The New York Times

Sunday, October 17, 1999

A SUPERPOWER FLAUNTS ITS INGNORANCE

By Tony Judt

(Tony Judt is director of the Remarque Institute at New York University.)

The Senate's rejection of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has unleashed a torrent of gloomy historical analogies.

The Republicans are retreating to isolationism, we are told, and this latest humiliation of the President is comparable in impact and significance to the Senate's refusal to ratify Woodrow Wilson's signature on the Versailles Treaty, ending World War I, in 1920.

The comparison is tempting. It is indeed rare for a President to be overruled on such a significant foreign-policy decision. And the manner in which the Senate majority has eviscerated a major international

agreement does recall the events of 80 years ago. As in 1920, now: the hubristic self-confidence of a Democratic President has been brought low by a resentful Republican majority, and an imperfect but vital internationnal accord may have been weakened beyond repair.

But the resemblance stops there. Historical analogies are always imperfect, sometimes misleading. This comparison risks diluting the implications of the Senate's actions.

Versailles was a truly flawed treaty - economically unenforceable and more likely to arouse nationalist demands than to mollify them. The senators' motives in refusing to endorse Wilson's signature were of course mixed, but some of the doubts expressed were substantive and prescient.

In any case, the failure of the: World War I peace settlement and the League of Nations that it created

had little to do with American absence from the international scene.

To be sure, America's retreat contributed to disillusionment with the outcome of the war, but even under the rosiest Wilsonian scenario the United States was never going to underwrite or police the settlement,

and no one thought it would.

The other great powers of the time, Britain and France, adjusted their policies in light of America's partial

retreat: the British avoided offering their continental allies security guarantees that they could not enforce

without help, while the French flailed around in search of allies to the east.

But their behavior - and that of Germany, Italy or the Soviet Union - depended far less upon the actions or inaction of the United States than did the behavior of foreign powers after World War II.

The situation now is very different. "Isolationism" does not quite capture the mood of Senate Republicans; if anything, it flatters them. The Senate's behavior bespeaks a studied indifference to the outside world, a refusal to take seriously the very question of relations between the United States and the rest of the globe.

For this, of course, President Clinton bears some responsibility. For a long time he paid no sustained attention to foreign policy. Even when he did concentrate on it, he remained obsessed with its impact on domestic politics - witness the intervention in Kosovo, the first war in which the avoidance of any casualties at times took precedence over military and diplomatic objectives. If the Republicans now gleefully treat foreign treaties as the small change of factional reprisal, their behavior, however unseemly, is not out of keeping with a set of priorities this President helped to establish.

Indifference - and an appalling ignorance of affairs beyond our borders - carries risks at least as great

as isolationism, while lacking even the appearance of a reasoned basis for policy. For a long time the United

States led the world in efforts to restrain the production and dissemination of nuclear weapons. The 1963

Limited Test Ban Treaty, the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the strategic arms treaties of the 70's and 80's, the unilateral moratorium on underground testing since 1992 and the recent Chemical Weapons Convention may all have been cosmetic, as some have charged - and even hypocritical, freezing situations in which we were ahead. But hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, and by appearing virtuous we were able to pull along many others in our wake.

Like an international accords, the test ban treaty may be Imperfect. But our endorsement of it would give us

increased leverage over those, like Russia or China, who need good relationships with the United States, as well as over others, like Pakistan, India or even North Korea, who should be given grounds to fear our displeasure. If we behave like a rogue nation ourselves, smug in our monopoly of virtue and weapons, how can we hope to bring pressure to bear on true rogue nations overseas?

In recent years we have ceased to set an example. If anything, the United States today leads by counter-

example. We don't pay our dues to international agencies. We block, oppose or impede agreements on the environment and the punishment of war crimes. We are obsessed with our sovereignty in a world where our own actions bear witness to the growing limitations on the absolute sovereignty of states. And hearing the Senate debate the case for unrestricted nuclear testing, one would suppose we had learned nothing and forgotten nothing since the very earliest days of the cold war.

The only time the United States speaks consistently and with authority in the international arena today is in defense of free trade. But because the contrast between our energetic initiatives on free trade and our calculated obstruction on everything else is so stark, we stand accused even by our friends of cynical self-interest. What we claim as the universal benefits of unrestricted commerce in agriculture, for example,

Europeans interpret as the self-serving marketing of undesirable commodities for the benefit of American

agribusiness.

This growing isolation is a perilous condition for the world's only great power, which is why the comparison

with Versailles doesn't hold and the situation is more serious. In contrast to great powers of the past, the United States is governed by men who have absolutely no grasp either of their country's responsibilities or

even of its capacities.

In certain instances American detachment can stimulate local substitution: thus doubts about the reliability of the American security umbrella may lead to the forging of a common European defense force. But in inherently global questions there can be no substitute for the global super-power.

In any strategic effort to make the world a marginally safer or better place in the coming century, the United States has to take the lead. As it is, we aren't keeping our foes in line, but we are causing great anxiety among

our friends. We are the only game in town, and we won't play.

If the Senate has its way, there will be an empty space where the United States ought to be. International politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Sooner or later, it will have to be filled.