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WASHINGTON - Dr. Robert Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, recently returned from a conference in Novgorod, Russia, sponsored by the Berlin branch of the Aspen Institute, but paid for by NATO.
What he learned there appalled him.
"The purpose [of the conference] was to send a message to the Russians," Mr. Hayden said. "It was more polite than Khruschev's 'We will bury you,' but it was essentially the same.
"The NATO guys said, in effect, there are no rules [of international law]. We will do whatever we want to do, and you can't stop us," Mr. Hayden said.
This approach is unlikely to win friends or influence people even among the dwindling band of pro-western moderates in Russia and in other nonwestern countries, Mr. Hayden opined.
"The idea that we can mess up other people's countries because nobody can hurt our planes will cause them to retaliate in other ways," he predicted.
The most ominous outgrowth of the Kosovo war has been discussions among the Russians, Chinese, and Indians about forming an anti-American alliance.
There are indications chilliness between Russia and China during the Cold War has been supplanted by a shared hostility to the United States.
On Aug. 17 China announced Russia and China would work together to build a nuclear power plant for China. Russian sales of military equipment to China and India now total about $2 billion a year, said the director of Russia's state-owned arms company.
In both Russia and China, hostility to the United States is driven chiefly by domestic political considerations. Among ordinary Russians and rank-and-file Chinese, "resentment of American power is huge, and many hold the United States responsible for their economic problems," Stratfor, a private intelligence service, said.
But the view in both Moscow and Beijing, aggravated by the Kosovo war, of the United States as a bully and an aggressor has exacerbated anti-American feeling, and is driving the remarkable detente opening between China and India. Russia and India have been friendly for decades, but relations between China and India have been frigid, chiefly because of past Chinese support for India's arch-enemy, Pakistan.
The incipient anti-American entente may soon be joined by Indonesia, if that nation's military concludes that western intervention in East Timor could trigger the breakup of their country. A Chinese-Indonesian alliance likely would dominate the South China Sea.
NATO's actions in Kosovo, which were contrary to both the United Nations and NATO charters, have turned public opinion outside of western Europe and North America strongly against the United States, Mr. Hayden thinks.
"One thing that the Kosovo war ensured is that countries like India and Pakistan that have developed nuclear weapons will build all they can, and the systems to deliver them," Mr. Hayden said. "They need to have a counterweight, some kind of protection against what they perceive as American aggression."
Mr. Hayden makes an important point. Wars don't start because nations say: "Hey, we've got all these neat weapons. Let's go kill somebody." Nations build weapons because they have enemies, or think they do.
China and India are the world's most populous nations. Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous and the largest Muslim nation. Russia has more nuclear weapons than we do. Thanks to lax security and export policies, China now has the know-how to build nuclear weapons as capable as ours. India has nuclear weapons, and can improve them rapidly if China shares with India the secrets it stole from us.
The feckless foreign policies of the Clinton administration are on the verge of creating an anti-American alliance potentially more dangerous than the threat communism presented at the height of the Cold War. But the 10,000 journalists in Washington, obsessed with Really Important News like Jesse Ventura's Playboy interview, are paying little attention.