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Germany, Japan, and the False Glare of War
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19322 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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6 / 1991 |
2,243 Words |
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Daniel Hamilton and James Clad
Daniel Hamilton and James Clad are senior associates at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hamilton, a
European specialist, was deputy director of the Aspen
Institute Berlin from 1982 to 1990 and has organized various
projects on the future roles of Germany and Japan. Clad, an
Asian specialist, is a former diplomat and correspondent for
the Far Eastern Economic Review. |
The Persian Gulf War has sharpened American perceptions of friend and foe alike, clarifying underlying realities of power and exposing divergent assumptions about those supposed pillars of a new world order--the United States, Germany, and Japan.
Those assumptions, which concern the respective roles and responsibilities of the world's most influential countries, matter far more in the longer term than an expeditionary war in the Middle East, no matter how successful. And we stand a good chance of getting these key relationships right if we move as decisively now as we did in the Gulf to burn away the disorienting fog surrounding notions of a "new world order" ever since the collapse of the Cold War.
Yet judging from American reaction to Germany and Japan both during and since the Gulf hostilities, the war's brief and unnatural illumination has not helped us to see the new world around us more clearly. Indeed, it has blinded us to the basic architecture of the New Age, invisible in the glare of the Gulf War's bright spotlight.
The war has brought home at least one clear lesion: Although America no longer is the undisputed No. 1, it remains the only country retaining all the attributes of power: military, political, economic, technological, and demographic. It also enjoys a more varied and intimate range of ties with all major powers, far more than any other has with all the rest.
This range and diversity enable the United States to employ leveraging influence with all major powers, in concert or separately. Like no other country, America has the power of international initiative and of global agenda-setting. Rather than undisputed primus inter pares, America can emerge from the war as the world balancer; not as the sole superpower nor the world's policeman but as the best equipped broker.
The partial exorcism of the ghost of Vietnam is, of course, reinvigorating America's belief in itself. Yet a reinvigorated America must learn other lessons from the Gulf War.
What are these? First, while the war's outcome resulted from the concentration of power, its origins resulted from the diffusion of power.
As the tension and discipline imposed by the Cold War had dissipated, international events are now being driven far more by the encroachments of regional
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