Quelling the Teacup Wars: The New World's Constant Challenge

Leslie H. Gelb

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 1994

Article preview: first 500 of 2,392 words total.

Summary:  As America's involvement in the world deepens, its leaders are responding to new problems with old fears. Outmoded strategies will allow today's core problem - civil wars - to overwhelm us.

Leslie H. Gelb is President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Almost 50 years ago and almost 75 years ago, our forebears exulted in their military triumphs and wrote of endings and beginnings. Filled with hope and cynicism, they sketched new international maps and institutions. Idealists and realists alike, most made the same basic error. Most assumed that the world had changed more than it really had.

The danger today is that we may commit the opposite error, namely that we will think or at least act as if the world has changed less than it really has. And by so doing, we will exaggerate old threats and minimize new ones, and thus finally find ourselves overwhelmed by the all-corrosive danger that stares us down daily - the teacup wars filled with countless bodies and horrors, the scourge of civil and ethnic violence.

If we fail to ameliorate and check this scourge, both the victims and the unpunished killers will undo much of what we value and undermine efforts to mold a just and stable international order. Without such an order, there can be little hope to tend the planet, nurture more tolerant societies, sustain economic progress, or contain the perilous spread of military and nuclear power.

Yet even as the physical traces of the Old World vanish, many still cling to its intellectual trappings. While the New World surrounds us and pounds us for attention, we answer mostly, though far more softly, with the old fears and the old strategies.

Though the Soviet Union lies in ashes, we almost expect and plan for the emergence of a new Russian empire. Though Germany has evolved as one of the most stable democracies in the world, we secretly dread its reversion to authoritarianism and militarism. Though the United States has never before been as entangled in the world as it is today, we fear its return to isolationism. Most policy experts still lean on the central strategy of the Cold War: keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. Only, we want to execute this strategy on the cheap, at bargain basement prices.

The Cold War's worries should not be tossed aside. On the contrary, we would be naive and irresponsible to ignore the possibilities of future Russian expansionism or German brittleness or the chaos of a world without American leadership. But we must examine these concerns with fresh eyes and judge anew whether they should remain at the core of Western strategy or be placed in different focus.

The issue of strategic focus is essential. No strategy can succeed unless it settles on the most compelling threat and defines it correctly. The strategy of containment zeroed in on precisely the right problem. For all the misjudgments and miscalculations committed in the name of halting the spread of communism, containment kept us pointed in the right direction. Now we must look again at the main elements of containment - Russia, Germany, and America - put them in their new context and see whether and how they still fit.

End of preview: first 500 of 2,392 words total.