Neither Hide nor Go It Alone : Bush rightly warns against both isolationism and unilateralism

President Bush, in an important valedictory foreign policy address this week, has again strongly cautioned that the end of the Cold War must not prompt Americans to turn their backs on a half-century of intimate engagement in world affairs and retreat into isolationism.

Communism’s collapse in Europe has not lifted the responsibilities of international leadership from the United States. “Our choice as a people is simple,” he said in a speech at Texas A&M; University. “We can either shape our times or we can let the times shape us, and shape us they will, at a price frightening to contemplate--morally, economically and strategically.” The departing President’s insights are sound, his somber warning is a message to be heeded. However compelling the domestic agenda facing President-elect Bill Clinton and his Administration, American military and diplomatic leadership in the world remains both indispensable and unavoidable.

It is indispensable because no other power has the strategic resources to respond rapidly and effectively when international stability is menaced. It is unavoidable because the United States is the nation to which all others instinctively look when cross-border aggression occurs or order collapses. There would have been no coalition formed to repel Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 if Washington--and Bush specifically--hadn’t acted to rally others to the cause. And there would be no evolving international effort to bring some measure of security to Somalia today if the United States had not taken the point position.

But leading, Bush noted, “doesn’t mean bearing the world’s burdens all alone.” That thought deserves equal weight with the admonition not to abandon the nation’s international obligations. Other countries, less powerful than ours but whose economic, strategic and moral interests may be no less engaged, also share in the responsibilities for preserving peace and defending democratic and humane principles. The Clinton Administration, we think, should use all of the great influence this country has to insist that those responsibilities be met. While isolationism must be shunned, unilateralism must be rejected.