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In "Animal Farm," George Orwell's classic allegory of Soviet communism, the animals who took over Farmer Jones' farm adopted this slogan to distinguish friends from enemies. As part of the novel's mockery of Stalinism, the slogan translates fairly easily as "Communists good; capitalists bad."
But the oversimplification works equally well in reverse to describe the U.S. system during the Cold War for identifying adversaries and allies: "Communists (and anyone who likes them, takes their aid or votes with them at the United Nations) bad; everyone else good."
The Cold War was many things, including this: A simple model for understanding the world and defining one's role in it. The central plot of the story of the world during those four decades was, in the haunting phrase from President John F. Kennedy's inaugural, "the long twilight struggle" between communism and -- in the U.S. version -- democracy.
America's role was to be the captain of Team Freedom. Its job was -- again quoting JFK's ringing 1961 speech -- "to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." America's interests were global because the Communists were bent on world domination.
With the end of the Cold War, that model is gone. To the degree that it was a simplistic, militaristic half-truth, we shouldn't mourn its passing. But it hasn't been replaced by a better model. It has been replaced by nothing.
Without the global struggle against communism as a guiding principle, what should be the top priority in the development of U.S. relations with China -- to develop it as a market for Western goods, to restrain China's ambitions to become a military superpower, to encourage it down the path to democracy? In the post-Cold War world, when should the United States intervene abroad militarily? What is the central purpose of NATO in the post-Cold War world? Where should the United States put its foreign aid dollars?
Perhaps, as one expert on international affairs suggests, the U.S. position in the world is so strong that it wants nothing more than to keep things the way they are. The problem with that, according to Ronald Steel of University of Southern California, is that U.S. tradition makes it uncomfortable with the role of a status quo superpower.
Or perhaps, as another scholar argues, the world is in transition from the bipolar world of the Cold War to a multipolar 21st century in which no one or two superpowers will dominate. Samuel Huntington of Harvard argues that the more the United States tries to run the world, the more it will drive away its friends and unite its potential rivals.
Ten years into the post-Cold War era, geopolitics lacks a central organizing principle, which suggests dangers and challenges ahead.
Historic benefits
Some of the danger is represented, paradoxically, by Russia.
Of course it's true that Russia has reduced its nuclear arsenal by half since 1991, no longer subscribes to an ideology associated with world domination, no longer controls the foreign policies of its neighbors, no longer reflexively uses its position on the U.N. Security Council to veto any resolution favored by the United States.
These rank among the huge, historic benefits the United States gained by its Cold War victory.
But even after decommissioning half of its arsenal, Russia has 4,500 nuclear warheads. Russia's desperate economic condition raises the possibility that nations seeking to enter the nuclear club could buy bombs, plutonium or the expertise necessary to turn plutonium into bombs.
U.S. officials have worked with Russia to prevent such occurrences and have worked on further arms-control treaties. But such cooperation depends on good relations between the former superpower rivals, and U.S.-Russian relations have deteriorated throughout the post-Cold War decade.
The START II treaty, under which Russia would reduce its arsenal to 3,500 warheads, has languished in the Russian Parliament since 1993. Partly because of declining U.S.-Russia relations, parliamentary elections since then have generally profited anti-American and anti-arms-control parties, whether of the Communist or nationalist variety. A new lower house of Parliament will be elected in December, but there is little reason to expect that a new majority will favor START II or warmer relations with the West.
No matter how much it misses its superpower status and how much it resents the United States, how could Russia, in its diminished political, economic and military condition, make geopolitical trouble?
Russia remains the world's second biggest nuclear power, by a huge margin, which by itself means its goals and grudges cannot be blithely ignored. And it retains a permanent seat on the Security Council, with the power to veto any resolution.
Russia remains a likely place for smaller nations to turn for aid and sympathy if they don't like their assigned role in the U.S.-dominated world order. This has already happened with Iraq -- Russia has become the leading voice on the Security Council for the lifting of sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime -- and with Yugoslavia, which has recently explored the possibility of joining with Russia and Belarus in a pan-Slavic federation.
Some U.S. foreign policy critics, the most prominent of whom is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, have argued throughout the '90s that Russia remains the greatest threat to the United States, that further nuclear arms reduction should be top priority and that President Clinton's foreign policy has blundered by pursuing actions that unnecessarily alienated Russia, especially the expansion of NATO.
No clear purpose
The question of NATO's role illustrates the new ambiguity of geopolitics.
During the Cold War, NATO's purpose was clear: to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe, or defend against it by uniting the power of the United States and Canada with their European allies. It worked. NATO never had to fire a shot during the Cold War.
But what is NATO's purpose now? Judging by NATO's Kosovo mission, it seems to have shifted, without saying so, from its defensive role. After all, Serbia hadn't attacked a NATO member. Perhaps NATO's new, unacknowledged job is to punish human rights violations by non-NATO members in Europe.
And what about NATO expansion? The end of the Cold War created a long list of nations that might like to become NATO members. Almost every post-Communist country, including Russia, joined the Partnership for Peace, which NATO organized as the beginning of the process to sort out candidates for full NATO membership.
In 1999, NATO admitted three new members -- Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Nine others are actively working to be considered. But if NATO isn't sure of its role, how is it to decide whom to admit?
By its first round of expansion, NATO signaled that the key to admission was not necessarily what a new member could add to the military posture of the alliance -- the Czech Republic is too small to add much; Hungary created a strategic problem because it is not geographically connected to the rest of the members. NATO appeared to be rewarding those post-Communist nations that had made the strongest conversion to democratic forms of governance, free-market economies and pro-Western foreign policies. Perhaps NATO's purpose is to provide an incentive to the post-Communist world to embrace Western norms.
The three countries admitted this year appreciated the symbolic recognition that they had joined the Western world, but on a more concrete level, they wanted to be in NATO in case Russia gets back on its feet and tries to reassemble its empire.
Look at the nine countries whose applications will be considered next by NATO: Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Albania, Slovenia, Macedonia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Most, if not all of them, also seek NATO membership as a hedge against Russian revanchism. Perhaps NATO's post-Cold War identity isn't so different from the old one -- a defensive alliance against Russia.
Part of Russia's anti-Western backlash is based on the assumption that NATO's goal is to surround Russia, possibly with aggressive intent. Every eastward expansion of NATO will inflame these fears. Of the nine membership candidates, Estonia ranks near the top of the list for its transition to democracy and capitalism. But a NATO decision to admit it or any other former Soviet Republic would be explosive.
How will the next U.S. president balance those competing impulses in the absence of a central geopolitical organizing principle?
A force for progress
The United States is having a hard time acknowledging its new role because the reality is inconsistent with Americans' notion of their country as a great world force for progress, according to Steel, author of "The Temptations of a Superpower: American Foreign Policy After the Cold War."
"Because of the demise of all its opponents and by dint of its overwhelming strength, the United States finds itself looking at a world that could hardly be better for its interests," Steel said in an interview. "That gives it a vested interest in maintaining a very high degree of stability in the world. It's a status quo superpower, kind of like Britain was in the 19th century. It wants to prevent the rise of rival powers and it wants to prevent regional quarrels from spreading or becoming messy. Its goal has changed from containment of communism to containment of instability."
The trouble, Steel said, is that Americans are fond of the myth that they are a dynamic, progressive force in the world that associates itself with people everywhere seeking freedom. "Then there's the reality that encouraging those kinds of results can lead to all kinds of messy instability," which is not in the interests of a status quo superpower, he said.
But Harvard's Huntington suggests that the United States cannot preserve the status quo and isn't as dominant as it thinks.
In "The Lonely Superpower," published in March in the journal Foreign Affairs, Huntington argued that the Cold War represented a classic case of a bipolar configuration in geopolitics, with two superpowers trying to move the world toward a unipolar system under its own leadership. The United States won that competition and, in the period immediately after the Soviet collapse, enjoyed what Huntington called a "unipolar moment." The Persian Gulf War represented that moment.
But "that moment has passed," Huntington wrote. The world is now organized according to what he called a "uni-multipolar system," in which the United States can block action on major international issues but can't settle the issues without the help of other powers.
The more the United States acts like it runs the world, the more other major players try to level the power equation, he wrote. "While the United States regularly denounces various countries as 'rogue states,' in the eyes of many countries it is becoming the rogue superpower . . . promoting its own interests with little reference to those of others."
The end of the Soviet threat even removes the incentive that many of the United States' Cold War allies had for valuing its friendship. "In a bipolar world, many countries welcomed the United States as their protector against the other superpower," Huntington wrote. "In a uni-multipolar world, in contrast, the world's only superpower is automatically a threat to other major powers."