New World Order or Hollow Victory?

President Bush's triumph in the Gulf War is in danger of becoming a footnote in contemporary history, not the turning point it should be. His preliminary postwar efforts to establish a durable security system in the Middle East lack a strategic focus. America's readiness to resume arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the gulf emirates and the tentativeness of the arms control proposals unveiled for that region last May are more suggestive of past failures than future promise. The initiative of Secretary of State James A. Baker to convene an Arab-Israeli peace conference seeks again to arrange direct talks between adversaries, not to advance a conceptual approach for transforming regional conflicts. The vision that forged an international coalition and achieved success on the battlefield is not evident on the diplomatic front.

Opportunities to establish a stable regional order will not last long. Victory has left the United States the preeminent military power in the Middle East, as it did at the end of the Second World War. This time, however, American power is not as self-contained or rooted in a hegemonic economic position; it must rely on the political and financial support of other countries.

But neither is the United States constrained from proceeding along a new path, as it had been in 1945-48, because of its growing preoccupation with containing Soviet power, rebuilding Western Europe and deferring to the vestigial imperial pretensions of a depleted Britain and France. In the 1990s the United States may not be the dominant power it was in 1945, but relative to the other major actors in the international arena it alone is positioned, and perhaps only briefly, to shape the course of events in the Middle East for years, even decades, to come.

Just as the campaign to undo Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait could not have been mounted or carried to a decisive conclusion by any power but the United States, so too does the establishment of a system of security in the Middle East depend on U.S. leaders seizing the moment to pioneer an arrangement that will end the vicious cycle of wars and ever-increasing expenditures on arms, to ensure security for all states in the region.