Confronting Chaos

By JAMES WALSH

ABOUT A CENTURY AGO, LEO TOLSTOY REputedly remarked, "Imagine Genghis Khan with a telephone!" What the author of War and Peace had in mind, of course, was the device's military potential. But Genghis Khan as symbol stands for something much larger in the Russian psyche: a force of upheaval that can intrude as suddenly as an arctic gale or a Mongol horde. In the convulsions that wracked Moscow last week, as in the ambush that slaughtered American soldiers in distant Somalia, chaos demonstrated once more that it has long since mastered the long-distance message. Genghis Khan today not only has telephones and satellite-TV links, but uses them to wake up the world at the most inconvenient times. Civilization wishes he would hang up.

The fact that Russian instability -- or Somali anarchy or Bosnian carnage -- keeps ringing at odd hours, and often on weekends, shows that turmoil has no respect for civilized comfort. More fundamentally, the alarms amount to further proof that the world is far from being a tidier place without Soviet- American antagonism to kick it around. If the Kremlin no longer helps to orchestrate conflicts in remote countries, it presides over a veritable Mongolian hot pot of disorder at home. At the same time, impoverished lands like Somalia, with a scant sense of nationhood, remain just as prey to pandemonium as they have been since the mini-Lenins who held them together acquired a fatal bad name. Such primitive sorts of emergencies call on the world's conscience with electronic immediacy. The trouble is, too often they get primitive answers.

A wisecrack that made the rounds in the 1980s characterized the Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with missiles." Now, as then, the economy is not that bad off. But Boris Yeltsin's Russia last week seemed closer to being a Weimar Republic with missiles. Images of violent communist-fascist mobs dedicated to strangling Russian democracy in its cradle no doubt helped galvanize international support for Yeltsin, a figure whose impulses are sometimes seen as suspect. The ambiguity of the crisis was reinforced by the televised spectacle of tank commanders loyal to Yeltsin shelling the Parliament Building.

Surely the Russian President had no choice but to respond with force. His increasingly heavy reliance on the military, however, is not the most promising sign that Western governments backing him could wish for. To whatever extent that U.S. and European goodwill has aided democratization so far, the sustenance obviously needs to continue over the long haul, especially when Russian turbulence is not resounding round the world. Genghis Khan on the line is one thing; on the switches of an ICBM force, quite another.

On balance, the U.S. and other Western powers have acquitted themselves fairly well in supporting the new, improving Moscow. Their ministrations in calming even wilder frontiers have, in contrast, been notable duds. George Bush decided to let Europe settle Yugoslavia. Europe decided it needed the U.N., which decided it needed America, which is where Bill Clinton, famous critic of Bush's nonpolicy toward the Balkans, came in. Clinton, who also inherited Bush's more active strategy for Somalia, embodies the tendency of privileged nations in appearing newly allergic to foreign affairs. By ^ everything he has said and done since taking office, this most domestically minded of recent U.S. Presidents has made it clear he would prefer the world to go away.

It will not, of course -- and foreign policy driven in fits and starts by intrusive messages of turmoil from abroad only ensures repeated buffetings. In one of his waggish moments, Henry Kissinger once commented, "There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full." Clinton, along with society in America and the West at large, seems to take this attitude in earnest. Last May, when Bosnian Serbs refused to follow his peace script, Clinton lamented with almost pathetic candor, "I felt really badly because I don't want to have to spend any more time on that than is absolutely necessary, because what I got elected to do was to let America look at our own problems." When the brutality of a local khan like Somalia's Mohammed Farrah Aidid rouses Americans from self-absorption, their response -- get out of there -- is as reflexive as was Bush's impulse to go into Somalia in the first place.

Whether U.S. soldiers ought to have overstayed their original mission -- ensuring food deliveries to starving Somalis -- remains at least questionable. Clinton's decision to go "multilateral" on the more ambitious project of re-creating a nation, a well-intentioned and perhaps even logical choice though that judgment was, has certainly not been a success to date. The U.N.'s initiative to that end could not function without American military assistance, and that military mission has gone astray. In Somalia as in Bosnia, "multilateralism" was the choice of appearing to do something between unignorable spasms of tumult.

Two months before his assassination, John Kennedy said, "The purpose of foreign policy is not to provide an outlet for our own sentiments of hope or indignation; it is to shape real events in a real world." The realities of the present unpredictable and unsentimental world demand no less. Failing it, the telephone will be ringing more often after midnight: Chaos calling; Will you accept the charges?

With reporting by William Mader/London and J.F.O. McAllister/ Washing ton