A Bridge Too Far.

• Author: Kaplan, Lawrence F.
• Position: American foreign policy

The new millennium arrives with few apocalyptic prophecies. In fact, its approach is having a giddy and, in some cases, narcotic effect on otherwise sober minds. Nowhere has that effect been more in evidence than among those forward-thinking members of Washington's foreign policy community: "At the dawn of a new millennium, we can envision a new era that escapes the twentieth century's darkest moments, fulfills its most brilliant possibilities", President Clinton exults. "The forces of global integration are a great tide, inexorably wearing away the established order of things."

This vision, which has shaped the contours of American foreign policy for most of the past decade, responds to multiple needs unrelated to foreign policy as such. It offers assurance that complex questions of politics and history have been resolved, that autonomous forces will sweep up the detritus of a horrible century, all but making politics and policy irrelevant. Thus, responding to the 1998 Indian nuclear tests, Mr. Clinton advised India "to define [its] greatness in 21st century terms, not in something we've left behind." He likewise enjoined China's sclerotic leadership to get on "the right side of history", confiding to reporters that one of his purposes in visiting with Chinese officials was "to create for them a new and different historical reality." In the President's telling, that reality reduces to a simple narrative of material progress and moral improvement, the benefits of which may already be glimpsed in a New Middle East, an African Renaissance and even in a strategic partnership with China.

Now, ideally, a nation's foreign policies derive from an assessment of the world around it and its own political values. Alas, the millennial paradigm has evolved in response to nothing more than excitement over a calendar date. Recent history, after all, has plainly and quickly confounded the expectation that the post-Cold War era would be a period of international harmony.

And, yet, untroubled by contrary trends, those who presently guide the fortunes of the world's only superpower insist that the twenty-first century will abolish the complexities of international politics. Specifically, it is expected to accomplish this as a result of three things: the rapid and widely celebrated growth in ties of commerce and technology; the embrace of that growth by all but an obdurate few; and, as a consequence of the latter, a fundamental redefinition of the meaning of national security.

As to the first of these, President Clinton has declared that, henceforth, the United States will build "peace through trade, investment and commerce." Indeed, the serene conviction that commercial relations are properly a cause rather than an effect of peace - a belief once thought to have been repudiated decisively at the Marne - has lately been revised and enshrined in official policy. The revised version derives mainly from enthusiasm about technological progress. Thus, National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, one of the theory's main boosters, maintains that because they allow states and societies to communicate with one another as never before, "the fellow travelers of the new global economy - computers and modems, faxes and photocopiers, increased contacts and binding contracts - carry with them the seeds of [political] change."

But if states and societies are communicating increasingly with one another - as they surely are - the question then arises: Are they saying anything new? Given its manifest reluctance to heed much of anything Washington...