COLUMN LEFT : Squandering Our Future on Military Folly : Where is the peace dividend? The White House is spreading it over the sands of Arabia.

“In the life of a nation,” President Bush declared as U.S. troops landed on the Saudi desert, “we’re called upon to define who we are and what we believe.”

The Cold War’s end provides a providential chance to revitalize our country. Now, however, as we lurch toward economic decline at home and war abroad, it looks like this opportunity will be squandered, without public awareness or debate.

For the United States, the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union is a remarkable, serendipitous blessing. At the very moment our economy groans beneath debts incurred and investments unmade, the Soviet Union sues for peace. The 40-year global struggle that has consumed so much of our resources and attention has come to an end. The U.S. military budget can be cut by 50% or more without endangering our security in the least. We are free to turn our attention to our own society, with a huge pool of funds available to be invested--without new taxes.

This blessing comes at the moment the world can no longer ignore the growing threat posed by environmental degradation. Most initiatives on the environment did not fare well in the recent elections. Faced with a choice between protecting jobs and protecting trees, between cost and cleanliness, voters turned cautious in a grim economy. But this calculus misstates the challenge--and the opportunity--posed by the environmental crisis.

With global warming, holes in the atmosphere, desertification, the fouling of air and water, humans are the new endangered species. Environmental degradation is no longer a nuisance, but a clear and present danger. Across the world there is general agreement that we must transform the way we live if our grandchildren are to survive in the next century.

This threat is also an economic opportunity. The environmental imperative will force a transformation in where we live, how we travel, the way we produce things, what we use for energy. New technologies, living arrangements, transport and communications systems must be invented. Factories must be rebuilt, new products invented, new tastes and habits developed.

The peace dividend can help speed this transformation. Research and development funds can be transferred from fighting mythic wars in space to developing alternative energy sources. Government procurement can create a market for efficient cars, buildings, production facilities. Investment in mass transit, in cleaning up our own environment can stimulate production that can find markets across the world. Commitments in education and retraining can provide opportunities for workers and scientists displaced in the conversion from military spending to sustainable production.

But the Administration is blind to these possibilities. This month the President defined his course by sending more troops to the Persian Gulf and scuttling the international conference on global warming. If the Administration has its way, the United States will play the world’s policeman, prepared, in the President’s words, to “respond to threats in whatever corner of the globe they appear.”

The peace dividend due us from the end of the Cold War will be spent on the military. Next year’s military budget--when the costs of the Persian Gulf forces are included--is likely to be higher than this year’s. The new budget agreement even contains a perverse provision that prohibits transferring money from the military to domestic investment.

The President’s intervention in the Persian Gulf is an expression of his “pump it up” energy policy. Led by Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, the White House will countenance no limits on the burning of fossil fuel. Thus other nations--led, naturally, by Japan and Germany--that are now investing massive sums in alternative energy, conservation, mass transit and efficient modes of production will find little competition from the United States in the markets of the future.

The Administration’s see-nothing stance is complemented by the Democrats’ say-nothing posture. Despite all the talk about tax fairness, most Democratic incumbents ran and won on the old staples of money from political-action committees, constituent service and bringing home the pork.

Seventy percent of the American people now think the country is on the wrong track, but no national political leader has yet found a way to address the challenges and the opportunities presented to us by the ending of the Cold War. It is this failure--far more than the coming recession or even the possible war in the gulf--that will haunt us in the future.