U.S. Finds It’s Lonely at the Top

The fall of Iraq after little more than three weeks of war made it clearer than ever: The United States is the most powerful nation the world has seen in centuries.

But strength, paradoxically, can be a problem.

The overwhelming military power of the United States has already provoked as much resentment as respect from other nations. Now the Bush administration faces a choice: Should it press its advantage against countries such as North Korea, Iran and Syria? Should it focus instead on consolidating its victory in Iraq and repairing old alliances frayed by war? Is it powerful enough, and skilled enough, to do both?

A quarter of a century ago, a painful defeat in Vietnam made Americans averse to military action, a “Vietnam syndrome.” Will the U.S. triumph in Baghdad now create an “Iraq syndrome,” a belief that American military prowess can quickly solve more of the world’s ills?

“We are the strongest nation the world has ever known, but we also have a tendency to overreact to our most recent experience,” Robert S. Strauss, a longtime counselor to presidents of both parties, said last week. “We react too negatively to bad news and too positively to good news. The pendulum swings and never stops in exactly the right place.”

Inside the Bush administration, and among conservatives outside the government, some have called for pressing the U.S. military advantage against other nations.

“We are hopeful that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq that the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is not in their national interest,” said Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, one of the administration’s chief hawks.

But other, more senior officials have made a point of emphasizing that the administration is not planning a series of further military expeditions.

“We believe that all of these nations -- Syria, Iran, others -- should realize that pursuing weapons of mass destruction, supporting terrorist activities, is not in their interest,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview with The Times. “It doesn’t mean that war is coming to them, it just means that the world is changing in the new century, where we have to deal with these kinds of threats.... It doesn’t mean that the only consequence the American president can think of is to reach in the toolbox for the military.”

One lesson of the chaos on the streets of Baghdad may be that rebuilding Iraq is a taller order than expected, some officials say -- especially in view of the challenges the United States still faces in the rest of the world.

“We’ve got to find out how big of a sandwich, how big of a bite we’ve taken here,” one said. “In terms of our human resources, financial resources, time and political resources, what is Iraq going to be absorbing? We don’t know the answer to that yet. But we’ve got to consolidate [the U.S. success] in Iraq, and we’ve got to continue to consolidate in Afghanistan.”

Once those countries that saw U.S. military action are under control, other priorities are jostling for President Bush’s attention: An Israeli-Palestinian peace process that he has promised to move forward. The unsolved crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The danger of war between India and Pakistan. And the war on terrorism that began after Sept. 11.

In view of that long list, officials in the Bush administration say they would rather handle the problems posed by North Korea, Iran and Syria without going to war. Foreign policy experts outside the government believe that war is unlikely for both practical and political reasons.

“There may be a temptation in some quarters to try to use military pressure against other countries, but there are huge risks in it,” said James B. Steinberg, a former aide to President Clinton. “In the cases of Iran and North Korea, it’s not doable as a practical matter.... There was a unique set of justifications for dealing with Iraq the way we did. If we press that model further, we’re going to find the international resistance to anything we do will make it very difficult to accomplish anything.”

Instead, Steinberg said, the administration needs to repair its relationships with other major powers, including Russia, France and Germany, which all opposed the war in Iraq.

“The most immediate urgency is to consolidate our basic support among the people we need for the long haul,” he said. “We can’t sustain a unilateral pursuit of our own conception of international order. We’ll find the problems are getting harder and harder, not easier.”

“We should be having nonstop, serious private conversations with all these countries,” agreed Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “We should be using the problem of rebuilding Iraq as a vehicle for broader discussions toward a new nonproliferation policy and a new alliance against terrorists.

“But it’s not happening,” he said. “The mistrust is so deep ... it’s reached a level of hatred.”

Administration officials confirmed that few real steps have been taken to heal the bitterness between the Bush administration and the leaders of France, Germany and Russia.

Indeed, the mini-summit this weekend among Presidents Jacques Chirac of France and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder may only rub salt in the wound.

Powell, asked about the opposing powers’ summit, said dryly: “They’re all in St. Petersburg because Chancellor Schroeder is receiving an honorary degree from the University of St. Petersburg, and I am delighted that they all wish to share the moment with him.”

White House officials said that Bush has maintained a cordial relationship with Putin and that he talked with the Russian leader on the telephone as recently as April 5. But the president hasn’t spoken to Chirac since early February, and he hasn’t spoken to Schroeder since last year.

“France is going to pay some consequences, not just with us but with other countries” for its positions on the war, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress last week.

One consequence of the continuing tension, Steinberg noted, is that the United States now faces built-in opposition to its policies. “The Bush administration’s national security strategy said that in the post-Cold War world, all the great powers are on the same side,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s turned out to be all the great powers except one: us.”

Still, the startling preeminence of U.S. power remains the hallmark of the post-Saddam Hussein world. Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian who predicted a U.S. decline in his 1987 bestseller, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” now says his forecast turned out to be premature.

“Boy, are we powerful,” Kennedy said. “I checked all the way back in history, and I just can’t find a parallel to one country that spends more on its military than the combined total of the next 14 biggest powers.”

Even ancient Rome had to share the globe with a Persian empire and a Chinese empire, Kennedy noted; the United States today faces no comparable counterweight.

“Chancellor Schroeder said last week that, in his view, military power is not the central issue,” he said. “That seems to me to be a kind of flight from reality.”

But over the long run, Kennedy said, the U.S. may find it impossible to sustain its military dominance if it does not also maintain a healthy economy and wage some careful diplomacy.

“Voltaire asked, ‘If Carthage and Rome could not survive, who then is eternal?’ ” he said. “We spend 50% of the world’s military expenditures. Is that sustainable over the long term? My instinct tells me it isn’t.

“It depends on our economic power, and that stands on shakier foundations,” he said. “Unless we see some reconciliation with other countries, we may have to pay not only the military cost of this war, but also the greater part of the tab for rebuilding Iraq -- at a time when the economy is weakening.

“The flip side is not just that there’s unease in other countries and unhappiness that we’ve become too big for our boots ... [but] that there will be more groups of individuals who loathe America, and who will try to attack American embassies and American citizens abroad,” he said. “I’d like to see the world’s most powerful country respected and liked, as well. But that is not the case today.”