PERSPECTIVE ON THE ‘NEW WORLD ORDER’ : The Little Guys Are Calling the Tune : If Japan and Germany can’t stand up to Iraq, then the dominance of economic over military power is nonsense.

The Persian Gulf crisis has had a salutary effect on the effort to define the character of the post-Cold-War era, lending a sobering sense of reality to a discussion that had become too airily “conceptual” for its own good.

When it became clear in the late 1980s that the Cold War was indeed over, an orthodoxy about the new era emerged, fully formed, virtually overnight. Its essence may be summed up in three propositions:

--Bipolarity is being replaced by multipolarity.

--Divisiveness and separation are being superseded by interdependence.

--The primacy of military power is giving way to the dominance of economic power.

That this hastily assembled conventional wisdom seemed to have been arrived at in large part by simply postulating that everything would become the opposite of what it had been during the Cold War did not necessarily establish its falsity, though it did hint at a certain glibness and superficiality.

Now, much of this chatter has been stilled by the gulf crisis. The whole notion of multipolarity is undermined by the utter dominance of the United States’ role in the affair, and the extremely feeble part played by Germany and Japan, the two new candidates for global power status. Indeed, some commentators have been so impressed that they have experienced an instantaneous conversion from multipolarism to unipolarism, and now see the United States as clearly in a class on its own.

Belief in the declining efficacy of force has also taken a beating since the Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait. That an otherwise inconsequential country of 17 million people has been able to precipitate a major crisis and hold the world at bay for several months, solely on the basis of its carefully accumulated military power, has dealt that belief one serious blow. That the armed force of the United States has been the only thing capable of mounting an effective riposte to Saddam Hussein--while the economic power of a Japan or a Germany has been largely irrelevant--dealt it another.

If, far from being unique, Hussein represents a familiar and recurring historical phenomenon--a locally powerful and ambitious ruler making a bid for regional hegemony--then the crisis surely suggests that, like Mark Twain’s obituary, attempts to write off military power are a trifle premature.

Intellectually, arguments for the decline in the importance of military power depend a great deal on the alleged consequences of global interdependence. The more the international system comes to resemble an intricately meshed Swiss watch, the argument goes, the more tenuous will be the reality of sovereign nations and the more anachronistic the military-based system of power politics. But again the gulf crisis points to a different conclusion: the more Swiss-watch-like the world becomes, the more vulnerable it will be to marauders, blackmailers and terrorists--and the more it will need force to defend itself against such threats.

Another recent event challenges the “interdependence” thesis in an even more fundamental way. The collapse of the global trade talks in early December raises seriously the prospect that, far from being strengthened, the interdependent trading system that has served the world well since the 1940s may soon be replaced by an arrangement of mutually antagonistic trading blocs, each designed to penalize outsiders and frustrate the application of the principle of comparative advantage. If this happens, regional autarky--and diminished interdependence--will be the distinctive feature of the new era.

The gulf crisis suggests that the post-Cold-War world described in the new orthodoxy may owe more to the wish-list of American intellectuals than it does to the available evidence. The belief that increasing interdependence is leading to a harmonizing of interests and an escape from power politics, and the accompanying belief that the efficacy of force is declining--these reflect a cast of mind that has prevailed among intellectuals throughout this century, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Faced with the confusion resulting from the sudden collapse of the Communist empire, they simply fell back on these congenial beliefs in an attempt to make sense of what was happening.

In the boldest and most stimulating of such attempts so far, Francis Fukuyama has spoken of much of the Third World remaining “mired in history,” even as the advanced countries free themselves from the atavistic passions of nationalism, religion and ethnicity. But contemplating what is happening now in the Soviet Union, Central Europe, the gulf and the Indian subcontinent, it seems increasingly likely that, far from being anachronisms, the countries that are so “mired” may call a large part of the international tune in coming years.

For, precisely because they are still in that pre-modern condition, they have the conviction and the will to act in ways that can force the rational, passionless and hedonistic advanced countries to respond to their initiatives. That they are emerging as the agenda-setters of the new era may be the real lesson of the gulf crisis.