ESSAY

By Richard Brookhiser

President George Bush calls it "a responsibility imposed by our successes" in the cold war. Columnist Pete Hamill calls it the new world odor. Fleeing Kurds, burying their dead in mountain tent cities, call it misery.

Welcome to the new world order.

If huddled refugees have become the emblem of his foreign policy, Bush has only himself to blame for giving it a sonorous title with the word new in it. The principles -- and the problems -- of the new world order have a long history in American foreign policy -- or better, foreign policies, since America has traditionally pursued two. The NWO echoes both.

The first tradition of American foreign policy, appropriately, is America first. It was often isolationist, as in George Washington's warning in his Farewell Address against permanent alliances. But it was not necessarily so. (Washington had been interested in westward expansion since colonial days.) Our interests might compel us to pick fights; as America expanded in the world economy, and as weapons became transoceanic, we also came to have interests in such things as peace and stability. But we would continue to stay out of fights that did not directly concern us, and our concerns did not automatically include every instance of injustice in the world.

Over the years this principle of self-interest was inflected by an idealistic impulse: America as leader and light of the world. We associate this with the crusading spirit of the World Wars and the cold war, but it too goes further back. The Spanish-American War began not only to remember the Maine but to cleanse Cuba of Spanish concentration camps. Earlier still, there were Americans who wanted to aid Hungarian rebels against the Habsburgs or Greek rebels against the Ottomans.

Both impulses have shared a very American respect for legalistic thinking -- not surprisingly, since so many American diplomats were Wasp lawyers. They searched, as George Kennan put it, for "formal criteria of a juridical nature by which the permissible behavior of states could be defined." The rest of the world was often baffled by our devotion to this search, even as it made the rest of the world baffling to us. "To the American mind," Kennan added, it was "implausible that people should have positive aspirations more important to them than the peacefulness and orderliness of international life." Still, whether we were being hardheaded or softhearted, we put our faith in rules, since both our power and the world's happiness seemed to benefit from them.

The gulf war, the first crisis of Bush's NWO, was in fact a display case for the weaknesses and the strengths of typical American behavior. Our pussyfooting diplomacy before the invasion of Kuwait was intended to be a simple lawyerly proposition. Because we wanted to be honest brokers, we assured Saddam that we had no position on the precise location of the Iraq- Kuwait border. The only problem with our offer was that Saddam, who is not a Wasp lawyer, took it to mean that we didn't care whether there was an Iraq- Kuwait border.

Once he erased it, all the strands of our foreign policies knotted together. Self-interest rose to the defense of our oil supply. Saddam's treatment of Kuwait and his casual lobbing of Scuds into Israel stirred Bush to outrage. Our diplomats had rounded up a sheaf of United Nations resolutions to give Operation Desert Storm a firm foundation of paper.

Last month, in a speech in Montgomery, Bush outlined four principles for the NWO. His hopes for the future were as old fashioned as his actions had been. Principles 1 and 2, "peaceful settlements of disputes" and "solidarity against aggression," reflect the American obsession with legality. Principle 3, "reduced and controlled arsenals," reflects the interests of a commercial power, dependent on peaceful world trade, that is eager to reduce its military spending. Bush's last principle, "just treatment of all peoples," comes out of the idealist tradition with, like the first three, a legalistic tinge.

If Americans keep behaving like Americans, we will keep on encountering the same problems. One potential problem, as Kennan suggested and Saddam demonstrated, is that other countries will misunderstand us -- although the gulf war should clarify our notion of the boundaries of "permissible behavior," at least for the time being.

The most serious problems with the old/NWO, however, are likely to be of our own devising. They will arise whenever we tilt too heavily to one side or the other of our national character. Too often, American idealism metastasizes into utopianism. Making the world safe from aggression, or even from injustice, is not the same thing as making it safe for democracy -- an exercise in political evangelism that is an altogether more difficult task. Woodrow Wilson approached the peace talks ending World War I as the consummation of a democratic crusade. Their failure ruined Central Europe for 70 years.

The opposite error is to leave jobs half finished in the name of a foolishly consistent prudence. This is the impracticality of practical men, and this is clearly what controlled the Bush Administration's first response to the plight of the Kurds. Not wanting to become bogged down in Iraq's internal affairs, we left the Kurdish rebellion to its fate. We should have seen that a six-week air war was already a massive intervention in Iraq's affairs. If Saddam was dangerous enough to be bombed out of Kuwait, then his internal enemies, the Kurds and the Shi'ites, ought to have been helped to win themselves some breathing room.

The double impulses of our old approach to world order make for contradictions. Together they can save the U.S. from empty moralizing or mere self-seeking.

It is very American to think that all history begins yesterday. Thinking so, we repeat old mistakes or balk at burdens that seem brand new. Bush could do a better job with the NWO. Americans have been tinkering with it for 200 years.