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

DATE: MONDAY, February 18, 1991                   TAG: 9102180150
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DOYLE MCMANUS LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Long

VISION BEHIND BUSH MOTTO STILL SEEMS FUZZY

"We spent months," recalled Francis Fukuyama, a State Department policy planner at the time, "but no one could come up with anything shorter than a paragraph. Nothing seemed to work."

The Bush administration, it seemed, was heading into history without a theme to call its own.

Then came an unlikely rescuer: Saddam Hussein and his invasion of Kuwait. After Bush dispatched 200,000 U.S. troops to defend Saudi Arabia in August, he needed a concept, a vision, to explain his assertive new policy.

One August morning, at his summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, he took his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, for a long ride aboard the presidential speedboat, Fidelity. Four hours later, the president came ashore with a ringing slogan that Scowcroft had offered during their talk: "the new world order."

Ever since, the goal of a "new world order" has been the central theme of Bush's foreign policy pronouncements. He summoned it in September, telling Congress why he had sent the troops; he used it again in November, when he turned the defensive troop commitment into an offensive force; and he invoked it repeatedly in his State of the Union address last month, explaining why he thinks the burden of world leadership must fall to the United States.

The concept suffers from only one problem: Almost no one, even inside the administration, is quite certain what it means.

"Go ask them upstairs," urged a senior State Department official whose job, at least on paper, includes building large parts of the new world order. "Nobody around here knows what it is."

"I can tell you what I think it is," another senior official confessed, "but I'm not sure that's the same as what the president thinks it is."

And among those who think they know, not everyone agrees that the slogan is a good one. "It's Wilsonian nonsense," said a White House aide from the administration's conservative wing, recalling Woodrow Wilson's doomed crusade to fashion the League of Nations after World War I.

In fact, Bush and his aides have explained the basics of a new world order fairly well. The idea has three parts:

U.S.-Soviet cooperation on international issues, instead of the old Cold War conflict;

"Collective security," meaning joint action by many nations against aggression;

And American leadership to make sure it all gets done.

"What is at stake [in the Persian Gulf] is more than one small country," Bush said in his State of the Union address. "It is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of Mankind: peace and security, freedom and the rule of law."

"As Americans," he added, "we know there are times when we must step forward and accept our responsibility to lead. . . . Among the nations of the world, only the United States has both the moral standing and the means to back it up."

But beyond those general principles, Bush's vision remains distinctly fuzzy at the edges. Will the establishment of a new world order require the dispatch of U.S. and allied forces to dozens of Third World trouble spots? Will the United States really entrust decisions on collective security to the United Nations? And will the Soviet Union, riven by internal conflicts, continue to play along?

The president himself has occasionally muddied the waters by offering different versions of his vision, sometimes stressing multilateral action through the United Nations, sometimes the single-handed leadership of the United States.

During the first week of February, he told one audience that the core of the new world order would be "a revitalized peace-keeping function of the United Nations." Yet he told another audience that the Gulf War demonstrated "that the United States has a new credibility, and that what we say, goes" - a declaration that sent tremors through some U.S. allies who feared that the new world order might turn out to be a recipe for American primacy.

Administration officials, alarmed by all the attention their creation is getting, have tried gently to reduce expectations a bit.

"I think we run the danger of overselling this," a senior official said last week. "It wasn't really designed to be invested with all the load that it's carrying. . . . It's just a notion."

"In part, it's George Bush's `vision thing,' " he added - using Bush's own description of the policy overview he has had difficulty articulating. "It's a way of thinking about things right now, more than it is a concrete program of action."

"I don't think there is a single official definition," said another senior official. "I don't think anybody has sat down with the president and said, `Here's what we mean by the new world order.' But it's inherent in a lot of [Bush's] actions. . . . In a way, it's subconscious behavior."

Still, despite their disclaimers, officials insist that the concept is much more than just a speech-writer's flourish - and assert that Bush is clearly and genuinely taken with the idea.

"I think the thing he gets most excited about is the notion that the United States [can] play a leadership role that is more positive than before, in the sense of moving the world forward rather than just holding off disaster," said one aide.

Several analysts noted an irony in Bush's vision of a new world order: The idea's success depends upon events in the world's two most disorderly places, the Persian Gulf and the Soviet Union.

The gulf, of course, is the first great test of the new world order; indeed, a Bush aide said, the idea might never have "gelled" if it hadn't been for Saddam's invasion and the unusually unanimous world response.

But events in the Soviet Union and China may pose an even greater test; both Communist giants are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, so they can veto any initiative they dislike. "Conservatives" in Moscow's Communist Party are already complaining that Gorbachev has been too cooperative toward the United States. If they succeed in switching Soviet foreign policy toward hostility, or merely to an arm's-length relationship, one of the pillars of the new world order would disappear.