PERSPECTIVE ON U.S. POLICY : Suddenly, the World Doesn’t Count : When Washington awakes in January, it will find much damage done by election-year self-absorption.

In years gone by, the world would quiet down during the U.S. presidential election campaign. Neither friend nor foe wanted to risk that something might go dreadfully wrong while the Americans were distracted by their national passion. Not so, now that the Cold War is over and America is less needed or feared. In fact, so much is happening this year that the President who takes office next January will have to rush to catch events that are passing America by.

Most obvious is the mini-debate that is raging over aid to the former Soviet Union. To the glee of the Democrats, Richard Nixon returned from the politically dead to criticize George Bush for his parsimony. But nobody can be gleeful that Russia’s fate could be decided while the United States sorts out whether even to have a foreign policy. Never before in a millennium of Russia’s history has there been such a chance to draw it to the West and direct its energies toward meeting domestic needs rather than preying on its neighbors. Yet, despite Bush’s new mini-proposal last week, the United States so far has been unable to muster as much as 1% of its defense budget to try to eliminate threats from the European heartland once and for all.

The Middle East is in competition with the former Soviet Union to see which will first create an impossible mess. President Bush got Arab-Israeli peacemaking off to a good start, but he has so angered Israel and its U.S. supporters without reason that peace has little prospect until at least next year--by which time it could be too late. Meanwhile, the United States and other arms merchants are pumping weapons into the region so fast that next time, the locals could fight a Desert Storm-sized war all by themselves. And eager beavers in Washington who cannot function without a bogyman are building up Islam and Iran--a minor player in the regional arms race--as replacements for the Red Menace.

The Pentagon is setting the pace in protecting the past. Anything will do to make up for outmoded Cold War arguments for big budgets. The military’s draft Defense Guidance, which was leaked to the press, presented a vision that makes the term “global policeman” seem minor league. Before, our allies were worrying whether we would run from responsibility; now they must worry about the other shoe that has dropped: a vision of Imperial America, ready to squash any rival, including friends. Of course, the American people are unlikely to give the Pentagon either the money or a global hunting license, but the planning document has damaged this country’s standing in many parts of the globe.

Meanwhile, U.S. relations with Japan continue to erode. On the campaign trail, Japan is merely a symbol to blame for American economic shortcomings. But Japan is taking the United States very seriously, weighing the price, in terms of American political abuse, of preserving a relationship that took 40 years to build but will need little time to tear down.

The Administration’s careening from hyperactivity to indifference reflects Bush’s operating style. He runs U.S. foreign policy with a smaller team than any other President since before World War II. This proved to be a forceful instrument for wrapping up the Cold War, helping Germany to unify and taking the measure of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. It isn’t so helpful in building a new world order while Bush & Co. are distracted by electioneering.

With the presidential election consuming America’s full ration of political attention, U.S. leaders can’t even complete the global trade talks that, come April 15, could abort and leave the whole world poorer off.

Thus U.S. foreign policy is now either on autopilot or being designed by bureaucrats who apply geo-mechanics to complex problems in distant parts of the world, without supervision by the nation’s leaders. Only in Latin America and Africa, in which Bush and his team long ago lost interest, have knowledgeable experts developed enough authority to keep the experimenters at bay.

After November, the United States can again look outward and begin deciding where it wants to go in the world. By then, however, many key options will have been foreclosed by what the world is doing now. On Inauguration Day, the promise provided by the Cold War’s end and the Desert Storm victory may already have been squandered. This election year is proving to be a poor time for America to be leaderless.