COLUMN: America's creation: A new world disorder

From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '00 From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '00On December 31, as the planet celebrated the new millennium, another event occurred which has already had far greater consequences for the world than the anti-climactic Y2K bug. While partygoers caroused in Tokyo, Paris or Penn's Landing, Boris Yeltsin -- Russia's increasingly dictatorial president -- suddenly resigned and handed power to a little-known former KGB chief named Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, the only ones we're fooling are ourselves. A momentous shift in the global balance of power was quietly building up through the 1990s and has now come to a close with the end of Yeltsin's regime and the promotion of China to a full-scale rival for international supremacy. Not that any of this was inevitable. The 1990s began with such promise. Thawed, then almost-warm relations between the U.S. and Gorbachev's Soviet Union. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. And at home, the "peace dividend" that would free up billions of dollars from the defense budget for everything from Social Security and the budget deficit to schools and health care. But instead of taking advantage of a historic opportunity to "make the world a better place," both abroad and at home, our political, military and business leaders embarked on an irrational policy of trying to dominate as much of the world as possible. How else can one explain our increasingly ludicrous attempts to "squeeze" Cuba to death, or our frequent attempts to impose our will on other sovereign states through military intervention? In 1992, I was taught to consider Russia our new friend. As the decade progressed, the West treated Russia more and more as an unruly child or unreliable ally, fit only for primitive capitalist "shock treatment" and IMF loans -- but no say in world affairs. No wonder, then, that ordinary Russians have long since abandoned their illusions of Western benevolence for a growing nationalist rage. And many critics agree that much of this is our own fault. To be sure, America's ruthless aspiration for global control had its own murderous logic. As long as there were no other great powers on the world scene -- and most importantly, no united opposition -- the U.S. could afford to engage in reckless behavior wherever it pleased. NATO's war of aggression in Yugoslavia last spring clearly revealed the extent of resentment and anger toward the West's heavy-handed behavior and moral hypocrisy, from Japan and China to Russia and even NATO-allied Greece, not to speak of most of the Third World. But neither rumors of a nascent Moscow-Minsk-Belgrade alliance nor China's outrage at the bombing of its embassy caused any real worry in the State Department. All of that should have changed in December when Yeltsin and China's Jiang Zemin greeted each other with a bear hug at their meeting in Beijing -- a historic summit that received virtually no media coverage in the U.S. I had to go to the ex-Soviet paper Izvestia to read Yeltsin's speech in which he declared that President Clinton "believes he can tell the rest of the world what to do" -- and promised those days were now over. Tough words from Yeltsin, a man who was nominally our friend. His successor, if anything, will likely be even less friendly. Given the record of the U.S. and its allies in the post-Cold War era, it's hardly surprising that other powers are discussing new alliances or mutual defense agreements against the threat of Western aggression. What disturbs me, however, is the near-total ignorance of the shifting tide of world politics in the mainstream press. That can mean only one of two things. It's possible that those in power are well aware of the limitations of our military might and business influence but wish to prolong the myth of American omnipotence to a gullible public. That's not a great thought, but it would hardly be the first time our leaders have lied to us. Perhaps it is even more likely that our leaders have failed to recognize the enormous impact of Yeltsin and Jiang's embrace or the dawn of the post-Yeltsin era on the balance of world power. If so, this would be much more than a failure of understanding on the part of Clinton and Albright. Because all signs are pointing to an upcoming military operation of the kind launched against Yugoslavia in 1999 -- possibly later this year when the West "helps" Montenegro to secede from Yugoslavia, or if and when a crisis erupts between India and Pakistan, or in any of innumerable hot spots around the globe. And if the U.S. and its obedient allies once again brandish their missiles without so much as a token attempt at diplomatic resolution, the world's other powers will be much less likely to stand idly by and watch their "non-superpower" status rubbed in their faces by Washington's arrogant Caesars. Don't make the same mistake, folks. A new year has dawned. The post-Cold War, a unique period of unlimited U.S. world domination, has come and gone, and a new era of potentially deadly conflict looms before us. My hope for 2000 is that enough of my fellow U.S. citizens, who proved they could still change the world in Seattle two months ago, will recognize the new facts of the game and keep our leaders from pushing the earth over the edge of today's illusive "peace."