In the space of a few months in 1989, the Soviet imperium in Eastern Europe began to disintegrate like a soda cracker in salt water, and even within the U.S.S.R. itself, long dormant national, ethnic, and religious passions began to sputter and whine. The Beriin Wall was turned into a collection of pet rocks, and Americans suddenly began hearing of peoples unknown to their ears since the days when the pope had divisions: Moldavians and Wallachians, Armenians and Azeris, Croats and Slovaks, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, Turks and Tadzhiks, Bulgarians and Byelorussians. One almost expected the Gepids and the Ostrogoths to set up their pennants and apply for membership in the United Nations.

Yet even as Mikhail Gorbachev, to the thunderous cheers of the West, restructured the Soviet Communist Party last winter, Soviet military advisers were helping Angola’s Marxists polish off Jonas Savimbi’s anticommunist guerrillas. Moreover, two days after what must have been the 357th emendation of the Soviet constitution since 1917, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander for rapid deployment forces in the Middle East, testified to Congress that the Soviets are still pulverizing Afghanistan and pulling the wires of their puppet regime in Kabul, with more military aid than they forked over when they occupied the place. Communism may have been chucked out of the economic and intellectual ring, but it still throws a good punch, and the vision entertained by some people in the West of a bucolic planet full of peace and democracy may be just a bit premature.

Nevertheless, whatever happens to Mr. Gorbachev or the Soviet regime, it’s probably true that the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States has forever ceased to be the defining concept of American foreign policy. The Soviets may overrun Angola and keep Afghanistan, and their apparatus of spies, propagandists, and hired malcontents may continue to conspire, demonstrate, and subvert all they want. But the truth is that there is very little, short of nuclear attack, that the decrepit Soviet Empire can do to the United States directly. The day-today business of indigenous bureaucrats in Washington and the technocratic therapies they plot to impose on American civil society are far more serious threats to us than MIG-23’s in the Khyber Pass or Moscow’s pet herds of clergymen armed with banners and chicken blood.

The end of the Cold War, or at least the withdrawal of the United States from the contest, affords an opportunity for Americans to redefine, for the first time since the days of the Truman administration, what we want to be and do in the world beyond the oceans that surround us. The redefinition will involve not only deciding who gets the booty of the Peace Dividend or which congressional districts will lose military bases, but also an identification of what the United States as a nation and a culture is going to be in the opening years of the next century. Foreign policy is almost always a reflection of what kind of order prevails at home.

So it was when the Gold War began, and the long quarrel that bubbled between anticommunist conservatives, who sought a strategy for victory, and liberal globalists, who wanted to cast America as the world’s social worker, mirrored a more basic division over what kind of society the United States would be in the late 20th century. To Harry Truman, “the seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife,” and “our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid, which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.” Communism, to the uplifted mind, was largely a symptom of underlying social illnesses—poverty, disease, political repression—that only global programs of bureaucratically administered foreign aid and development could cure, just as only analogous domestic programs could provide the social and economic panaceas that Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and their fellow liberals prescribed.

The concept of foreign policy as an extension of liberal social therapeutics opened vast opportunities for social engineering all over the world and offered huge rewards for those leaders and elites, foreign and domestic, clever enough to seize them. Most of the “corrupt dictators” installed or buoyed up by U.S. money and power began their careers as progressive reformers, and even François Duvalier kept on his desk the portraits of three icons of liberal hagiography—John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pope John XXIII—along with two loaded revolvers. Any or all of these items may have helped Papa Doc die in his bed with his savage autocracy intact, one of the few rulers in the history of Haiti to do so; but the “progress” his brother despots or their American-trained elites imposed on their tribal and feudal societies only helped to provoke the rebellions that eventually caused their governments to turn belly up in the tropical sun. Most of these gentlemen, whom their American admirers would not have cared to meet in a dark alley in Manhattan, possessed as much character and common sense as a Hollywood sex kitten, and neither their collapse nor the whittling away of American power that resulted from their fall should have been surprising.

Of course, U.S. foreign policy in the Gold War, once it had fallen under the control of liberal elites, no more protected American national interests than domestic liberalism protected citizens from professional cutpurses. Not enforcement of elementary civic relationships and national security but the entrenchment of bureaucratic and institutional interests was the real purpose of both. Hence, the United States found itself saddled with a military that was unable or was not permitted to win wars, intelligence agencies increasingly impotent to acquire reliable information or competently execute covert policies, and a diplomatic service that could plausibly be accused of harboring treason.

Such public bureaucracies were matched and indeed closely linked with private interests that nursed at the federal bottle: businesses that grew fat off foreign aid; government contractors who designed and sold the high-tech equivalents of underwater real estate in Florida; universities that swelled their “plants” with federal research grants and contracts; and a horde of consultants in every known field of study who thought the unthinkable and earned what should have been the unearnable. Meanwhile, the Soviets stole atomic, military, and technological secrets, infiltrated the government, and supported surrogates who overthrew U.S. allies in Cuba, Central America, Asia, and Africa. Fortunately, Mr. Gorbachev’s predecessors never fully gauged what mush they were up against, and their own oligarchy of crooks and commissars entered its terminal stage before they found out.

Just as East Europeans seem to be throwing out their ruling bums, so the end of the Cold War ought to offer a chance for Americans to rid themselves of the parasitical mafias that have mangled the pursuit of our national interests for the last forty years. To do so would not necessarily lead to the much-dreaded “isolationism” that is more often an epithet than a real option, but it would involve a definition of specific and concrete goals and interests in place of globalist slogans and the chicanery they encourage. Dealing with the Third World debt, foreign (especially Asian) economic competition, massive illegal immigration, and the restoration of the Monroe Doctrine are probably the major problems that a serious nationalist foreign policy ought to address.

Unfortunately, there seems little prospect of doing so, since the same elites that mismanaged the Cold War remain firmly in place and seem to have learned nothing from their lackluster performance over the past two generations. Managing the global environment, creating democracy everywhere, and making sure the sclerotic Soviet economy gets enough economic and technological fixes to save Mr. Gorbachev from early retirement in Siberia appear to be the main appetizers on the globalist diplomatic plate just now.

Such goals simply regurgitate what James Burnham more than twenty years ago called the “set of uprooted abstractions out of which globalism compounds its heady brew.”

What distinguishes the globalist abstractions from genuine internationalist ideas is precisely their divorce from technical, social and historical realities. There are three billion plus human beings now living on the face of the earth, but there is no Humanity: that is to say, actual human beings, though they may share a metaphysical and theological identity, do not in point of fact have common psychological, social and historical traits that link them into an operative social grouping that we may name “Humanity.” In real life men are joined on a much less than universal scale into a variety of groupings—family, community, church, business, club, party, etc.—which on the political scale reach the maximum significant limit in the nation.

If Americans don’t want to find themselves embarked on another forty years in the global wilderness, they will have to take matters out of the hands of those, on the left and the right, who still peddle a foreign policy based on “Human Rights,” “Global Democracy,” “Transnational Issues,” and what Burnham called the “other capitalized familiars put into general circulation by the ideological hucksters of our time.” Otherwise, those abstractions eventually will show up on the national doorstep to tell us not only how we ought to run our neighbors’ houses, but also how to manage our own.