WASHINGTON -- Completely unnoticed by most Americans, the Washington elite has become ensnared in a yet another false, narcissistic foreign policy debate. Yet when French President Jacques Chirac stood side-by-side with Chinese President Jiang Zemin recently and denounced U.S. nuclear and antiballistic missile treaty policies, it hinted at troubling questions raised by unintended U.S. imperiousness and strategic incoherence: Is the U.S. the steward of global order or a rogue superpower?

The Clinton administration clearly sees it as the former. In the aftermath of Congress' rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Clinton administration launched a partisan campaign against its invented straw man: the "new isolationists," who, inveighed National Security Counsel adviser Samuel Berger in a major policy speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, "believe in a survivalist foreign policy -- build a fortified fence around America and retreat behind it."

This school of thought, a "dominant minority" in Congress, according to Berger, purportedly opposes any international treaties; refuses to bear any burden for maintaining world order or to intervene to stop slaughter in peripheral foreign conflicts; believes great powers need great adversaries and seeks to turn China and Russia into new enemies.