For the second year in a row, summer has served up stark evidence that the new world order so trumpeted by President Bush remains an unsettled and uncertain concept.
It all seemed so black and white after the fall of the Berlin Wall brought down the reign of communism and Soviet domination in Eastern Europe.The "new thinking" of Mikhail Gorbachev, which saw the Soviets acquiesce in the diminution of their own influence, altered the geopolitical equation. Bush declared the Cold War over and the superpowers "at the threshold of a brand new era."
But as demonstrated by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the bold attempt one year later by Kremlin hard-liners to resist the winds of change in the Soviet Union, the new order has been anything but orderly.
"What is it about August?" Bush whimsically asked after the peace of his summer vacation was shattered by the roll of tanks into Red Square.
This was the August that official Washington tried to make up for vacation time lost a year ago to events in the Persian Gulf. After a summit in Moscow that ended with talk of the United States and Soviet Union entering "a new chapter" in history, Bush and his advisers dispersed to their respective retreats, confident world events were going their way.
As Bush winds up his month of boating, fishing, golf, tennis and crisis diplomacy, he again stands to gain politically from unimagined developments abroad while at the same time being presented with new foreign policy challenges.
In the course of a single week, the tumult in Moscow took U.S.-Soviet relations on a roller-coaster ride from the post-summit of only 19 days before to suspicion, hostility and, with the defeat of the coup against Gorbachev, to the point of an incredible transformation.
In Moscow, Bush announced that the normalization of economic relations between the United States and Soviet Union was "nearly complete." A month later, U.S. officials are grappling with how to redesign that process to account for the mounting loss of control by the Soviet central government.
After committing to "a new partnership and a sturdy peace" in Moscow, Bush is being forced to rewrite the "new beginning" that summit was to have represented. The result, administration officials admit, may well be a new world order far different than the one he envisaged a mere month ago.