Temptations of a Superpower.

Five years have passed since the end of the Cold War, long enough for the deeds of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to be entombed in high school history textbooks. But we have yet to find our way to a new foreign policy consensus, despite the earnest efforts of both post-Cold War presidents. George Bush tried and failed; his goal of a "New World Order" was mocked by events. Bill Clinton tried as well, if less enthusiastically; his fling at "assertive unilateralism" came to grief on the streets of Mogadishu.

Part of the problem has been conceptual. The character of our time is so elusive that we don't even have a name for it. We're still vamping, epochally speaking, in the "post-Cold War era"--an admission that we don't know where we are, only where we've just been. And yet between genocides, ethnic wars, nuclear proliferation, and global economic competition, foreign policy still demands a daunting amount of an American president's time, no matter how devoted he is to domestic concerns. What's a statesman to do?

If the statesman is Clinton, or Bob Dole, or even Newt Gingrich, the fallback answer is to recite timeworn verities: The United States is the world's only superpower; American leadership is vital; and we must be guided by the twin (and not always compatible) roles of U.S. foreign policy: realism and idealism. At a conference staged by the Richard M. Nixon Center in March, all three men delivered virtually interchangeable declarations of hard-eyed Nixonian realism, tempered, of course, by lofty Wilsonian idealism and reaffirming the necessity of American preeminence.

Clinton: "American leadership is necessary for the tide of history to keep running our way, and for our children to live the future they deserve." Dole: "Leadership does not come without a price tag, but in my view, it's a price that's worth paying."

Gingrich: "The United States must lead, period. The objective lesson of the last five years is simple: there's no replacement."

To all of which Ronald Steel, whose prior book was a magisterial biography of Walter Lippmann, replies: not really.

Put bluntly, Steel's message in this nicely crafted series of essays is: Forget most of what you learned during the past half-century. The United States may be the world's only superpower, but it is far less "super" than before, and the honor may be more trouble than it's worth. The notion that the United States "must lead" in virtually every circumstance is a terrible mistake. Our impulse toward Wilsonian idealism, while the most original and attractive feature of our foreign policy, is also the one most likely to get us into quagmires. The global advance of democracy might be a noble goal, but it is so unrealistic as to be self-defeating.

"If a foreign policy is to be effective, it must have the support of the American public. And to have that support, it cannot be quixotic or gaseously utopian," Steel warns. "It cannot seek impossible ends, like the democratization of the world, or the attainment of a beneficent 'world order.' It will avoid grandiose rhetoric precisely so that it can act in those cases which will be few but critical where it can, at tolerable cost, achieve its ends, and where the degree of suffering or injustice that it addresses greatly exceeds the customary or the tolerable. This is not a form that will satisfy zealots or crusaders, and it is also more than some others may be willing to incur, but it is one that accords with the moral values of the American people and has limitations realistic enough to win their support."

Thus, Steel argues for a foreign policy that begins with the central concerns of the American people (jobs, drugs, immigration, the environment); that seeks stability in Europe and Asia through old fashioned "balance of power" diplomacy; that acknowledges that large countries have geographic spheres of influence (ours being the Western Hemisphere) and looks skeptically on intervention beyond those bounds; and that rejects most opportunities for military action, even under newfangled devices of multilateral action or "collective security."

This is, in short, a Walter Lippmann view of the post-Cold War world: a brief for a new realism and against reflexive idealism. Steel's realism is not isolationist or narrow; he decries the failure of the United States to act in Rwanda, for example, where genocide could have been halted at minimal cost. On the other hand, he approves of the decisions by the Clinton and Bush Administration to reject military intervention in Bosnia, where the cost of success would (in Steel's view) be unacceptably high. And he warns against setting unnecessarily lofty goals, as when Clinton adviser Anthony Lake listed the nation's adversaries in September 1994 as "extreme nationalists and tribalists, terrorists, organized criminals, coup plotters, rogue states, and all those who would return newly free societies to the intolerant ways of the past."

"After thus lining up the United States for a crusade against most of the world, it is not surprising that the Clinton Administration, in one area after another, has had to retreat upon discovering that it was standing alone," Steel notes. "Leaders who set such agendas are doomed to failure and will be repudiated. The result may well be to discredit not only the more grandiose projects but even desirable ones, such as cooperation with other major powers to dampen regional conflicts. That is the price paid for a lack of a sense of proportion."

In practice, the Clinton Administration has already taken much of Steel's advice. Clinton's reluctance to spend meager political capital on foreign adventures, reinforced by the lawyerly caution of Secretary of State Warren Christopher, has made Lake's professions of Wilsonian idealism little more than dissonant reminders of what Democrats once believed.

But where Clinton's realism is reluctant and grudging, Steel's is root-and-branch. In Europe, for example, Steel argues that U.S. leadership is mostly a relic of the Cold War; we should welcome NATO's replacement by a European-led security alliance, "for it means that the United States can cease being distracted, even seduced, by tasks that others can best perform for themselves."

This is a direct and bracing argument, more useful than anything our major politicians have said about foreign policy over the past few years. There are, to be sure, some holes in the case. Steel asserts that the United States "faces no serious security threat abroad" and is "as near to being invulnerable as a nation can get." If the last five years have taught us anything it is that we can be threatened all too easily by nuclear weapons in North Korea, Iran, or Iraq. There may be an echo here of Lippmann, who promoted neutrality up until the fall of France in 1940, a position he later confessed had been "a deadly misunderstanding." Steel's notion of spheres of influence seems a bit outmoded in a world where geography means less and less. And there is very little here about the economic issues that are muscling their way to the top of the foreign policy agenda.

For other views and other pieces of the puzzle, readers will want to consider Michael Klare's recent book on proliferation, Nuclear Outlaws and Rogue States, Samuel P. Huntington's hotly debated warning of world cultural conflict, The Clash of Civilizations, and the ever-growing bookshelf on global economic competition. But as a first shot in what will be a long and passionate debate, this is not bad at all.