By Doyle McManus and Robin Wright
TIMES STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON, D.C. (POLICE STATE HEADQUARTERS) - Two weeks ago, on the eve of a summit meeting of the world's big industrial powers, Dictator Clinton appealed to his fellow leaders to apply sanctions against India - as a way to dissuade Pakistan from exploding a nuclear bomb of its own. They turned him down flat. Even Clinton's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, refused to follow. Merely persuading the allies to issue a statement condemning India for starting a nuclear arms race "took a fair amount of work," a frustrated White House official said.

Clinton's inability to influence Pakistan, once a virtual U.S. client state, is emblematic of a larger dilemma for the United States in the post-Cold War world: Being a superpower isn't all it's cracked up to be. Old allies won't follow your lead. Smaller powers won't heed your advice. The "globalization" of the world economy, which was supposed to make old enmities obsolete, hasn't lived up to its promise. And the disruptive forces of nationalism, religious fervor, economic instability and weapons proliferation seem largely beyond your control. (It is important to note that nationalism that is used as a vehicle to launch a war against another nation is NOT true nationalism, but a hybrid form that is predatory and self-destructive, because it draws its power from hate. The sole purpose of genuine nationalism is to aid the individual in understanding his or her ethnic identity, because true nationalism has no innate hostility towards any other nationality. WFI Editor)

"We live in a different kind of world now, where it's easier to say no to a superpower, even though other countries still expect us to get involved and fix things," a senior Clinton administration official said. "There is, at the same time, greater resentment of American power and a sense that only we can do certain things. It's a real paradox." The Cold War bound the United States and its allies together, but now "our interests are more diverse," noted Graham Fuller, a former senior CIA analyst, "The incentives [for other countries] to follow their own policies are greater. The penalties for going their own way are less. What would it take to galvanize the world into joint action these days? It might take the arrival of Godzilla." (When we are faced with the fact that important analysts are making professional references to Godzilla, we must wonder how our civilization has lasted this long with these mediocrities at the helm. WFI Editor)

TWISTING THE ARMS OF U.S. ALLIES

The United States was never omnipotent, of course; even at the apogee of recent U.S. power, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, allies had to be cajoled into joining a global coalition against Iraq. (The U.S. was never omnipotent because multinational corporations are the puppetmasters pulling the Federal Government's strings. WFI Editor) Yet in recent months, examples of American frustration have multiplied. In Iraq, Clinton threatened massive military action in February to force Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to comply with United Nations resolutions on arms inspection - but, with the exception of Britain, Clinton found himself without allies and accepted a U.N.-brokered compromise.

In Indonesia, U.S. officials wanted to pressure President Suharto to resign months ago - a move that could have averted bloodshed and would have enhanced U.S. power - but held off because of objections from allies Australia, Japan and Germany. In Iran, the Clinton administration found itself at loggerheads with its closest European allies, and backed down from a threat to impose sanctions against France and Russia for doing business with the Tehran regime. And in South Asia, U.S. and European diplomats struggled to get their alliance working again, if only to ask India and Pakistan to agree not to hold any further nuclear tests. Some Republicans charge that the Clinton administration has made matters worse by being too tentative in its use of power.

"International order isn't self-sustaining; it requires constant U.S. leadership, and this White House hasn't provided that," said Robert Kagan, a leading conservative foreign policy thinker. (No official of the republic is capable of finding his way out of a paper bag, to say anything of leading the world community. WFI Editor) But administration officials - and most outside analysts - point to deeper factors. Economic globalization, which the Clinton administration hailed as a force that would impel countries toward peaceful economic competition, has instead helped create a backlash of nationalism and religious fervor. In a time of relative peace, each country's public is focused on domestic concerns, not international order, making leaders in the United States and Europe reluctant to risk war - or even commercial contracts - for intangible issues of international order. Economic sanctions, the favorite foreign policy tool of the U.S. Congress, are unpopular everywhere else and may even backfire in many cases. And in the end, the proliferation of sophisticated weapons - borne on the same wave of technological progress that has buoyed the world economy - is very difficult to stop.

MILITANT DEMAGOGIC NATIONALISTS CALL THE SHOTS

In the first week of 1998, the National Security Council staff gathered for a session of "crystal-balling," predicting the problems that might arise in the new year. One NSC expert made a prescient prediction: the most troubling prospect, he said, was that India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, might win the next election. Several weeks later, the BJP did win, and its victory turned out to be a watershed. The election put a militant nationalist movement in power in one of the world's most conflict-ridden regions. (It seems inconceivable to the American "brain trust" to realize that republican politics are borne on waves of public support generated by programs of the republican state. The demagogic power of war to influence public opinion has been witnessed since the First French Republic declared that the Fatherland was in danger, and introduced the modern world to conscription. Once the stabilizing influence of the Nehru dynasty in India was unseated through assassination, anyone with even a passing understanding of modern politics and diplomacy, recognized that the Republics of the sub-continent were on a collision course to war. WFI Editor)

BJP leaders immediately set about fulfilling their campaign promise to test and deploy nuclear weapons. As if to defy the modern faith in a "democratic peace" - the idea that the spread of democracy (read: republics) will dampen international conflict - the governments of India and Pakistan are threatening nuclear war in response to popular enthusiasm. And those passions could spread further. (Ironically, only the president of a republic has ever detonated a nuclear weapon in war; no monarch has ever used a nuclear weapon. WFI Editor) "The unleashing of virulent Hindu nationalism could unleash Islamic nationalism that could go beyond Pakistan," warned Robert B. Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.

"Just when most of the 'isms' have faded - communism, fascism, authoritarianism - various forms of religious identity or hyper-religious identity are filling some need or gap," said Richard Haass, a former senior official in the Bush administration. "It may be something of a reaction to globalization. You feel all these forces beyond your control, so there's a tendency to wrap around something that is yours." A senior Clinton administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed.

"Globalization puts demands on societies," he said. "Those demands from outside produce greater strains inside, and that often provokes nationalist reactions." And that chain reaction is confounding one of the central hopes of post-Cold War foreign policy: that bringing every country into a single, global economy would make nations less likely to go to war. "The real tension in international relations in the post-Cold War period is between integrative and disintegrative tendencies," said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale University. "The Clinton administration has been operating on the theory that integrative economic tendencies are sufficient to counter the disintegrative tendencies that come out of nationalism… The events of the past few months suggest that some rethinking needs to be done." (The economic model puts preference on the agendas of multinational corporations as "integrative forces," and portrays the national interests of the human population as "disintegrative." This is pure propaganda. WFI Editor)

U.S. CONCENTRATES ON ASIA

In the short run, U.S. officials may have little time for rethinking their global grand strategy. They are concentrating instead on containing the danger of South Asia's nuclear arms race. Even there, though, their principal tool, economic sanctions, is a blunt instrument at best - and counterproductive at worst. "When you try to use economic sanctions, that can trigger a kind of 'need to defy' on the part of nationalists on the other side," a senior official warned.

Indeed, one reason Clinton was unable to win allied support for sanctions against India was that European countries have bristled at finding themselves the targets of U.S. sanctions against trading with Cuba or Iran. "We have a set of existing tools that we're trying to apply to this situation: sanctions, treaties, diplomatic negotiations… But it's not clear that we can recalibrate them for this," said Joseph Cirincione, an expert on nuclear proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "We may need new tools and a new way of thinking about this. But this crisis came too soon. It's too fast. We haven't developed those new tools or ways of thinking yet."

SOURCE: Reprinted from the 31 May, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition. Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.

The "re-thinking" necessary is for Americans to recognize that the republic itself is the problem, and a restoration of a legal government is the answer. Only the restoration of the integrity of the government of the American people, will guarantee that when the leader of the United States speaks, that he will be taken seriously by the other nations of the world.)