Can America Stand Alone?

By Charles Krauthammer

Has there ever been a more reluctant superpower than America? Has any great power taken less pleasure in its foreign adventures? I doubt it. As shown yet again in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. is the world leader, and Americans hate the job. The idea that the world is an arena of unending conflict repels Americans. It means that a superpower's work is never done.

Don't we get time off? Just weeks after winning the cold war, we face a new war in the gulf. Like Americans going off to Korea just five years after V-J day, we feel uneasy, disappointed. The more disturbed among us feel betrayed. They need to conjure up some conspiracy, some alien force (Jews, imagines the fevered Pat Buchanan) dragging us again to war.

The reluctant superpower seeks an end to toil. Which is why Americans are endlessly resourceful in trying to evade the burdens of history. First, there was the isolationism of the '20s and '30s. Then, during the cold war, the American left counseled abdication, denying either that the cold war existed or that it was anything more than a cozy arrangement to keep the Pentagon and the paranoid right happy.

Next, the cold war was won. In the accompanying euphoria, the idea was born that having once again won the war to end all wars, the U.S. could finally lay down its burdens. Calls rang out for cutting the defense budget in half by the end of the decade. The New Yorker, with its unerring instinct for the politically trendy and the politically stupid, suggested (quoting Daniel Ellsberg) doing the 50% cut right now. In Congress the rush was on for wholesale American demobilization. A reporter, complaining at a Feb. 12 White House press conference about "out of sync" defense spending, asked the President, "Who's the enemy?"

< Well, now we know. Saddam Hussein has reminded Americans the world is a nasty place. Americans do not appreciate the reminder. They find it hard to accept the fact that as the planet's only remaining superpower, the U.S. is the one nation that can, and therefore must, face down the nasties.

Hence the search for another way to avoid the crushing burdens of superpower responsibility. The search has borne fruit. The newest panacea for getting us off the hook has been found: the U.N., multilateralism, collective security. Woodrow Wilson's great dream that the world would respond to aggression by acting collectively rather than having to rely on a policeman (i.e., us) is finally coming true.

What a dream. What an illusion.

What is happening in the gulf is not collective security but a coincidence of interests. And it is hardly collective. Without the U.S. leading, prodding, bribing and blackmailing, no one would have stirred. Nothing would have been done: no embargo, no Desert Shield. The world would have written off Kuwait the way the last body pledged to collective security, the League of Nations, wrote off Abyssinia.

Last week the commanders of both Egyptian and Syrian forces in Saudi Arabia declared that they would not take part in any counterinvasion of Kuwait. In Kuwait, as in Korea (our most recent exercise in collective security), if war comes it is America that will carry the fight. When the Iraqis complain that the anti-Iraq coalition, the U.N. front, the whole multi-lateral apparatus, is little more than a cover for an assertion of American power, they exaggerate only slightly.

Nothing wrong with cover. It is nice to have. It is always good to enter a conflict with lots of people cheering you on and saying how noble your cause. It is still nicer to have others standing on the front line with you, even though they are only a token force.

Multilateralism is fine. But it carries two dangers. First, that we will mistake illusion (world opinion, U.N. resolutions, professions of solidarity) for the real thing (American power), and assume that if we dispense with the real thing, illusion will get us to where we are going.

The second danger is that multi-lateralism will become a fetish. The need to nurture it can actually become a hindrance to the exercise of real, effective power. There are voices arguing that the U.S. should not do anything in the gulf -- undertake military action, for example -- that might jeopardize the grand coalition it has put together. This is to confuse means and ends. The coalition is a means to getting Iraq out of Kuwait. It is not an end in itself. As long as the means serves the end, it is worth having. If there comes a point at which holding the coalition together prevents us from achieving the objective, then surely the objective takes precedence.

The great danger with any collective action is that the more partners you have, the less you can do. U.N. resolutions, Security Council support, Soviet backing, allied troops and Japanese money are all very welcome in this or any other American geopolitical exertion. They are welcome but they cannot be made essential. Otherwise, American policy becomes prisoner to its partners' wishes. The more partners, the more wishes. Options become constrained, the chances of success diminished.

The point of policy, after all, is success. It is not to feel good. It is not international applause. It is not to hold coalitions for the sake of coalitions. It is to achieve ends. If coalitions help, fine. Otherwise, they cannot be allowed to paralyze policy.

President Bush says it is not America against Iraq but the world against Iraq. In fact, it is America, with some friends following carefully behind. Collective security is a diplomatic myth: convenient to use, dangerous to believe.

History has been severe with America. After reluctantly joining and decisively winning the three great wars of this century (World War I, World War II and the cold war), America is permitted no rest. It keeps getting stuck with the job not just of protecting itself but of imposing order on a disorderly world. Collective security is only the latest myth seized upon by Americans desperate to believe they have found their well-deserved escape from the burdens of history.

Unfortunately, and unfairly, they have not.