Lack of Fear Over WWIII Leads to Rare Global Cooperation : Strategy: The idea of collective action is a concept from the playgrounds: Gang up on he who picks the fight, jump on the seesaw to overbalance the big kid.

The extraordinary worldwide response to the call for sanctions--and even the use of arms--against Iraq represents the fulfillment of an elusive dream of leaders past, Woodrow Wilson’s recipe for achieving global security through the collective action of all nations.

And the reason for the almost unprecedented commitment to joint action after the brutal invasion of Kuwait, scholars and government officials agree, lies in the new realities created by the ending of the Cold War--especially the lifting of once-pervasive fears that even the most remote crisis could turn into conflict between the superpowers.

“All of this stuff is going on, and in all of the discussions, no one is raising the specter of World War III,” said a senior U.S. official on the Administration’s Kuwait crisis team who has served on many such teams in the past. “It’s the first time I’ve been involved in a task force or a crisis (when) that hasn’t been the first concern. Ten years ago, any crisis would have led within hours to speculation about Armageddon.”

Enshrined in the charter of the League of Nations, the idea of collective action is a concept from the playgrounds: Gang up on he who picks the fight, jump on the seesaw to overbalance the big kid.

Yet in crisis after crisis, from Ethiopia to Iran, that goal has always given way to the reality of power, with nations unwilling or unable to join together against a single foe. Now, after 70 years of shattered hopes, collective security may be rising from the ashes.

“There has never really been anything like it in this century,” historian John Lewis Gaddis said of the alignment against Saddam Hussein. Added Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard University expert on international affairs: “This is really quite remarkable.”

Scholars attempting to explain the unexpected cooperation say that the main reason for it lies in the new realities created by the end of the Cold War, an era whose onset leaves world powers with the luxury of joining in collective action without having to worry about guarding their own back doors.

With the receding of the apocalypse having opened the way for new economic growth, they say that Hussein’s sudden grab for oil strikes squarely at interests that are at the center of agendas for the future, from Washington to Beijing.

Among other factors that combined to forge the common ground: the lack of ambiguity in the Iraqi attack upon Kuwait, collective guilt among powers who had failed to act before and new diplomatic ties that knit disparate responses into one.

Whether such consensus can hold in driving the Iraqis from Kuwait remains an untested prospect. Uncertain, too, is whether such cooperation would form anew at a different time against a different foe.

But scholars, for whom crises shed light on what would otherwise remain obscured, say that they are watching to see whether the unfolding events in the Middle East will prove the case for the kind of great-power teamwork for which some had all but abandoned hope.

And with economic integration now intertwining the fates of nations and war between large powers regarded as less likely than ever before, some experts express a cautious optimism that the experiment might mark the beginning of a new age.

“If this turns out well,” says Richard N. Gardner, a Columbia University professor and former ambassador to Italy, “this would constitute a landmark event in the history of this century.”

To be sure, the anti-Iraqi forces now massing in Saudi Arabia remain largely those of the United States, augmented so far by only British support. It is an American operation, not endorsed by the United Nations.

That lopsided alignment is far from the mandatory gang-up that Wilson and heads of other states had designed in the 1919 League of Nations Covenant as a guarantee against a repeat of World War I. It also falls short of what was envisioned in the U.N. Charter, which provides for a special multinational military force to act against aggressors.

But for the first time in history, even the Soviet Union expressed interest Thursday in joining in a potential United Nations blockade.

And in economic terms, a more fundamental breakthrough has already taken place. When the U.N. Security Council voted early this week to impose mandatory sanctions on Iraq and conquered Kuwait, it marked the harshest punishment the body had ever administered to one of its own.

That sweeping net of sanctions already “transcends” previous experience under the League and the United Nations, said private economist David D. Hale. “We are really at the threshold of new cooperation here,” he said.

The history of collective security is littered with examples of failure. When Mussolini grabbed for land in Ethiopia in a 1936 annexation bid, the League slapped on only mild sanctions.

The problem was that Germany had seemed intent on a war of its own. Rather than risk an affront to Mussolini, France and smaller members of the international organization essentially sacrificed the League. After an unchecked Italy won its triumph, the League voted to solicit suggestions about “improving the application of the Covenant.”

The post-World War II solution sought to tackle the problem in a different way. In the new United Nations, a committee of great powers would hold the reins acting as what Roosevelt called Four Policemen to punish states that violated the rules. According to Roosevelt’s thinking, the military forces of the United States, the Soviet Union, China and Great Britain would serve as a peacekeeping force wherever they were needed in the world.

But that Security Council arrangement quickly shattered as the Cold War broke out, guaranteeing repeated vetoes that left collective security without teeth. Only by virtue of Soviet absence did the United Nations respond as planned--and then only once--when a U.N. force responded to the invasion of South Korea.

Otherwise, notes Columbia University’s Gardner, an expert on international organizations, U.N. military involvement essentially has been limited to “blue-helmeted peacekeeping forces” made up soldiers from small nations.

And even in response to state-supported hostage-taking in Iran, the Security Council--while issuing a unanimous condemnation--was unable to impose sanctions, blocked in the waning days of the Cold War by Soviet refusal to join with the United States against any potential foe.

It is such balance-of-power calculations that some historians suggest have faded with the Cold War, opening the way to the kind of superpower cooperation evident in the crisis of the last eight days.

Indeed, with the Soviet Union, Japan, China and the European Community in accord with the United States, some analysts suggest that--at least in certain cases--there at last may be a committee of great powers willing to act together.

“What’s happening today is exactly what Roosevelt envisioned when he talked about the Four Policemen taking charge of the world,” says historian Gaddis.

What may knit those powers more closely together now than ever before are economic ties that make even China subject to what happens in the developed world. At the same time, Harvard’s Hoffmann notes, leaders of the Soviet Union seem “determined to prove that they are the best citizens of the new international order.”

But scholars caution that other factors may make the Iraqi case the exception rather than the rule, with by far the most important the hammerlock on economic growth that Hussein could impose upon the developed world because of his control of a large part of the world’s oil.

They further point out that the world response to crisis undoubtedly has been accelerated by U.S. leadership made more efficient by the diplomatic ties forged in the past 18 months by President Bush.