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The future of the Soviet Union could bring disintegration or right-wing reaction, or both -- prospects all the scarier because the Soviets still possess vast nuclear stockpiles. Moreover, a successful transition to a market economy will take a miracle. But one can hope the U.S.S.R., or what remains of it, will also pursue economic development rather than expansion and aggression.
While Clausewitz called war a continuation of politics by other means, $ economics may become a continuation of war by other means. There may be virulent trade wars among the economic Big Three -- Europe, Japan and America (whose sphere should eventually include Canada and Mexico in an American Economic Community).
The global marketplace, however, has become so interconnected that trade wars don't make much more sense than real wars. Issues that once were strictly internal -- Japan's retail distribution system, European price supports for farmers, the U.S. budget deficit -- have become legitimate subjects of international negotiation. This suggests that the emerging world economy will dictate a new and more limited concept of sovereignty.
Even so, real or imagined unfairness in trade will persist, as will visceral fears of one's country being overtaken and bought up by foreigners. Fighting protectionism, the creed of economic know-nothings, in the U.S. and elsewhere, may be the greatest challenge to American leadership, and also its greatest opportunity. A special advantage is that the U.S., both an Atlantic and a Pacific power, has closer ties to Europe and Japan than they have to each other.
Beyond these three economic force fields, national, tribal and religious conflicts threaten to turn many parts of the world into larger Lebanons -- conflicts like the ones pitting Arabs against Israelis, Islamic factions against one another, Islamic fundamentalism against the West, Indians against Pakistanis, among others.
The current Middle East crisis, with Iraq ranged against moderate Arab states and the West, is sometimes described as an economic conflict: poor Arabs vs. rich, the "Arab world" (a fictitious concept) vs. the oil-greedy industrialized world. But that is at best a partial truth. Such economic issues are really elements of those other, overarching battles of nationalism and tribalism, conflicting faiths and competing power.
Why should the U.S. care? In the instance of Iraq, because of oil and Israel. But there are more general reasons. Some years ago, a French novel imagined desperate hordes of the Third World poor advancing on the West. One need not take that prophecy literally to worry about terrorism and other forms of contagion from regional conflicts and from "the wretched of the earth." We should be able to reduce our military commitments in the Third World, but we cannot escape them altogether. It is in our interest to help construct some degree of world order, especially as several Third World countries have nuclear weapons capability. That is also why the U.S. must continue pushing for nonproliferation. And that also strengthens the case for continued development of nuclear defense.