The Dawn of Cold War II.

There is a theory afoot that the true motivation for NATO's war on Serbia is not goodness and kindness and mercy, but America's urge to achieve absolute world domination. If only it were so! What's a little Pax Americana compared to what now appears to have been NATO's real goal all along--the restoration of the Cold War?

We could have had one superpower, calmly enforcing the reign of the IMF and McDonald's, but the masters of NATO, in their passion for symmetry, determined that there must be at least two. And if they have so far achieved nothing else in Yugoslavia, they have at least managed to restore order and sense to the universe, in the form of a standoff between the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other. You can stop worrying about Y2K--just set your calendars back to 1958.

A prescient observer could have seen this coming exactly a decade ago, when it became clear that the other side was no longer willing to play its role in what will be known, soon enough, as Cold War I. At the news of perestroika and Gorbachev's intention to start scrapping his warheads, did Washington officialdom don funny hats, swill champagne, and run out to foxtrot through the streets? Not at all. In fact, the White House inexplicably derided the Soviet leader as a "drugstore cowboy" and hinted that perestroika was a diabolical trick. When then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney proposed a microscopic 0.3 percent reduction in defense spending to mark the sudden disappearance of any plausible enemy, outraged screams issued from Congress. "You are putting Grumman out of business," complained the Representative from that company's home district. What would have been welcomed as peace almost anywhere else looked to Americans like an enemy shortage.

Bill Clinton was supposed to lead us out of the old Cold War mentality--a fresh young President willing to serve Warner Brothers and Pepsi as well as Boeing and Lockheed. But in 1994, his Administration began pushing for the expansion of NATO to include a passel of former Soviet subject states. Yeltsin yelped, and even Pat Buchanan, whom no one has ever accused of being a pacifist, was aghast. Consider the logic here: What made the expansion of NATO possible in the first place was the disappearance of the only rationale for its existence, the Soviet empire.

Now if NATO were just a club for white people of non-Slavic origin, a place for them to gather over sherry and reminisce about the fun times at Normandy and Ypres, what would it matter how big it got? But it is, of course, a military alliance, meaning a kind of armed gang, and the first thing new members have to do is take a sacred oath to increase their military budgets. This is called "modernizing" and is justified by the need to have all members, including the paupers among them, achieve "NATO-compatible" levels of armaments. As noted by many in the press, the biggest U.S. supporters of NATO expansion were not the Polish-derived citizens of Chicago, they were the manufacturers of missiles and fighter jets.

But what is a military alliance without something militaristic to do? Serb atrocities in Kosovo seemed to present the ideal mission. No one, except perhaps the occupants of Belgrade's bomb shelters, can reasonably deny that Serbia excels in the atrocity-production business (although the Croats and even the Kosovar Albanians can claim some success in this department, too). So Madeleine Albright, consummate hostess that she is, launched her war according to a timetable designed--her aides have since revealed--to get the whole business over with in time for NATO's fiftieth anniversary bash in April. This was to be the beefed-up NATO's inaugural war and proof of its lasting relevance. So what if Serbia's longstanding ally, Russia, had started growling about re-aiming its nuclear warheads at Albright's Washington office?

No victory in sight, NATO held its birthday party in April anyway, with the diplomats all feigning the gravitas appropriate to people engaged in acts of random vandalism from the air. But there were no long faces among some of the partygoers, no indeed. U.S. weapons manufacturers' stocks were booming, thanks to the "excitement in Kosovo," as one market analyst put it, and the arms dealers not only showed up at NATO's party, they actually sponsored it. Well, to be fair, some communications firms like Ameritech pitched in for the hors d'oeuvres, too, but the bulk of the sponsors were defense companies like Boeing, which contributed $250,000, and Raytheon, which has seen its stock soar by 17 percent since NATO's war began. As a reward for their generosity, the executives of sponsoring companies were allowed to mingle with the assembled diplomats, no doubt using the occasion to whisper little pleasantries like, "Boy, do I have a cluster bomb for you!"

But you can't have a meaningful Cold War against just poor old basket-case Russia, whose soldiers can usually be found roaming the streets, panhandling for vodka and turnip money. Hence the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade--and this "hence" does not derive from any privileged insider information. It would just be too painful to admit that NATO's great moral undertaking includes bombing a crowded city without an up-to-date map. Never mind that China today is no more communist than Connecticut: At least its military is in good enough shape to have funded an American Presidential campaign.

Maybe it's not 1958, though. Maybe it's really 1914. Then, too, a bit of nastiness perpetrated by Serbs--a minor bit, by present-day standards, involving the murder of just two people, who happened to be the Hapsburg crown prince and his wife--provoked a mighty urge to punish. Nations all over the world suddenly realigned themselves into two opposing camps. Huge war machines, polished to perfection during the preceding decades of relative peace, rolled onto the field. Nothing at all was accomplished in the four years of fighting that followed--nothing, that is, beyond a major expansion of cemetery acreage. So Cold War II is looking a lot like World War I, except that if the nuclear warheads start flying, this could turn into a war that not even Boeing will win.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War" (Henry Holt & Co., 1997), is a columnist for The Progressive.