Optimism Amid Crisis Most Tense : Silver lining is emergence of a collective security

The crisis provoked by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait has escalated into the first major confrontation of the post-Cold War era and new realities, both hopeful and sobering, are emerging.

Foremost among the latter is the realization that a world liberated from the threat of nuclear annihilation will not be free of mortal danger. As the case of Saddam Hussein makes all too clear, there remain good old-fashioned nationalist dictators every bit as aggressive and threatening as Stalinist ideologues. The Third World already is dotted with their kind; we may yet see their reappearance in some of Eastern Europe’s darker corners.

Moreover, these hard men need not sit atop an indispensable natural resource--as Hussein does--to present a military challenge formidable even by the standards of the industrialized world. Forty years of heedless military competition between East and West have seen to that. Both blocs have attempted to buy influence--and to defray their own defense costs--by shipping quantities of technically advanced conventional weapons into the Third World. Worse, both sides have been unconscionably casual about the transfer of material and technologies that have allowed nations like Iraq to build chemical weapons and put many, including Baghdad, on the verge of acquiring nuclear arsenals.

But, as sobering as these implications of the gulf crisis may be, much that has transpired so far should be a source of hope. The willingness of the vast majority of the world’s nations to directly and collectively engage Hussein’s challenge is, as foreign policy analyst Stanley Hoffman put it, “Quite remarkable.” In fact, if the anti-Hussein coalition holds together, this crisis could, as former diplomat Richard N. Gardner has said, “constitute a landmark event in the history of this century.”

Clearly, the absence of military rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was bound to render even situations as complex and perilous as the Kuwait crisis more manageable. But since the end of the Cold War, many analysts have worried that a world lacking the imposed discipline of an all-dividing Soviet-American competition would be a more chaotic--perhaps more dangerous--place. The alacrity with which the international community has responded to this crisis suggests that this need not be the case.

What is particularly heartening is the way in which the world’s countries have turned to the United Nations. For the first time since the Korean crisis, the Security Council is functioning as its founders envisioned. It is undeniable, of course, that this new international consensus was galvanized by the fact that Hussein’s goal is to control a resource--oil--on which the rest of the world depends for its prosperity. So be it. A world organized by principles of rational self-interest is much to be preferred to the deluded utopianism that dominated the Cold War era. And a world in which the great powers are willing to assume the responsibility of collective action will be a better place not only to do business, but also in which to live.