The New Constellation

Like iron filings disturbed by wholly new fields of force, familiar world patterns are being redesigned. With an abruptness that seemed stunning after a generation of debate, the United Nations admitted Mao's China and sent Chiang Kai-shek's delegates unceremoniously home to Taiwan.

After years of tortuous negotiation, Western Europe was about to coalesce in a new reality as Britain voted to join the Common Market. Simultaneously, world leaders were meeting in dizzying and sometimes improbable combinations. Yugoslavia's Tito was in the U.S., the Soviet Union's Leonid Brezhnev in Paris, and Aleksei Kosygin in Havana. India's Indira Gandhi stopped in Brussels on the way to the U.S.

The impulse toward redefinition came with especially galvanic effect in the U.S. Senate. There, liberals and conservatives combined to defeat the foreign aid bill, thus upending more than 25 years of U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Though some of the disparate motion was coincidence, it symbolized a rearrangement of global power relationships. Where the postwar era had been marked by a bipolar balance between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., the next decades will see a more complex constellation of power centers. That fact has already been widely discussed--but it has not yet been emotionally accepted or, as the psychologists say, "internalized" by most Americans. The recognition that America is not omnipotent is painful and can lead to petulance and isolationism, to a kind of let's-pick-up-our-marbles syndrome. But the fact is that the new shape of the world could mean a lessening of burdens and immense new opportunities. To recognize this requires wisdom and imagination--especially in the White House.

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