign policy that are
peculiar to America: the identification of personal with
international morality; the idea that relations among nations are
like relations among people; and that everybody in the world is
some degree of misunderstood American, therefore the guiding
principles of Iowans can be applied to Central Russians; the
tendency to oscillate between excesses of hostility and excesses of
conciliation; and the conviction that everybody in the world has
the same interest in maintaining the peace, hence the emphasis on
the doctrine of collective security.

The world in which we now find ourselves is not very hospitable
to all these ideas and we will have to get used to this. Conflicts
suppressed by the Cold War are emerging and can be best understood
by reading the history of the last century. (The Bosnian tragedy
is a replay of what happened in what was called the Bulgarian
Massacres of 1876 that led to the congress of Berlin.)

All over the world, ethnic conflicts blow up whose specific
characteristic is that the participating actors do not care about
world peace, do not care about stability, and care above all about

prevailing.

The Cold War policy, dominated by the doctrine of containment, was very precise and measurable. Our present policy, described as enlargement of democracy, overlooks the fact that only about 15 percent of the world is technically democratic, and that many of those countries interpret democracy quite differently than we do.

Furthermore, it begs the question of what we can do to enlarge
democracy, especially what the relation is between the use of
military force and the spread of our convictions, which is one of
the problems raised by Haiti.

America must develop an idea of its national interest. We have
to define what it is that we can do by ourselves, what we must do
in tandem with others, and what we cannot do at all. And then we
have to be able to explain why we have given the answer we have.

Our key problem now - contrary to the Cold War, and not to be
described with slogans like ''enlarging democracy'' - is what are
the structures that we want to bring about in the world, and what
is our margin for creating them?

A few observations on the world now before us:

The countries of Eastern Europe should be integrated as rapidly
as possible into the European Union, and at least a few of them
should be admitted into NATO.

As somebody who in the 1970s was a strong advocate of the policy
of détente, and who believes today that friendly relations with
Russia are a key element of world stability, I also say that there
will not be friendly relations if the impression is created that
every vacuum in Europe can be filled if the traditional prejudices
of Russian nationalism are encouraged from the outside.

For growing up between the Russian border and the German border
in Eastern Europe is a no-man's-land, neither in NATO nor in the
European Union, that is bound to tempt both Russia and Germany into
their historic attitudes of trying to fill the vacuum.

- With unification, Germany has no further reason to subordinate
itself to France. And with the Russian armies withdrawn, NATO needs
a more clearly defined mission.

- The common argument out there is that the former Soviet Union,
whose principal heir is the Russian Federation, can become
democratic, market-oriented, and then integrated into the
international system. This tempts us into believing, one, that we
can identify foreign policy with one particular Russian leader, and

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second, that we can solve our foreign policy problems by engaging
in a form of social engineering within Russia.

I would advance a number of propositions with this regard. No
Russian government has ever left office voluntarily in the 500
years of its recorded history. So you could argue that democracy
there does not come naturally.

Every Russian government in every generation has expanded its
territory, without exception, from which I deduce, perhaps
unfairly, a certain proclivity. And if you travel around the
borders of the Russian republic, you will not find one country that
is not terrified of these tendencies.

What I want from American foreign policy is that it encourage
Russian economic development, cooperate in the process of recovery,
but make it clear that this is not compatible with reassembling all
the former republics and having Russian armies again reappear at
the borders of Poland, the Czech Republic, Turkey, and all the
other countries in which there are now buffers of weak non-
threatening republics.

American foreign policy has been so obsessed with social
engineering and so concerned with general phrases like
''peacekeeping'' that we have lost track of these very simple
propositions. We have had a tendency to equate what we do in Haiti
with what Russia does in the "near abroad". Yet Russian expansion
changes the security situation; American actions in Haiti do not
affect the security situation anywhere.

The idea behind foreign policy is to make distinctions, not to
make abstract general rules. And in the name of peacekeeping or UN
actions, all of which reflect a certain American tradition, we may
not understand some of the key requirements of foreign policy.

Thus we should stop talking about a new world order as if it
already exists. It has to be built from the old, which has to be
rethought. (END)

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