A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany, and the Struggle for Supremacy.

• Author: Rauch, Jonathan

A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany, and the Struggle for Supremacy. Jeffrey E. Garten. T/mes, $22.During the war against Iraq, George Bush built a consortium of like-minded democracies and held it together, with impressive results. He and the Europeans did it again following the coup in Moscow, quite possibly saving democracy for the Soviet people. Indeed, Bush's one major accomplishment as president has been to show what the great democracies can do when they choose to act in concert. True, his New World Order was held together by phone calls and presidential charm rather than treaties and institutions, but for a while it sure looked promising.

While they fought together in the Gulf, the same allies were also fighting in Geneva--except there, at the negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), they were fighting each other. By any objective economic standard, the GATT's efforts to liberalize trade worldwide were, and are, far more important than rescuing Kuwait. In trade, however, there is no Saddam Hussein to scare off parochialism. The French and Germans deadlocked the talks by stubbornly defending their outrageously cynical farm-subsidy system. The Americans have sulked petulantly toward unilateralism and a regional trade bloc. The Japanese have dived under the furniture, hoping that they, the world's second largest economic power, can somehow escape notice.

So which world will it be? Multipolar consortium or multipolar disarray? The Gulf war or the GATT?

The latter, says Jeffrey E. Garten, an investment banker and former State Department official, in his bracing new book. "If current patterns prevail, the nineties could well be notable for its [sic] lack of leadership. The New World Order will, in fact, be a world without order."

Garten makes his case with exceptional clarity and balance, born of a simphfying assumption that, unlike so many other simplifying assumptions, does more good than harm: Relations between America, Germany, and Japan pose the "critical question deterraining the shape of the world as we head for a new century." Each of the Big Three is a major economic power (together they account for almost half of the world's economic output); each is a regional fulcrum; and each has had its--shall we be delicate?--problems with the others.

Garten can handle the economics, security issues, and politics of all three countries; it is above all the broadness of A Cold Peace that makes the book so useful...