World Policy Journal
Volume XVII, No 4, Winter 2000

 

American Stalemate, Unruly World
By The Editors

 

A disputed election, a hobbled president, a country divided from courthouse to Congress. It has happened before, in 1825 and 1877, and doubtless Americans will once again cope with their domestic discontents. But the prospect of prolonged deadlock and party acrimony is of incomparably greater concern today to the rest of humanity. For better or worse, in prosperity or recession, the United States - "the indispensable nation" - is wedded to a global economy and a global security system that Americans helped to create.

The system is straining at the seams. Europe's economic and political community seems stuck midway between expanding its functions and frontiers, and finding ways and excuses for standing still, as Martin Walker relates in this issue. Elsewhere in the world, in the Middle East, Russia, Africa, Asia, and South America, the problem is not stasis but vulnerable economies and domestic strife. Not in recent memory have there been more violent, and more intractable, conflicts in so many places. The Cold War's simplifying matrix no longer exists, though some persist in clinging to its stereotypes, as Anatol Lieven contends in his essay. Many disputes, like Tolstoy's unhappy families, arise from specific local circumstances that are mystifying to outsiders. Worse, those who try to help or to comprehend - peacekeepers, human rights monitors, journalists, and even medical workers - are now deliberately targeted by belligerents, with a dismaying indifference to world opinion, much less international law. In our pages, we describe the killing of a New School colleague, a human rights advocate in Indonesia, who was trapped in this lethal crossfire.

The wars fester, millions are uprooted, sending waves of refugees across frontiers, breeding enmities that can persist for generations, propelling a tide that now impinges on the more fortunate. Yet as Brian Urquhart demonstrates, what is misleadingly termed the international community lacks the rudimentary resources for fighting so many fires in so many places. Granted, American diplomacy may be able to address only the results and not the sources of this global turbulence; it may be that in the short run there is no realistic possibility of restructuring the international system. Yet in the coming months, a new administration, dogged by attacks on its legitimacy, distracted by incessant quarrels at home, might opt out of potentially unpopular global initiatives, or conversely, might plunge forward incautiously into hopeless ventures. In few regions are the risks of a misstep greater than in Central Asia, blessed with oil and gas riches, but blighted by repression and corruption, as detailed in the article by Ahmed Rashid. Looking ahead, it seems evident that this journal will not lack for subjects, or a mission.