Order to Attack Is One of Biggest Presidential Gambles Ever : Geopolitics: Bush’s decision comes during a time of tremendous global flux.

In ordering U.S. troops into war against Iraq, President Bush has taken one of the biggest gambles any American chief of state has ever taken.

The stakes are, in many ways, much larger than those in the Vietnam War. At that time, a quarter century ago, American troops went into battle in a Cold War world in which the relationships among the world’s leading powers were relatively static. Now, U.S. forces are going to war at a time in history when the world is in a state of almost unprecedented flux.

As a result, the President’s decision involves an extraordinary gamble. At stake: Washington’s position as world leader.

If the President is successful, if he turns back Iraq’s aggression under the banner of an international coalition without setting the entire Middle East ablaze, then the “new world order” about which he has spoken so often will be one dominated by the United States and its military power.

No longer constrained by the Soviet Union and the Cold War, Washington is likely to stand unchallenged as the dominant power in the world.

“This is an historic moment,” Bush himself told the nation Wednesday night. “We have, in this past year, made great progress in ending the long era of conflict and Cold War. We have before us the opportunity to forge, for ourselves and for future generations, a new world order.”

If Bush is unsuccessful, however, there may indeed be a “new world order,” but it could well be one in which the United States will be seen by other nations as a power in eclipse. Japan and Germany, in particular, may quickly move in to the leadership role that has been played by the United States and the Soviet Union since the end of World War II.

In the war against Iraq, success will not be defined in strictly military terms. Rather, the stakes also involve economics, Mideast policy and terrorism.

The President is gambling not only that the United States will defeat Iraq but that it will be able to win quickly, with minimal damage to the U.S. and world economies, and that it can withstand an upsurge of anti-Americanism in the Arab world and terrorist attacks at home.

In a sense, the current war will be the test of an intellectual debate about American power, a debate which has been carried on for four years.

In 1987, Yale University historian Paul Kennedy wrote “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” In the book, he argued that America ran the risk of following the path of earlier powers, such as Spain, the Netherlands, France and, most recently, Britain, all of which he said suffered “imperial overstretch.”

Kennedy contended that nations gain power by developing military strength to protect their expanding economic resources--and that they decline when the cost of maintaining military power abroad weakens their economies.

“Decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them all simultaneously,” he wrote.

The best-selling book ouched a raw nerve among U.S. policy-makers.

“Paul Kennedy is wrong about the United States,” said one top Pentagon official, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard L. Armitage.

“Our policy role today . . . is not one of ‘imperial overstretch’ but one of responsible outreach,” said then-Assistant Secretary of State Gaston J. Sigur.

In the four years since, the Ronald Reagan and Bush Administrations have been determined to demonstrate that the United States is still fundamentally strong and that the warnings of Kennedy and other “declinists” are exaggerated.

As President, Bush has shown a clear willingness to rely upon military force as an instrument of American power. He launched an invasion to oust and capture former Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega. And, in the midst of a summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Malta, he called out U.S. warplanes to help defeat a coup against Philippine President Corazon Aquino.

In both of these cases, critics warned that the American use of force would have serious long-term consequences. They predicted that the invasion of Panama would permanently sour American relations with Latin America and that the military intervention in Manila would galvanize public sentiment to oust the United States from Philippine bases.

So far, at least, the critics have been wrong about Bush’s earlier military interventions. The U.S. position in Latin America seems to have survived the Panama invasion, and U.S. officials are now in the process of negotiating another decade or so of access rights for crucial bases in the Philippines.

But if things go badly, the use of force against Iraq could have consequences that dwarf those of Bush’s earlier decisions to rely on military power.

Bush’s earlier military moves were brief and had few economic consequences. The campaign against Iraq could cost as much as $500 million to $1 billion a day, just for an air war. If Bush launches an all-out assault with ground forces, the costs could rise to as much as $2 billion a day. These costs will have to be borne at a time when the nation is already in a recession.