In Post-Cold War Era, It’s Free World That’s Shifting : Diplomacy: Relationships that were alliances of convenience in the fight against the Soviet Union are now being re-evaluated.

When the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down, many people looked for huge political changes in Eastern Europe and expected that the rest of the world--what we used to call the Free World during the Cold War--would stay pretty much unchanged. It hasn’t worked out that way, and there are important lessons here for the United States to learn.

In Eastern Europe the communists, ex- and not-very-ex, are on a roll. A string of election victories and near-victories has put heirs of Josef Stalin’s parties in or near power in half-a-dozen countries in Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the ex-communists pushed Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats into third place in the most recent local elections.

Meanwhile, the winds of change are blowing--through the West. In Japan, 40 years of power by the (misnamed) Liberal Democratic Party ended last summer and the Social Democratic Party of Japan, a party long opposed to Japan’s role in the U.S. system of Cold War alliances, is now the largest bloc in a new government.

In Italy, the heirs of the Italian Communist Party are now the most powerful political force in a disintegrating political structure. Their strongest rivals are a party that wants Italy to break up and a neo-fascist movement that ran Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter for mayor of Naples. The people U.S. policy tried to exclude from Italian politics look set to control the next stage in Italy’s evolution.

The Sandinistas are, in effect, part of the governing coalition in Nicaragua; the current president of South Korea was a dissident during the Cold War; a socialist jailed by America’s military allies is the front-runner for the next presidential election in Brazil; the Palestine Liberation Organization and the African National Congress, both denounced by Cold-War American leaders as terrorist organizations with communist links, now look like governments-in-waiting.

None of this was in the script. The Cold War was supposed to be a battle between the United States and the Free World against the Soviet Union and the Slave World. Our allies, we kept telling ourselves, were members of the Free World; their allies were satellites and puppets. Fidel Castro was a puppet of Moscow, while El Salvador’s murdering oligarchy was “making progress toward democracy.”

But life is never as simple as political rhetoric would have it. In some countries, U.S. allies were genuine democrats; in others they were, well, puppets and satellites. The shah, Manuel A. Noriega before he bit the hand that fed him--we can all add names to the list.

In many countries the lines between satellite and genuine national democracy were blurred. Italy’s Christian Democrats and their allies were genuine local movements that had close ties to the CIA and the U.S. government at various points in their history. During most of the Cold War, governments in West Germany and Japan considered themselves dependent on the American “big brother” who had defeated them in World War II and now protected them from the Soviet Union.

U.S. alliances in the Cold War were not always alliances with entire countries; sometimes they were just with a regime or one political party. This was particularly obvious in countries like Greece, South Korea, South Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Taiwan. In all these countries, the U.S. government supported one side in a civil war, and communists supported the other. In other countries the Americans did not need to be so heavy handed, but their influence was still felt. Both the United States and the Soviet Union interfered in the internal affairs of other countries throughout the Cold War; both infiltrated political parties, sent financial assistance to friendly political factions and generally did their best to control the outcome of political processes.

Now both sets of foreign influences are being withdrawn, and countries are trying to find a new political balance based on the strengths of their internal political forces. Communist parties in the Western world have been deprived of financial support and liberated from the ideological connection to Moscow. Pro-Western parties are also forced to get by on their own.

The changes will not be trivial. Greece, an honorary part of the West during the Cold War, is beginning to look and act more like a Balkan country than a Western European one. Germany and Japan must now decide whether they wish to belong to the Western world or not. During the Cold War, they had little choice--the alliance with the United States was both welcome and necessary. Now they must choose for themselves.

All this suggests a new interpretation of America’s victory in the Cold War. Conventional wisdom originally assumed that the United States won the Cold War the way we won World War II: The end of the conflict left the America unchallenged in the world. What was true of the United States was true of our principles: Free markets and free political institutions were about to sweep the globe.

We wish. The United States does not bestride the world like an invincible colossus. Soviet Union or no Soviet Union, the United States cannot impose its will on Somalia or even on Haiti. Our Cold War allies can, when they wish, thumb their noses at us with impunity. Over Bosnia and on trade issues, the Western allies demonstrated an independence that would have been unthinkable at the height of the Cold War.

Americans will have a clearer idea of the international situation if they compare our Cold War victory to Britain’s victory in World War I. Britain was a superpower going into the war and it remained a superpower coming out of it; and Germany, Britain’s great rival, was decisively defeated. For a few years after the war, the British behaved like an unchallenged superpower. They sent troops to trouble spots around the world; they bombed Iraq into submission.

But the British soon found that they were overextended. They were helpless to establish democracy in Russia or to prevent ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. In the end, they gave up the effort to establish world order, retreated to relative isolationism and ignored the dangers posed by the rise of fascism in Europe.

These mistakes would be easy for the United States to repeat. Overconfidence has already led us to commit ourselves too often and too far overseas; we may be on the verge of an equally excessive retreat into misguided isolation.

In the rapidly changing world, the United States needs a realistic sense both of its powers and its limits in foreign policy. The “Free World” is changing as fast as the Communist World as the ‘90s roll on; our ex-enemies aren’t changing as much as we hoped and our old friends are changing in ways we can’t always predict and often don’t like. The world is a far more complicated place now than during the Cold War--and it gets more complex every day. The Clinton Administration will need all the skill and luck it can get to find its way through the pitfalls and land mines so thickly scattered across the post-Cold War international landscape.