Tokyo's No Star Line-Up

By JAMES WALSH

If misery loves company, leaders attending the annual Group of Seven summit $ in Japan this week ought to feel right at home, for a sadder collection of bruises and black eyes would be hard to find. From John Major of Britain to Kiichi Miyazawa of Japan, the heads of the world's richest and most powerful democracies have been chewed up in a grinder of popular discontent.

The G-7 summit has an important script -- coordinating economic policies, stabilizing Russia and rescuing free trade -- but the actors seem far from up to their roles. Says foreign policy analyst Michael Mandelbaum, a friend of President Clinton's who turned down a high U.S. State Department post in January: "What we have in Tokyo is a meeting of the world's strongest countries but the world's weakest leaders." It is, says Michael Aho, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, "the summit of the politically unpopular."

For Clinton the Tokyo conference was supposed to be a chance to shine in foreign affairs and reassert American leadership over the Group of Seven. By last week, however, the outlook had changed to a point where White House aides were scrambling to scale back expectations, pointing to Japan's political tumult as a hindrance to agreements. The sorry truth is that Miyazawa is scarcely alone in his fall from grace. Along with his fellow summiteers, Clinton is plagued by waning faith in his abilities. His first four months in office have made America's allies less respectful of the traditional U.S. leadership role and Clinton's stewardship. Every land and age suspects that the present generation fails to live up to achievements of the past, so it was probably inevitable that people today would be wondering what happened to the Churchills and Roosevelts and De Gaulles, the Adenauers and Nehrus of yesteryear. Yet the present discontent goes beyond simple nostalgia. A terrible form of gridlock has seized the most prominent nations, from old democracies like the U.S. to the newest, most notably Russia.

Why the dearth of grand leaders on the world stage? Largely it is because of the absence of grand challenges, or at least of the clear good-vs.-evil challenges that can rally a people and call forth bold leadership. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were 20th century archetypes of the crisis leader. Mortal peril and powerful enemies can force leadership on ordinary men -- Harry Truman, for example. So can wrenching historic changes, like the dramatic endgame of the cold war, which cast players such as Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev and Walesa in historic roles.

With the end of the cold war, the world's challenges are no less important or difficult, but they are murkier and more intractable. For a brief, triumphal moment, Western democratic capitalism seemed to have defeated all comers. Such elation was quickly replaced by a realization that the world's hardships and hatreds were hardly diminished by the end of the cold war. Standing up to the Soviets, while a daunting task and perhaps one oversimplified at the time, was in some ways less tricky than sorting out the collapse of Yugoslavia or dealing with a persistently sluggish global economy. Communism's demise left grand alliances of countries bereft of ideologies, foes and, ultimately, a vision of where to go next.

Today's list of endemic woes, topped by economic stagnation and ethnic warfare, certainly add up to a crisis. But it is a creeping, chronic crisis, not one that galvanizes people or calls for leaders to wield a sword of confrontation. Now, when the challenge is mainly to cooperate, to find national and multilateral solutions to long-term ills, today's leaders are coming up short.

Six months ago, many Europeans and Japanese, beset by economic reverses and political paralysis, gazed at the young new American President with frank envy. Says Max Kampelman, a former U.S. diplomat and Ronald Reagan's chief arms-control negotiator: "I think the world was ready for a Bill Clinton leadership, but Bill Clinton wasn't ready. Our President has a capacity to lead, but he started out falling flat on his face." Eugene Rostow, an Under Secretary of State in Lyndon Johnson's presidency, had similar high hopes for fellow Democrat Clinton; he now finds himself "puzzled, startled, disappointed."

The roll call of walking wounded extends further. Boris Yeltsin in Russia and Poland's Lech Walesa were heroes in opposition, but in power have revealed feet of clay. Deng Xiaoping in China is on his last legs, with no sign so far that anyone of comparable vision will succeed him. Felipe Gonzalez, the boy wonder of Spain a decade ago, barely squeaked by in national elections last month and is still struggling to form a minority government. In New Delhi a press commentary calls P.V. Narasimha Rao "the Prime Muddler of India."

As the Tokyo summit neared, Clinton seemed to be attempting to pass the blame for some of America's woes to his G-7 partners. "It's very hard for the U.S. to grow without help from other nations," he said. The Japanese "ought to stimulate their economy and open their markets." Germany, he said, "should continue to lower interest rates," while all the major powers together have to get fully behind the stalled free-trade talks and reach a successful conclusion this year. The homily may have sounded like a whine, but it illustrated the extent to which American power really has diminished in tackling its own troubles.

As Clinton said, quoting the Bible in his acceptance of the Democratic nomination a year ago, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Democracy as such is not in doubt today: most people would pass up the chance to have another "strong" leader like Hitler or Stalin. But the debate over where democracy can take societies, as distinct from whether it is a good thing, was frozen for many years by the cold war struggle. In its wake, governments are hard pressed to supply inspiration.

In Britain, John Major's public repute is the lowest for any Prime Minister since the country began polling. Miyazawa, following his government's June 18 collapse, is not only a lame duck but probably a dead one. Francois Mitterrand? His Socialists were routed in parliamentary elections four months ago, reducing the shrewd but tired 76-year-old President to a power-sharing role. Helmut Kohl? Three years after his luminous hour of forging German unification, the Chancellor has the lowest popularity among leading German politicians, according to a recent ZDF television poll. About Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, Italy's new stopgap Prime Minister, the best that can be said is that he is not a career politician. That happens to be saying a lot: the biggest names in Italian politics, if not the corruption-riddled political structure as a whole, have been heading toward ignominy.

In its latest issue, American Enterprise reports that huge majorities in every G-7 country but one -- Japan, surprisingly -- express unhappiness with the direction their nations are taking: 71% in the U.S., 70% in Canada, 63% in Britain, 61% in France. The surveys bear out a growing sense that electorates see their leaders not as temporarily lost pathfinders so much as empty suits. Deriding the gallery of statesmen manque he saw before him, columnist Norman Stone of the Times of London quoted Nietzsche: "I sowed dragons and I reaped fleas."

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, the nearest thing to a strong leader Japan has had in nearly two decades, argues, "With the cold war gone and Russia no longer the enemy, strong leadership is going from centripetal to centrifugal. It is being dispersed," resulting in something "more like the Japanese consensus-oriented type rather than the crisis type."

One of the unmanaged agenda items is the on-again, off-again effort to build what George Bush termed, apparently without thinking the idea through, a new world order. Why is it so difficult? A precedent occurred not that long ago. One reason men like Roosevelt are such towering figures in hindsight is that they won a peace as well as a war. They were like demiurges, already prepared to re-create the world almost de novo, with initiatives for such global institutions as the United Nations, the Bretton Woods international financial regime and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Conferences and charters proliferated. In the depths of the war, thinkers were planning for the aftermath -- even if their ideas ran to such silly extremes as turning mighty Germany into a land of milkmaids and gingerbread cottages.

The cold war's end, in contrast, was so abrupt as to leave the victorious nations flat-footed. No one had really planned for it, believed it could happen. Some of the results are well known today: the enormous costs of German unity, which have helped trigger a Europe-wide recession; waves of economic migrants and refugees from Central and Eastern Europe; nations that were formerly enemies now appearing on the doorstep like orphans, hat in hand and pleading to be fed; a general dwindling of motive power behind such overarching aspirations as a more closely united Europe, not to mention the idea of a common international cause of any kind. Freer world trade is on the ropes, and the major powers, far from articulating a vision of how societies can act together, have been jockeying more intensely for national advantage.

Kurt Biedenkopf, one of Germany's most thought-provoking politicians, believes that the leadership failure around the world betokens a lack of intellectual assets in governance. "The stock of old answers is obsolete," he says. "But the leaders are still using the old answers." Erwin K. Scheuch, a professor of sociology at Cologne University, chuckles at one explanation of why governments of the recent past were not so afflicted. "During the cold war, our guys always looked so much better than theirs that ours benefited from the comparison." Things are different now.

. The gridlock in many cases arises from a failure of national leaders to work well enough together, as this week's G-7 gathering will most likely demonstrate. In Kampelman's view, the lack of unity and coordination is a principal reason that so many democracies feel crippled. "We have seen a globalization of science, technology and communications, and it has moved into economics," he says. "Everything is becoming interconnected, and yet in the world of politics we are still in the Middle Ages." He stresses that arrangements for a new world order "don't happen because they are ordained in the order of the stars. They require leadership. Our country doesn't seem to understand that."

Another flaw may be the way the power of the state in leading democracies has expanded in trying to be all things to all people. Kim Holmes, director of foreign and defense policy studies at Washington's Heritage Foundation, contends that West European nations especially have shouldered too many social burdens and created a logjam of conflicting public demands, which is why they are now frantically trying to trim costs. He emphasizes: "If the main thrust of governments is to take more and more responsibility for gratifying people's needs, you are always going to be setting up the government for disapproval."

By a new world order, Bush meant primarily issues of security: deterring Iraqi-style aggression and maintaining stability even if it meant defending an imperfect status quo. These are still questions of great concern, especially in light of Yugoslavia's savage collapse. Clinton has not done much toward asserting U.S. leadership in the field. He threatened Serb aggression with a limp fist and has failed to frame the terms of a debate on whether the U.N. Security Council is right to intervene wherever such brutality exists. Yet security is only one of the world's several bulking issues.

In facing down the threat of totalitarianism, democratic societies have grown used to the idea that the bare mechanism of choosing leaders is sufficient for democracy. In the 19th century, philosophers constantly argued and debated what the rights and ideals of democracy might be. John Stuart Mill, a passionate libertarian, was convinced that visions of freedom and happiness must be constantly discussed, altered and changed as societies change, lest they fall into "the deep slumber of a decided opinion." In our time, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin has pointed out, "Men do not live < only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them."

Abba Eban, a former Israeli Foreign Minister, says the G-7 partners could be a real force for action, "but they have not learned to think together. They bring together an extraordinary concentration of power, but their meetings don't seem to produce anything." Eban's prescription: "They should recognize that collectively they have immense power to change the human condition, but individually they have not. They should set up a permanent institution, almost like a new state. Existing bodies cannot do the job." That would require both the wisdom and the leadership qualities of modern-day philosopher-kings. Though there may be some of those waiting in the wings, none seem to be stalking the stage for now.

With reporting by David Aikman/Washington, Margot Hornblower/Paris, James O. Jackson/Bonn and William Mader/London, with other bureaus