NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush’s Vision of a ‘New World Order’ Still Unclear : Policy: The President found a slogan for his Administration. But neither he nor anyone else can seem to define it.

Two years ago, when the Bush Administration was young, a group of junior officials tried to brainstorm a snappy slogan that would sum up their President’s vision for the world--a “Bush Doctrine.”

“We spent months,” recalled Francis Fukuyama, a State Department policy planner at the time, “but no one could come up with anything shorter than a paragraph. Nothing seemed to work.”

The Bush Administration, it seemed, was heading into history without a theme to call its own.

Then came an unlikely rescuer: Saddam Hussein and his invasion of Kuwait. After Bush dispatched 200,000 U.S. troops to defend Saudi Arabia last August, he needed a concept, a vision, to explain his assertive new policy.

One August morning, at his summer home in Kennebunkport, Me., he took his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, for a long ride aboard the presidential speedboat, Fidelity. Four hours later, the President came ashore with a ringing slogan that Scowcroft had offered during their talk: “the new world order.”

Ever since, the goal of a “new world order” has been the central theme of Bush’s foreign policy pronouncements. He summoned it last September, telling Congress why he had sent the troops; he used it again in November, when he turned the defensive troop commitment into an offensive force, and he invoked it repeatedly in his State of the Union address last month, explaining why he thinks the burden of world leadership must fall to the United States.

The concept suffers from only one problem: Almost no one, even inside the Administration, is quite certain what it means.

“Go ask them upstairs,” urged a senior State Department official whose job, at least on paper, includes building large parts of the new world order. “Nobody around here knows what it is.”

“I can tell you what I think it is,” another senior official confessed, “but I’m not sure that’s the same as what the President thinks it is.”

And among those who think they know, not everyone agrees that the slogan is a good one. “It’s Wilsonian nonsense,” said a White House aide from the Administration’s conservative wing, recalling Woodrow Wilson’s doomed crusade to fashion the League of Nations after World War I.

In fact, Bush and his aides have explained the basics of a new world order fairly well. The idea has three parts:

* U.S.-Soviet cooperation on international issues, instead of the old Cold War conflict;

* “Collective security,” meaning joint action by many nations against aggression;

* American leadership to make sure it all gets done.

“What is at stake (in the Persian Gulf) is more than one small country,” Bush said in his State of the Union address. “It is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom and the rule of law.

“As Americans,” he added, “we know there are times when we must step forward and accept our responsibility to lead. . . . Among the nations of the world, only the United States has both the moral standing and the means to back it up.”

But beyond those general principles, Bush’s vision remains distinctly fuzzy at the edges. Will the establishment of a new world order require the dispatch of U.S. and allied forces to dozens of Third World trouble spots? Will the United States really entrust decisions on collective security to the United Nations? And will the Soviet Union, riven by internal conflicts, continue to play along?

The President himself has occasionally muddied the waters by offering different versions of his vision, sometimes stressing multilateral action through the United Nations, sometimes the single-handed leadership of the United States.

During the first week of February, he told one audience that the core of the new world order would be “a revitalized peacekeeping function of the United Nations.” Yet he told another audience that the Gulf War demonstrated “that the United States has a new credibility and that what we say, goes”--a declaration that sent tremors through some U.S. allies who feared that the new world order might turn out to be a recipe for American primacy.

Scowcroft and other officials, alarmed by all the attention their creation is getting, have tried gently to reduce expectations a bit.

“I think we run the danger of overselling this,” a senior official said last week.”It wasn’t really designed to be invested with all the load that it’s carrying. . . . It’s just a notion.

“In part, it’s George Bush’s ‘vision thing,’ ” he added--using Bush’s own description of the policy overview he has had difficulty articulating. “It’s a way of thinking about things right now, more than it is a concrete program of action.”

“I don’t think there is a single official definition,” said another senior official. “I don’t think anybody has sat down with the President and said, ‘Here’s what we mean by the new world order.’ But it’s inherent in a lot of (Bush’s) actions. . . . In a way, it’s subconscious behavior.”

Still, despite their disclaimers, officials insist that the concept is much more than just a speech writer’s flourish--and assert that Bush is clearly and genuinely taken with the idea.

“I think the thing he gets most excited about is the notion that the United States (can) play a leadership role that is more positive than before, in the sense of moving the world forward rather than just holding off disaster,” said one close aide.

The beauty of the idea, another official said, is that it “identifies the fact that there are going to be significant challenges in this new period . . . and tries to signal that the United States and other countries have a common interest in solving these problems in a collective fashion.”

To some critics, the new world order already looks too collective; to others, it isn’t collective enough.

“George Bush is dreaming the Wilsonian dream,” said Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

“I don’t say that in a negative way,” she added quickly.

Still, she said, Bush had ceded more responsibility in the Gulf crisis to the U.N. Security Council than she thought wise.

“The biggest single problem with the U.N. is that it involves in every decision too many nations that don’t have a stake in the problem and don’t have a stake in the outcome,” she said. “That’s a prerequisite for irresponsible decision-making. Regional security arrangements, on the other hand, involve countries that do have a stake in the outcome.”

On the other side, many argue that the Administration has talked about collective action but has run what is basically a unilateral effort in the Gulf.

“What has happened in the past month is clearly American leadership with a lot of ‘followership,’ ” said Robert Hunter, a former official of the National Security Council in the Jimmy Carter Administration now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here. “There’s been a facade of multilateralism . . . but in practice it’s an American thing.

“If the new world order concept is going to have any validity, first there has to be an intelligent effort in the Middle East with a lot of sharing of ideas and responsibilities among countries,” he added. “It won’t work if the United States defines the new world order and the others are simply expected to salute.”

Former Ronald Reagan Administration official Charles Lichenstein agreed.

“A lot of people, including friends of ours, are becoming a little bit worried about the idea of a Pax Americana,” a world order guaranteed--and controlled--solely by the United States.

Still, the Administration may find itself pushed toward multilateralism whether it likes or not--because the limits on U.S. power have grown. In sending U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia, for example, Bush had to seek financial aid from allies to sustain domestic support.

“There is a tendency toward thinking in terms of a Pax Americana, but it isn’t a sustainable ambition,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a fellow at the International Peace Academy in New York. “The complexity of the problems may force multilateralism on the Administration. The political debts the Administration has accumulated--to the Europeans, the Arabs and Israelis--will increase their demand for real multilateralism.”

Administration officials respond that Bush’s thinking is something of a blend of both currents--a desire for multilateral action coupled with a belief that U.S. leadership is necessary to achieve it.

“I’d say there’s a little bit of both,” one aide said. “There’s only one superpower, and that gives us a significant responsibility. . . . Whatever you think about the international community acting on its own, somebody’s got to put it together, somebody’s got to lead it, (and) the only one that can do that is the United States.”

Fukuyama, the former State Department official, pointed out another paradox in Bush’s approach.

“It’s a funny kind of Wilsonianism,” noted Fukuyama. “True Wilsonianism paid much more attention to democracy; the question wasn’t just a country’s international behavior, but its internal behavior. . . . Bush seems to have taken the international law part without the domestic content.”

By seeking close cooperation with the Soviet Union and China despite those Communist powers’ crackdowns on democracy, he said, Bush is showing himself as much a hard-nosed “realist” as a Wilsonian “idealist.”

Indeed, several analysts noted, the greatest irony in Bush’s vision of a new world order is that the idea’s success depends upon events in the world’s two most disorderly places, the Persian Gulf and the Soviet Union.

The Gulf, of course, is the first great test of the new world order; indeed, a Bush aide said, the idea might never have jelled if it hadn’t been for Hussein’s invasion and the unusual near unanimous world response.

“Maybe it would have, eventually,” he said, “But I think the particular circumstances--coming when it did in U.S.-Soviet relations, coupled with the unique role the Security Council has played in this crisis--is what really put it together.”

But events in the Soviet Union and China may pose an even greater test; both Communist giants are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, so they can veto any initiative they dislike. Conservatives in Moscow’s Communist Party are already complaining that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has been too cooperative toward the United States. If they succeed in switching Soviet foreign policy toward hostility, or merely to an arm’s-length relationship, one of the pillars of the new world order would disappear.