Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, June 18, 1990                   TAG: 9006190375
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SUPERPOWERS IN A NEW WORLD

For more than 20 years, other nations have looked to the two superpowers' varying state of rivalry and conflict as the fulcrum on which rested prospects for global peace. Understandably so: The two nations have amassed the nuclear power to blow each other to bits - and the rest of the world with them.

Today Americans and Soviets possess that power still, yet the fact seems not as significant. As a new global order emerges, events have outpaced the superpowers, and trends that will determine humanity's future are driven increasingly by developments outside the orbit of U.S.-Soviet relations.

Environmental degradation and overpopulation, for example, are now threats more serious than the prospect of a superpower nuclear exchange. Potential erosion in the habitability of the planet - from climate change, ozone depletion, pollution, deforestation - and the rising pressures of population force everyone to consider national security in broader terms than the comparison of arsenals.

Not that nuclear doom is any less a threat. The danger is just more diffuse. Even as Americans and Soviets negotiate cuts in their nuclear stockpiles, other nations are laboring to create atomic arsenals of their own.

Pakistan, India, Argentina and Brazil are far along with their nuclear programs. Israel is a nuclear power, South Africa may be one. Iraq, Iran, Libya and North Korea - run by fanatical, ruthless leaders unlikely to be guided by civilized restraints - all aspire to join the club.

Political power is diffusing, too. Where nations once hastened to align themselves with East or West, and the superpowers bound other countries close to them in mutually advantageous paranoia, today allies are likely to think increasingly for, and of, themselves.

Empires crumble, new powers arise, and the ambitions of both the United States and Soviets will be constrained less by one another than by regional actors on the global stage.

Finally, the substance of power itself is changing. Great-power status, gauged by the ability to shape world events, depends now on performance as a manufacturer, exporter, investor and creditor far more than on military strength.

Being second in nuclear power only to the United States and first in conventional power in Europe has done nothing to lift the Soviet Union out of its Third World economic status. Japan, de facto winner of the Cold War, is now an economic superpower. And an integrated Europe plans to become one. The greatest threat to American security is not military, but economic.

Does all this suggest the United States is no longer a superpower, or that superpower summits, like the one earlier this month between Presidents Bush and Gorbachev, are obsolete?

Not at all. The United States remains the only nation with significant attributes of power in all its dimensions - political, military, economic, technological and demographic - and it retains its potential for leadership.

As for summits, they'll be, if anything, more important in the brave new world. It's just that the agendas will include more than arms control. And, to seat more players, the conference tables will have to be larger.