IDENTITY CRISIS

U.S. Has No Clear Idea Where To Focus Global Efforts

Six months after the terrorist attacks on the United States, we're calling
ourselves the world's first and only hyperpower.

The nomenclature is less important than the reality, and the reality is
that as a nation we continue to grow stronger as time goes by, by just
about any measure you can come up with.

But naming what we are is not the same as defining what it means to be a
hyperpower, and we continue to struggle with identifying precisely what our
role in the world should be or needs to be.

It is not yet clear that we can walk and chew gum at the same time,
globally speaking, and there are those who would argue that we don't need
to; we can just sit here between the oceans and ignore everyone else.

Which, of course, is a ridiculous notion, as we were reminded last
September. No nation is an island, least of all one as rich as ours is and
as dependent as ours is on the resources of other parts of the world.

That we are struggling to find our place in the world is clear from the
record, discounting our war in Afghanistan.

We have no clear idea of what to do about the fractious situation in
Israel. Pep talks, finger-pointing and counseling haven't seemed to work
very well, and ignoring the fight between the Israelis and the Palestinians
is unseemly for the world's most powerful nation.

Nor do we know what to do about the Pakistan-India conflict.

We identify an axis of evil, reposition our nuclear weapons along the axis,
bringing Russia back into our sights, along with the rest, and expect
everyone to be ... well, what, exactly do we expect of them?

The other war, the war on drugs, threatens to become a quagmire in
Colombia, morphing into a battle against entrenched guerrillas rather than
a fight against drug lords.

Faced with these challenges and others, how should we lead and to what
purposes?

Outside of government, a lot of thought is going into answering that question.

From Kai Bird of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and
Martin Sherwin, professor of history at Tufts University, writing in The
Washington Post: "To our own peril in this interdependent world, we are
foolishly squandering our first and strongest line of defense: the
imponderable that the venerable World War II Secretary of War, Henry L.
Stinson, called our reputation for fair play. ..."

From Sebastian Mallaby, a British Journalist, quoted in the New York
Times: "A new imperial moment has arrived. ..."

From Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, writing in The Atlantic
Monthly: "We need to come to grips with an ironic possibility: that the
very preponderance of American power may now make us not more secure but
less secure."

So the conversation is taking place. It just doesn't seem to be taking
place in the place that counts, which is in Washington.

After Sept. 11, everything changed. Everything, that is, but our reaction
to the attacks, and our reaction has been to deal with the problem as we
have always tried to deal with such things, which is to say by exerting our
considerable brute force.

Today's world is quite a bit more complex than the world was during the
Cold War when friends and enemies were easily identified, when our place
was clear and that place was in opposition to whatever the communist world
stood for.

What kind of country do we want to be from now on in reference to other
nations?

Now is a good time to have that discussion.