EASTWARD TO TARTARY: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus.

AuthorHeilbrunn, Jacob
PositionReview

EASTWARD TO TARTARY: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus by Robert D. Kaplan Random House, $26.95

Bread Or Bullets

PHEW! FOR A BRIEF MOMENT there, it looked like the 1970s all over again. The booming American economy was suddenly saddled with rising oil prices, which threatened to lead to stagflation--or high unemployment and inflation rates. The even more vulnerable western European countries experienced long gas lines and protests. To top it off, the old Israeli-Palestinian conflict flared up again. The 1970s retro-look looked as if it was becoming the real thing.

But world leaders have learned the lessons of the past. OPEC oil ministers, wary of spurring the West into serious conservation measures and unwilling to disrupt the world economy, boosted output, while the Clinton administration opened the spigot of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, pumping up not just Al Gore's fortunes, but also the economy's. Meanwhile, the Republicans sputtered helplessly about the Clinton administration's disregard for America's national interests in opening up the reserve.

Pity the poor GOP. The fact is that even an uptick in oil prices, while it resulted in some grumbling, hardly prompted any members of the electorate to divert their attention from "Survivor" or "Big Brother" to foreign policy. Whether it's pounding away at the issue of military readiness or China policy, the GOP's biggest foe hasn't so much been the Clinton administration as the national disinterest of the American public in the national interest. It isn't so much a new age of good feelings as an age of no feelings.

The biggest victims of this quiescent era, however, are the foreign policy pundits. Absent an enemy--and, despite the huffing and puffing in some quarters, North Korea does not cut the mustard--the era of grand strategizing is over. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger belong to an earlier period, not to be duplicated. Journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy are searching for the next big idea. But the foreign policy torch, such as it is, flickers only faintly and has been handed off to area studies experts who can explain local conflicts--Armenians versus Azeris, and so on--in mind-numbing detail. Such, globalization is the buzz word that off the tongues of world's financial gurus, but no one has explained what it is much beyond evoking Karl Marx's prediction of an "interdependence of nations."

It is thus something of a pleasant surprise...

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