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COLD WAR WAS FRIGHTENING, BUT PREDICTABLE NEW WORLD ORDER MAKES IT TOO EASY TO DO
 Nowadays, with the Soviet
Union dismantled and the threat of nuclear war no longer the overriding factor
in U.S. foreign policy, the world's lone remaining superpower is far more likely
to deploy its military forces on a whim, to involve them in some well-meant
but misguided adventure that in Cold War times would have been unthinkable.
Back in the bad old days,
when Marxist thugs ruled the Evil Empire, the United states wouldn't have dreamed
of interfering in a European civil war. but in 1999, with no Brezhnev glowering
in the Kremlin, no Krushechev sitting with his finger on the nuclear button,
the United States and its NATO allies rained bombs on Yugoslavia with impunity.
Russian President Boris
Yelstin didn't like it, but there wasn't a darn thing he could do about it.
 So which is better--a perilous
and delicate balance of power that forces superpowers to mind their own business,
or a one-superpower world in which the United States can meddle in any conflict
any time it wants to do so? I can't stop believing that
there was something to be said for an international stalemate that discouraged
ill-advised military adventurism. But I'm not goofy enough to wish for a return
to the Cold War and its theory of mutual assured destruction; the world is immeasurably
safer and happier without such tension and hostility.Anyone who thinks otherwise
should take note of that rhetorical blast from the past offered up by Yelstin
the other day when he responded to President Clinton's criticism of his policies
by reminding the U.S. commander in chief that Russia still has the capacity
to blow up the planet.
"He obviously must
have forgotten for a few seconds, a minute or half minute, what Russia is and
that Russia possesses a full arsenal of nuclear weapons," Yelstin said.
When Yelstin said that Clinton
had forgotten "what Russia is," he was referring to his country's
status as a major power among the nations of the world. But it was an interesting
choice of words, since no one could possibly forget what Russia is: the nerve
center of the former Soviet Union, one of the truly evil and oppressive empires
of the 20th century.
No, the American president
hasn't forgotten what Russia is. And neither have the American people, who lived
with the Soviet threat for too long to ever seriously embrace the fantasy that
Russia could ever be our friend.
The notoriously unstable
and reportedly unhealthy Yelstin has fostered the illusion of friendship between
the former Cold War adversaries because his troubled country desperately needs
American economic aid. But it clearly didn't take much provocation--Clinton
questioned Yelstin's treatment of rebels in Chechnya--to reactivate long-dormant
animosities.
Clinton shrugged off Yelstin's
outburst in the way that a sober and responsible patron might ignore the ravings
of a rude but harmless drunk at the neighborhood saloon.. Why dignify an idiotic
remark with a serious response?
Besides, by the time the
media reported what Yelstin had said, he'd probably forgotten that he said it.
It is conceivable, of course,
that this incident signaled a treacherous new turn in U.S.-Russian relations--and
that would be unfortunate. The two countries will never be pals, but mutual
tolerance beats mutual assured destruction any old day.
Even so, there was something
nostalgic about that fleeting moment of contentiousness, that brief flashback
to the flashpoint atmosphere of the Cold War. Those were difficult days, to
be sure, but there was a sense of order to the world back then. There was a
predictability to the way nations interacted, even if the interaction was too
often characterized by malice and menace.
Crazy as it sounds--and
scary as it was
--there was something reassuring about all that.
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