Essay: Two Centuries of New World Orders

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.