National purpose and NATO expansion.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. is groping to define its new role in the world. It is be-wildering that this great international triumph has brought not exhilaration to America and the world, but confusion bordering on moral crisis. The evidence is seen in numerous ways - some irritating (the spread of narcissistic youth culture throughout the world): some disturbing (the distrust of political leadership); some alarming (the increase in nationalism); and some frightening (the rise of murderous tribalism in the Balkans and Africa).

This new era has unleashed forces that we have yet to comprehend, as they stand in such sharp contrast to those that dominated this century. The industrial era, with its manifold blessings, also brought political and economic centralization, control, empire, and global conflict. In its benign form, this was manifest in large corporations and the welfare state. Its malignant form was found in totalitarianism. The new post-industrial age of the microprocessor, with its potential for greater personal autonomy, also harbors the centrifugal forces of political disintegration. As we already have witnessed, empires unravel, corporations restructure, traditional institutions lose their influence, and many are adrift in a sea of information without a moral compass. Collective disillusion can bring, as Charles Maier recently observed in Foreign Affairs, "heightened xenophobia, a surly distrust of institutions, cynicism about politics, a resent of elites. Societies can slip deeply into despair over ethnic or ideological pluralism."

Such demoralization has a profound effect on the young. It is manifest in their rejection of politics and disgust with its debates. the moral imperatives and the political discipline of the Cold War vanished, so did our common vision and shared purpose. The Cold War was about the future of democracy as much as the containment of the Soviet Union. Admittedly, in Vietnam, America verged upon converting the Cold War into an endless crusade to slay all the world's dragons in a perpetual war for perpetual peace. History will record that it was in Europe where the U.S. stood forthrightly for self-government and individual liberty and where the U.S.S.R. was vanquished without our firing a shot. NATO was the centerpiece of that strategy.

Today, in order to overcome the tendencies of territorial nationalism, ethnocentrism, tribalism, and moral decay that plague democracies, America...