NEWS ANALYSIS : ‘Global Revolution’ to Bring Problems, Turmoil for Clinton : Policy: The President has inherited so many challenges that some officials are talking of ignoring hopeless ones in a ‘diplomatic triage.’

Despite the monumental global changes on George Bush’s watch, the new Clinton Administration is virtually certain to face four years of even greater turmoil and even tougher decisions.

“We are in the middle of a global revolution, a period of change and instability equaled in modern times only by the aftermath of the French and Russian revolutions,” former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger warned shortly before leaving office in a valedictory address to the Council on Foreign Relations. “The status quo everywhere is under siege.”

Indeed, the world the new Administration is inheriting features such urgent issues--ranging from lofty ideological challenges to global health problems--that the nation’s top think tanks and government policy circles already are talking about something they call diplomatic triage: ignoring what are deemed hopeless problems so the world’s scarce resources can be devoted to problems that can be solved.

“There’s so much on the agenda that even the world community can’t handle it all,” said Morton Abramowitz, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That’s one of the big problems of the next decade, and that’s why triage is already taking place.”

Although the specific arenas will shift between now and the end of Clinton’s term in January, 1997, many of the unavoidable issues demanding significant U.S. input, attention or leadership fall under four broad categories:

* Instability and the evolving political spectrum. Although a third of the world’s 190 nations have moved toward democracy since 1989, the process has slowed, stalled and even reversed itself in key countries. In fragile new democracies, ousted Communists have returned under new guises. Elsewhere, right-wing movements are on the rise, and cultural forces are replacing traditional parties.

* Clashing economic interests. Although the Clinton team has pledged to tackle the troubled U.S. economy, it is likely to find that the deteriorating economies of both allies and rivals impinge on an American recovery and will demand U.S. direction or intervention.

* Arms proliferation and intractable regional conflicts. Although the United States is now the world’s unchallenged military leader, most wars during the Clinton watch are likely to be far more difficult and the threats more diffuse than the neatly delineated conflicts of the 20th Century. Arms treaties also will be more difficult to negotiate than bilateral Cold War pacts as weapons of mass destruction proliferate across five continents.

* Restructuring of nations and redefining of states. Although the North American Free Trade Agreement and the European Community set precedents for new regional cooperation between states, President Clinton is certain to face an increasing number of countries changing borders, breaking up or even crumbling as units of governance, trade and diplomacy shift.

Like the world in the 1990s, the four major issues are all interdependent. Any change in one is likely to have substantial impact on the others.

Indeed, in a final foreign policy speech in Texas as his term was ending, President Bush warned, “The new world could, in time, be as menacing as the old.”

For a country founded on democracy and committed to its promotion, one of the prime menaces for the United States will be worldwide efforts to unseat democratic governments.

“The initial burst of enthusiasm and progress on democracy has now run into the reality of governing,” said Graham Allison, director of the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project and professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“In most of the settings in which we’ve declared the success of democracy, we’re now finding a struggle to build democracies. It’s a long effort, and some important parties are slipping back, especially in countries with economic hardships.”

In South America, which had democratic governments in all its nations for the first time in 1990, senior U.S. analysts already are deeply concerned about Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and even Mexico. Military figures, authoritarians and others less committed to democratic reform are waiting in the wings to exploit public discontent.

In the former Soviet Union, democracy recently has faced setbacks as the old-line Communists--often appealing to nationalism--either have been voted back into office, as in Lithuania, or succeeded in slowing democratic reforms, as in Russia.

“The problem of the conservative-nationalist-authoritarian fight in Russia is not that it’s going to put the old Soviet system back together but (that) in some feckless attempt to do so, it’s going to precipitate chaos and even civil war,” predicted one of the United States’ most senior analysts, a career official.

Eastern Europe is also vulnerable. “As things go sour. . . , you could pretty easily see a coalition of nasty little authoritarian governments appearing in that part of the world,” the analyst added.

But the challenges are not limited to well-known ideologies. The political spectrum taking shape during the Clinton watch is likely to move in a host of new directions and include a variety of new components.

Tension among Confucianism, Islam and Western value systems, for example, will increasingly shape political developments in Asia and the Middle East over the next four years, potentially spawning violence.

“There’ll be no clarity to the (international political) picture, as there has been in recent decades,’ said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Jimmy Carter Administration who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’ll be much more confused, with both right and left as well as nationalism, ethnicity and religion increasingly interacting and clashing.”

A second pervasive challenge facing the Clinton team is the uncertainty and instability caused by global economic changes.

“The dominant foreign policy issue for the new Administration is economic performance,” said John D. Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. “Its main mandate to look at domestic economic performance can’t be dealt with outside the context of the global economy, large pieces of which are in real trouble.”

Indeed, whatever the hopeful signs on the U.S. recession, leading American analysts believe that a real turnaround is impossible until recessions end or at least ease in allied countries such as Germany and Japan.

“They’re sinking deeper into recession, thereby dragging us back,” the senior U.S. analyst said.

Achieving stability, the next stage, will then depend on economic equilibrium in areas that are now trying to establish free markets in what were state-controlled economies. More than 65 countries, ranging from Albania to Zambia, have begun such transformations since 1989--even more than the number moving toward democracy.

Finally, long-term growth will require easing and eventually reversing the acute deterioration in the most severely troubled nations of the Third World: Africa’s Mozambique, Asia’s Bangladesh, Latin America’s Guyana. Many are so chronically debt-ridden that most of their gross national product is used to pay off foreign debts rather than for domestic development that would break the cycle of poverty.

Like political and economic issues, military challenges in which the United States will have an interest over the next four years also will expand and diversify, ending an era of comparatively precise and predictable conflicts. Many are likely to be quagmires, making the Persian Gulf War and its aftermath look simple.

The multifaceted turmoil in the remnants of Yugoslavia will become the new standard. Such conflicts will entail unusual tactics along irregular boundaries, involve irregular military forces, be fought in population centers and generally violate international conventions.

“Probably the most important lesson learned (in Iraq) is that we won’t have that war again, partly because we did it so well. We’re going to confront (problems in) Somalia, Bosnia, Cambodia and others like them,” the senior U.S. analyst predicted. “We’ve got to figure out how we relate our armies to these kinds of quagmire challenges.”

Bush also bequeathed Clinton the largest bilateral nuclear disarmament treaty ever signed. But the new Administration is apt to find the next arms treaties more difficult to negotiate and more costly to enforce. Pacts in the 1990s will focus on a broader range of arms--including chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles--acquired in two dozen countries in the 1970s and 1980s.

“After every great conflict--and we’ve just had a great one--all the goodies, including the weapons, the technology, the people, the appetites, the industrial know-how, spreads out,” the leading analyst said in reference to the Cold War.

“Any country that has a serious interest in maintaining a weapons-of-mass-destruction program could do it,” the analyst added, particularly since both U.S. rivals and allies now sell “dual-use” technology that allows third parties to construct the world’s deadliest arms.

Stemming proliferation of all forms of weapons--from nuclear to chemical to biological--will require whole new regional and global approaches to enhance security and prevent countries from feeling so vulnerable that they seek ever-larger arsenals. That is a daunting task in light of concurrent political and economic trends.

The fourth major issue facing the Clinton team is the transformation of the international state system.

“The post-World War II and post-colonial state system itself is breaking down as many nations are increasingly unable to perform basic governmental functions, to control their internal affairs or to resist particularist and separatist tendencies within their borders,” Eagleburger said in his valedictory address.

The relatively peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union, the smooth division of Czechoslovakia and the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia and Somalia are but a few of the many changes anticipated during the 1990s.

Many U.S. analysts now believe that Zaire--the largest black African state, bordering nine others--may break up, setting a precedent that could ripple across the continent.

At its core, the issue pits forces demanding self-determination against others favoring traditional states and longstanding borders.

More profound in the long term than the other three problems, this issue is also the most complex for policy-makers to deal with conceptually--since all international laws and organizations are based on the old model.

The changes are so fundamental and so sweeping that it is not just a matter of adding a few new countries to the world map. International laws and conventions also will have to be rewritten and organizations restructured.

Clinton’s World Agenda

A list of the most pressing global issues facing President Clinton as his foreign policy team gears up:

EUROPE

* Curb “ethnic cleansing” and fighting in the remnants of Yugoslavia and prevent them from spreading in the Balkans.

* Help the fragile experiments in democracy and market economies in Russia and East Europe.

MIDDLE EAST

* Inject new energy into stalled Arab-Israeli peace talks.

* Ensure indefinite monitoring of Iraq compliance with U.N. resolutions and indefinite security for vulnerable oil-rich Persian Gulf sheikdoms.

* Head off weapons proliferation in several hard-line states.

ASIA

* Reverse the growing trade deficit with Japan in the context of a more comprehensive policy on Asia’s industrialized nations.

* Decide on renewal of most-favored-nation trade status for China and possible action on its weapons sales and human rights abuses.

* Check the flow of arms from North Korea.

THE AMERICAS

* Set policy on Haitian refugees and help restore democracy there.

* Encourage democratic reforms in Cuba, a Marxist holdout.

AFRICA

* Complete Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, withdrawing U.S. troops and handing over supervision to the United Nations.

* Encourage democratic reforms now budding across the continent with mixed results.

TREATIES

* Implement START II.

* Implement, revise or expand the North American Free Trade Agreement.

* Complete the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).