Ideas: Sorry To See the Cold War

Now that almost everyone agrees the cold war is over, policymakers and analysts have begun to debate whether jubilation or apprehension is in order. Even before Iraq's mugging of Kuwait, some experts worried that without the superpowers to rein them in, other nations tend to live by the law of the jungle, and hot wars are a condition of nature. Hence Europe could revert to patterns of international behavior that not too long ago made it every bit as dangerous and violent as the Middle East is today.

One of the first to sound a note of alarm was Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. In a speech last September he said, "For all its risks and uncertainties, the cold war was characterized by a remarkably stable and predictable set of relationships among the great powers." The changes in the East, he warned, may prove "destabilizing."

Eagleburger, a former ambassador to Yugoslavia, recently told a visiting delegation of historians that he particularly fears the "Balkanization" of Eastern Europe. With the retreat of the Soviet army, the countries of that region may once again be susceptible to the clash of national hatreds and ambitions that accompanied the breakup of empires earlier in this century.

A short version of this concern is echoed by Eagleburger's boss, George Bush, who has taken to saying that the new enemy in Europe is "instability and unpredictability."

Now comes the long version. It is a 52-page article, titled "Back to the Future," that appears in the quarterly International Security. An 11-page abridgment is the cover story in the August Atlantic. Copies of that piece are being circulated and discussed at the State Department and the White House.

Author John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, argues that Europe enjoyed 45 years of durable if chilly peace precisely because it was divided into two camps; the U.S. and the Soviet Union have kept not only each other in check but their allies as well. For Mearsheimer and other academic experts on war and peace, two is a lucky, even magic, number. As he puts it in social-sciencese, "a bipolar system has only one dyad across which war might break out." In other words, if nations are going to square off against one another, better they do so along a single, well-defined, well- fortified line that everyone knows not to cross. With a balance of power has come a balance of terror. War can be averted by that saving grace of the nuclear age, mutual deterrence.

Now Mearsheimer sees the emergence of a multipolar Europe, cluttered with dyads, or pairs of rivals, that could easily slip out of balance and alliances that constantly shift. The major states in the region -- Germany, France, Britain, perhaps Italy, certainly a shrunken but still formidable Russia -- will jockey for advantage, sometimes with, but often against, one another. Meanwhile, Hungary and Romania, Poland and Czechoslovakia may dig up ancient border disputes. "The geometry of power," writes Mearsheimer, would become "a design for tension, crisis and possibly even war."