By Andrew Rudalevige
Ten years before last Sept. 11, the first President Bush spoke hopefully of the "new world order" poised to emerge at the end of the Gulf War. He saw "a world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders ... in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations."
One immense challenge facing us is making those words--and their historic precursors from other conflicts ("the war to end all wars"; "freedom from want ... freedom from fear")--come true. I don't claim to know the specifications for a "new world order" with substance and staying power. But I do know a precondition for it: we as Americans must connect with the world as never before.
This is harder than it sounds. Consider the night of Dec. 11--the three-month anniversary of the mass murders we have come to call "events." I was watching the 11 p.m. news on a network affiliate out of Harrisburg. The lead story gave detailed attention to the policies governing birthing-room videotaping at local hospitals. The second was an expos revealing shifts in cellular-phone calling plans. I waited out the commercials for some acknowledgment that anything outside the Susquehanna Valley might exist.
After the weather report, about 15 minutes into the newscast, it came. Here at last was the update on the war. But it was condensed, with other minor stories like the revocation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, into "The World in a Minute"--complete with seconds counting down on a split screen, as if to reassure viewers that only a few ticks remained until they could return their attention to local basketball.
I doubt this hierarchy of newsworthiness is unique to this area; by January 2002 the Gallup poll's ongoing question about our "most-important problem" showed that barely a third of Americans put terrorism and the war in that category. But this should not be surprising. Former President Bush's hopes to the contrary, the decade after 1991 did not give rise to renewed internationalism. Instead, the new threats seemed amorphous and insoluble, distant from our national survival. Genocide? Never mind--did you hear about Tom and Nicole? Who's on Oprah?
One result of this willful isolation was to make U.S. involvement in foreign crises in the 1990s late, ineffectual or both. As Americans paid little attention to world events, our leaders--including, alas, the first Bush administration--did not try to force the issue. The 1992, 1996 and 2000 presidential elections were all about domestic affairs (in various senses); in the meantime, relations with powers such as China and Russia soured, and the debt crisis hardened. Within five years of the first President Bush's call for the revitalization of the United Nations, his own party in Congress refused to pay American dues to the U.N. In early September 2001, all foreign-policy answers combined made up fewer than 1 percent of responses in the Gallup poll noted above. None of this directly caused the attacks of Sept. 11. Nor, of course, does it justify them. But it did make them all the more shocking. They reminded us, as no editorial or commission report ever could, that ostrich-like ignorance of the world around us was no longer an option.
The current President Bush, to his credit, has frequently pointed out the long-term nature of the war against terror. Part of that war will be military. Part will come at home. Part will require a greatly increased program of foreign assistance and multilateral cooperation. All of it will require sustained internationalism on the part of the American public.
Such a world view is new and needs to be nurtured. To do that the president and other political leaders need to provide an ongoing translation of global events into the language of people's daily lives. The stakes need to be made clear. What will the war cost, both in largesse and lifestyle, in terms of our freedoms and responsibilities? Why is long-term engagement in the world's poorest places so important?
We need to start with the basics: polls frequently find, for example, that Americans think government spending on foreign aid is 10 times higher than its actual level (1 percent of the budget, and just 1/10 of 1 percent of our gross national product). Fixing this sort of disconnect will require a leadership willing to tell us the facts of international life--frequently, and honestly--and a public willing to hold our leaders accountable for just that.
President Bush might take a page from President Truman's efforts at the start of another long struggle, the Cold War. Through relentless educational efforts about the devastation in Europe and what it meant for American security, Truman convinced the country (and an opposition Congress) to pass the $60-billion Marshall Plan. His power was to persuade, not to proclaim. Presidents, atop a huge administrative apparatus, are tempted to avoid Congressional debate, where the only certainty is of delay. But while unilateral action is certainly more efficient, it is often a mistake. Public education occurs because of, not despite, frank discussion and even dissent; consensus is reached via compromise, not decree. It is no accident that Congress is listed first in the Constitution. We should seek multilateralism at home as well as abroad.
If some engagement and education is top down, much must be from the ground up. Here, colleges like Dickinson are particularly well positioned to help. Dickinson's emphases on study abroad, on training in foreign languages, on actively grappling with difficult ideas, are all crucial to bringing about a new generation of policymakers--and citizens--fully cognizant of their responsibilities in the new world we face.
The bad news of the current struggle is that innocent people have died, and will die. The good news is that wars can breed hope as well as destruction. The radios now blaring in Kabul, the women in classrooms in Kandahar, bear testimony to that. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it last October: "The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are all in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do so, let us reorder this world around us."
To do that, we need to face up to the fact that understanding the world takes more than a minute. I hope one legacy of Sept. 11 will be a United States engaged with, and interested in, the world and all it has to offer. "listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go," wrote the poet e.e. cummings. There's never been a better time to do just that.