At least President Bush didn’t parrot Woodrow Wilson’s promise that we were fighting a foreign war “to make the world safe for democracy.” Americans understand the word “democracy,” and it’s clear that “democracy” is not what our Gulf War or George Bush’s foreign policy is all about.
Instead, President Bush packaged his foreign policy as an effort to establish a “New World Order.” Although he has used this phrase repeatedly in his speeches to the American people and to Congress beginning on September 11, 1990, either by design or inadvertence he has failed to define this new goal.
We are left to speculate on what he means by a New World Order. One option is that America will now undertake the role and responsibility of serving as the world’s policeman; after all, keeping order by arresting the bad guys is the chief function of the police.
The magnitude of such a role is awesome. Shall we next send our troops to repel the Soviets from invading Lithuania and Latvia? or to protect the next protesters in Tiananmen Square? of course not.
Perhaps we will be the world’s policeman merely to protect existing boundaries. That policy makes it OK for dictators to savage people within their own borders (such as Gorbachev repressing freedom in Lithuania and Latvia).
Or, perhaps New World Order means that we will maintain a costly NATO-level of U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East for the next 40 years.
A second possible definition of New World Order is that the United Nations will henceforth exercise decision making power over U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, President Bush sought war making approval by the United Nations before he went to Congress, and his lawyers stoutly maintain that he didn’t need congressional approval at all.
In his September 11, 1990 speech to Congress, Bush said, “We are now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders.” During her tenure as Ambassador to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick conclusively exposed the hostility of the United Nations toward American policy and interests.
Most Americans were pleased that, the U.N. had become an irrelevancy in world events. Most Americans are very uncomfortable with Bush’s resurrection of this anti-American outfit.
A third possible definition of New World Order was suggested a few weeks ago by Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times, namely, “a convergence of goals and interests between the United States and the Soviet Union working as a team through the U.N. Security Council.” Since the Third-World-dominated General Assembly of the United Nations could be as fractious and frustrating for President Bush as the liberal Democratic-dominated Congress, it would be so much more efficient for the two superpowers to just get together on the Hot Line and make all the important international decisions.
Rosenthal’s use of the word “convergence” is ominously reminiscent of the use of that word by Lyndon Johnson’s National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, who was famous for his theory that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would “converge” and by John F. Kennedy’s State Department policy planning chairman, Walt W. Rostow, who was famous for his plea for “an end to nationhood.”
Of the three explanations for the New World order, Rosenthal’s is the most likely. George Bush is openly supportive of Gorbachev and has called for giving him billions of dollars of U.S. tax-funded credits.
Bush and the other Western heads of state have closed their eyes to the way Gorbachev has abandoned perestroika and all hope for a free market economy. He is trying to browbeat the nation into functioning under the heavy-handed, failed socialist bureaucracies.
Gorbachev took personal control of the KGB on March 5 and made it the vehicle to force compliance with his totalitarian one-man rule. Whatever remained of glasnost was liquidated when Gorbachev clamped down on the Baltic states and denied Boris Yeltsin the opportunity to speak on television prior to the March t7 referendum.
On February 26, Gorbachev told the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences: “My dear Party comrades, I am a Communist, and I adhere to the socialist idea. And I shall remain so until the end of my days.”
President Bush, his National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and his financial advisers cherish “stability,” and so are apparently willing to line up with the repressive Soviet regime of Gorbachev rather than with the hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who have been demonstrating against him.
Does the New World order mean ruling the world in cooperation with big-power dictatorships rather than allowing the uncertainties and unpredictability of freedom and decentralization?
