Special Report: Seeking a New World : Epilogue : On Entering an Age of Paradox

“Start with the recognition that something profound has happened,” said former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, reflecting on the changes sweeping the world. “This is a new epoch. That doesn’t mean everything is different--but it means all the important things are different.”

For five centuries, history seemed to move--with frequent reverses and sidetracks, of course--largely in one direction: toward a single, global civilization based on universal democracy, free trade and secular governance by increasingly powerful nation-states.

But now history has bumped into new realities, from the revival of ethnic and religious fervor to the increasing obsolescence of the nation-state. Is this, as some have argued, the “end” of the historical progression? Is it a return to an earlier age, the game of nations of the centuries before the Cold War? Or is it a transition to a new path?

We are still caught in midstream; our vision is still too close up. When Columbus returned home to Spain five centuries ago, he believed that he had found the Indies; it never occurred to him that he had, instead, found an entire hemisphere and helped invent the modern world. Like Columbus, we may need another decade or two of exploration before we know exactly where we are.

The least that can be said is that we are entering an age of paradox:

* A world that is becoming simultaneously more violent and less dangerous--more warlike in some ways, more pacific in others. For every conflict resolved, from Berlin to Managua, a new one springs up to take its place.

* A world in which the United States stands uncontested as a global leader--the organizer and spearhead of a vast alliance in the Persian Gulf--yet finds its power more circumscribed than at any time in a century. The real change has not been the historically common redistribution of power among a few big countries, but a wholesale diffusion of influence among countries, corporations and populist groups of many stripes.

* A world in which nations still pursue power and wealth, but sometimes find that the best way to gain more power is to surrender some to others. Witness the nations of Western Europe that have found greater strength and influence than at any time since World War II by yielding sovereignty to the European Community.

* A world in which the quest for new political freedom and the demands of economic competition push societies in two directions at once, integration and disintegration. Czechs and Slovaks, Kashmiris and Croats, all want some variant of the same paradoxical goal: political and cultural autonomy combined with a place in the global economy.

* A world in which the standard of living of billions of people surges ahead, accompanied by a rising sense of dissatisfaction. From the new democracies of Eastern Europe and Latin America to the emerging economies of India and Thailand, people expect democracy to bring an approximation of the Western prosperity they see on their television screens.

Compared to this new world of paradox, the 40-year-long Cold War was an era of unusual clarity: two superpowers, two economic systems, two competing creeds, each fully occupied with the overriding purpose of besting the other.

The challenge facing President Bush and Americans today is more ambiguous. As a people, Americans like their foreign policy to join the national interest with solid principles. But how far can that be carried in such a fragmented and tumultuous world?

Bush for one has insisted that the United States must continue its world leadership. And he has made gestures toward defining a new goal, especially in his speeches explaining the dispatch of U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia: “Out of these troubled times . . . a new world order can emerge . . . “ he told Congress.

What the Administration has failed to do is develop a plan for achieving that new world order.

“We need a strategic concept, and we aren’t hearing one,” said Paul H. Nitze, who helped draft President Harry S. Truman’s strategies for containing communism. Last spring, the 83-year-old ex-Cold War warrior drafted another one, much as he had 43 years before. “The central theme the United States should support in the future is the accommodation and protection of diversity, “ he wrote--”a world climate in which a large array of political groupings can emerge, each in its own individual, and perhaps eccentric, way.”

Whether it is Nitze’s vision or something else, the objectives of a strategy for the decades ahead will be complex. One element must be preventing the outbreak of major wars. Another must be enhancing America’s economic competitiveness. But the nation must do more than avoid military conflagration and make money. It must renew its own vision--for the sake of its own people and for millions around the world who still look to America for evidence that ideals can be made real.

“We are looking for something new--organization, structure, concept,” said Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France. “What is strange is that, at the moment, there is no thinker who is suggesting a possible course.”

Part of the problem, ironically, stems from America’s success in winning the Cold War: It may be more difficult to unlearn old habits and remake old institutions in the wake of victory than in the face of defeat.

Sometime around 1985, in his third year as secretary of state, Shultz came to see that the world was changing in fundamental ways and asked his aides at the State Department to prepare a study. But the bureaucrats, adept as they were at examining immediate, specific problems, could not focus on the long range. “Everybody wanted to discuss the subject in terms of the treaties we had to negotiate,” Shultz recalls, “but I said . . . ‘That’s not what I have in mind. I’d like to have somebody who’s capable of thinking big and broad.’ ”

Unable to delegate the task, the secretary of state, an economist and former university professor, did it himself--”in my spare time,” as he explained later.

“My thesis was (that) the world is in a different age and it’s an information age, and in order to flourish in such an age, people have to have a sense of freedom and openness,” Shultz says. He realized that an opportunity might exist to influence the basic attitudes of a newly appointed Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. In a series of contacts with Soviet officials, Shultz tried to convince him that the Soviet Union could prosper only if it opened up its political and economic system. It was an effort that Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze later described as “very important” in the evolution of Soviet reform.

Alas, deriving immediate policy from a comprehensive vision of the future is the exception, not the rule. Moreover, the way the government is organized often fragments policy-making. Economic policy, for instance, is often divided from political and diplomatic policy, even though--especially in today’s world--the three should be closely coordinated.

Some of the government’s institutions have tried to change in response to the new realities. One year ago, the Central Intelligence Agency created a new division--the “fifth directorate,” to focus on global changes that fell between the cracks of traditional, region-by-region intelligence analysis. But one involved official observed: “We know how to watch, but we don’t know how to get people (in the Administration) to pay attention.”

The transition from one era to another is never a simple affair. Historians cannot mark the point clearly on a calendar; they can only note the seismic events, like the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the invasion of Kuwait, which reveal that the terrain has changed.

The end of the Middle Ages and the opening of the Modern Age began around the time of Columbus’ first voyage in 1492, but it was two centuries before that transformation was complete. Even the birth of the Cold War in the ashes of World War II took more than two years. History is moving faster now, but its path is far from fixed. Many and various as the snares may be, there is still time for leadership to affect history’s course--for good or ill.