MISSOURI COMMENTARY: PEACE ON EARTH: WHERE? AND HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?

We approach year's end. What's hot? What's going to get hotter?

We used to worry about the nuclear clock when it was "us versus them," the "good guys versus the bad guys," freedom loving people versus treacherous communists. We were up to our ears in nuclear warheads and missiles. Once in a while, the clock edged towards midnight and the potential incineration of the world. Wiser heads would always prevail and the minute hand would slip back.

Then came the fall of communism and a feeling of euphoria. Fear and trepidation vanished and we were on the threshold of a sublime world of peace and virtue. That is what we wanted to believe.

What do we have? Instead of one pervasive, global fear and a single geopolitical cynosure, we have a world of innumerable worries. We don't worry about our very survival, but we do agonize over unsettling disturbances. As we contemplate "peace on earth," here are some things that deeply trouble us.

-- The collapse of the Soviet Union. Three cheers for the fall of oppression and totalitarianism. No cheers for the fact that there was no underlying base for a successor democratic regime in Russia or any other of the erstwhile component parts of the Soviet empire.

Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, Georgia, and the other Soviet successor states have gone from total control form the top to pervasive chaos at the bottom. The current rebellion in Chechnya is but one of several trouble spots.

In Russia, the economic and social crisis is virtually unsolvable. Think of it: In 1994, 50 percent more people in Russia died than were born.

The only thriving sector of the economy is organized crime and black markets. Gangsters, mobsters, killers for hire, bodies in trunks, hit men, mob bosses, prostitutes, gang warfare, rackets, protection, tax fraud, bank fraud, illegal money transfer, money laundering -- all these words and phrases are dominant parts of Russian life.

Crime is so pervasive in Russia that it is impossible for any honest capitalist enterprise not to be tainted by it. Crime itself is the essence of its free market system. As one historian puts it, "Russia is up for sale and the people with the most money are the criminals."

There are international consequences to Russian crime. The leaders of the criminal syndicates operate with great sophistication and do so across borders with ramifications in Europe and the United States.

The political fallout from gangster rule in Russia is enormous. If a stumbling democracy cannot meaningfully cope with law and order, than might an authoritarian regime do better? Might Zhirinovsky's contempt for the democratic process be a better philosophical bet than Yeltsin's disappearing acts and ineptitude?

-- Weapons proliferation. The arms merchants of the world are having a feast. If you have the money, you can buy most anything -- someday, perhaps, including access to weapons of mass destruction.

-- Jimmy Carter has made a quickie peace foray into Bosnia. He mildly blessed the ethnic-cleansing Serbs as rather nice kind of folks and than helped paddle the 39th cease-fire between the Serbs and the Muslims. Presumably he will begin work on the 40th after the New Year.

-- North Korea. The nuclear anxiety may be dampened for now, but now we have the helicopter incident.

-- The collapse of the Third World. More and more poor nations are in a state of economic and political distress.

-- Islamic fundamentalism. Algeria, Egypt and Morocco could some day go the way of Iran. Standing alone, the latter country is a nightmare for American foreign policy planners. If it is joined by other nations, then it becomes a horror story.

-- Failure of the United Nations and NATO as peacemakers. Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda show the shortcomings of the United Nations as the world's multinational peacekeeper. NATO came up pitifully short in the Bosnian debacle. America doesn't want to be the world policeman.

U.N. peacekeepers are timid in the extreme, poorly led and weakly supported. In soft situations where there is little likelihood of extended gunfire, the U.N. functions adequately as a patrolman on the beat. In hard situations where gunfire is likely, the U.N. isn't up to the job over the long haul.

Peace on earth? Yes, there is some, but not as much as we thought there would be when we entered the post-Cold War world.

~Tom Eagleton is a former U.S. senator from Missouri and a columnist for the Pulitzer Publishing Co.