New U.S. Motto: ‘Neither Patsy nor Bully’ : World relations: If nations move toward a rule of law, the United States will no longer be able to indulge in go-it-alone defiance and unilateral actions.

The pregnancies of history are often long and troubled. Spontaneous abortions outnumber successful births. Yet the gestation of a new order may at last prove fruitful, half a century after it was conceived. George Bush is not naive to believe that something novel and profound is taking place in world politics.

The order has antecedents in earlier efforts to harmonize the affairs of states--some would cite ancient Rome’s imperial peace, others the 19th-Century balance-of-power system. Its contemporary parentage, however, is American. Impelled by the carnage of the World War I, Woodrow Wilson pointed the path later followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in founding the United Nations.

Measured against the ambitions of 1945, the grand design of that day has not worked. Millions of dead testify that international institutions have not contained the violence of nation against nation, neighbor against neighbor. The shadow of that failure hangs heavily over mankind, but it has obscured other trends that may revive the original conception.

Myriad lesser accomplishments have given the world community better prospects for tackling the challenges of security. Creating a global economy, integrating Western Europe and liberating Eastern Europe, weaving a fabric of cooperation in science, communication and other fields, overcoming the great ideological divide--these are historic endeavors on which to build. They have shaped a far more auspicious context than the one in which the authors of the League of Nations and United Nations labored.

The United States has served as midwife to the age now aborning. To bring it to maturity, America will have to keep its bearings. It will need to demonstrate its dedication to the rule of law, its emphasis on the common interests of nations, its commitment to marshal adequate assets in support of global goals.

America will incur costs and risks if the world moves beyond rhetoric about law and begins to apply it. The United States will not be able to indulge in the go-it-alone defiance that rejected World Court jurisdiction over U.S. mining of Nicaraguan harbors. It will have to refrain from the sharp lawyering that displayed contempt for negotiated obligations by attempting to rewrite the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty through mischievous interpretation. Indeed, a wise step toward expanding judicial authority to bolster international law would be to invite the World Court’s opinion of the ABM provisions.

Only such deeds will give content to the lawful order the President has invoked. This does not mean the abandonment of sovereignty or the national interest. It suggests, rather, a prudent balancing of our national ambitions against those of other nations in an evolving pattern of international restraint. Modern patriotism must pay its “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” by directing a wider range of national action through multilateral channels.

The American motto should be “neither patsy nor bully.” We are called to preserve the vigor of American nationalism without succumbing to its perversion as insensitive unilateralism. That demands a clear perspective on the altered circumstances facing U.S. policy.

Whether one thinks the end of the Cold War bodes well or ill for American influence in the world, it surely removes a basic obstacle to fulfilling the ideals enshrined in the U.N. Charter. Soviet-American amity opens the way toward collective response to threats to peace. As the foremost advocate of the rule of law, the United States belatedly finds a partner in Moscow that espouses the same ideal--and appears to mean it.

Even before the superpowers joined in the Security Council to resist Iraqi aggression, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had engaged the United Nations to assist Soviet disengagement from Afghanistan and supported U.N. roles in the long-festering disputes of Namibia, Nicaragua and Cambodia. No one can be confident of sustaining this unprecedented collaboration, but it is vital that we do so. President Bush is doing yeoman service in that cause.

The new international agenda arrives before we have disposed of the old agenda. It is past time to address the compounding problems of environment and energy, population explosions and resource depletions, nuclear proliferation and narco-terrorism. But focusing on those issues must not divert the United States and its associates from completing work on systematic, verifiable reduction of conventional and nuclear arms. Urgent tasks remain to resolve regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Central America, quite apart from the chronic crises in the Middle East and the turbulent passage South Africa has just begun. Third World debt and disruptive trade practices by many countries cannot be left to happenstance.

These multiple agendas loom in a political environment that is increasingly “polycentric,” to borrow a term from Harvard’s Stanley Hoffmann. With or without a legal regime, self-interest requires us to frame U.S. policies compatible with the interests of others. Above all, constructing a system to prevent and manage conflict takes priority. Without a capacity to maintain security and deal with lawbreakers, other institutions of global cooperation will remain forever vulnerable.

In groping toward a lawful world, Americans should keep three things in mind:

* The goal is an American ideal whose time may finally have come.

* Close cooperation with the Soviet Union, once inconceivable, is now indispensable.

* The old business of arms control and regional conflicts must be wrapped up soon so that we can turn to new imperatives descending upon the world.

Cynics will scoff at these prospects; realists will acknowledge the difficulties. Politics is not a petri dish and the lawful order Americans have tried to spawn could well be deformed. But, for all the hazards, nursing this progeny is the prime task for U.S. statecraft in the decades to come.