New world orders to order?

* President Bush has been criticized by some conservatives for promising a "new world order" (henceforth NWO) after victory over Saddam Hussein. There is something about the phrase that has the same effect on conservative spines as an over-zealous masseuse. It reminds us of "new world information order," "new international economic order," and other nonsense from the supine Seventies. But just as fine words butter no parsnips, cold phrases should cook no geese. For whatever we call it, an NWO of some kind is inevitable. The freeing of Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, the rise of Japan, and the emergence of the U. S. as the sole world superpower-all these mean that some new structure of world power is emerging. What kind? There seem to be three candidates. The first NWO, ostensibly an idealistic one, is a genuinely collective system of security under the United Nations. This idea is both impractical and objectionable. The LTN is a shifting series of makeshift alliances which can provide security only in rare instances, like the Kuwait crisis, where the aggressor has no important allies on the Security Council. And even if UN vetoes were abolished, a "world democracy" in which tyrannies with small populations outvoted populous democracies would be an absurdity. The second NWO is a superpower condominium with the U. S. and the Soviet Union between them running the world under a cloak of LTN diplomacy. That concept, however, depends on the Soviet Union's both remaining a world power and becoming a more democratic one. With Gorbachev's retreat into neo-Stalinism and economic inefficiency, it is doomed.

That leaves the third NWO: a pax Americana. The Gulf crisis has been a dry run for a world in which the U.S. would be the dominant power enforcing collective security with the support of allies and the UN's blessing. As this NWO develops, U.S. allies not giving military help would, in effect, be taxed to pay the costs. Given Uncle Sam's dominance, however, U.S. interests would largely determine the international rules of the game, LTN decisions, and what constituted a threat to peace. Highly satisfactory. Seeking domestic support for his Gulf policy, President Bush has sometimes seemed to commend NWOs 1 and 2. But his policy has been an almost pure expression of NWO 3. If the price of a pax Americana is calling it a new world order, conservatives should be prepared to pay it. * Major General Viktor 1. Filatov, editor of the Soviet Military-Historical Journal and an enthusiastic supporter of Red Army crackdowns all round, has been livening up his magazine with excerpts from Hitler's Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and so on. Even in the looser atmosphere of today's Moscow, where advocates of Communist repression can freely speak their minds, this has raised eyebrows.

Filatov defended his editorial policy to the New York Times: "I regard the Protocols as a normal piece of literature, like the Bible or the Koran." Ah, literature. That's okay, then.

Robert Conquest, who is a poet as well as a Sovietologist, calls this "the Mapplethorpe defense." That provokes the further thought: Will the National Endowment for the Arts subsidize an American publication of the Protocols? And if not, won't the "arts community" denounce that as censorship?

We can only speculate. Still, the fact that today's most challenging work in the arts has the patronage of the Soviet Defense Ministry gives a fresh meaning to the term avant-garde. * I am delighted to announce that William J. Bennett is joining NATioNAL REVIEW as a senior editor. We welcome conservatism's fighting philosopher-and look forward to his taking off the gloves. JOHN O'SULLIVAN