More than 40 years ago, Secretary of State Dean Acheson delivered a characteristically blunt message to London's foreign-policy elites. Britain, he explained, had "lost an empire but not yet found a role." In "Temptations of a Superpower" (Harvard, 144 pages, $18.95), Ronald Steel has written an intelligent book that he hopes will bring Acheson's message to Washington today.

The thesis of this extended essay is that, with the end of the Cold War, the world is totally changed but Washington's foreign-policy apparatchiks persist in old thinking. He advocates a minimalist U.S. policy that would eschew elaborate efforts to shape the balance of power abroad, abandon the export of democracy and cut the military establishment a good deal more than has been done already. NATO, he believes, is irrelevant and must be disbanded.

Fair enough. One might disagree with some of Mr. Steel's bracing conclusions, but it is hard to argue with the point that the world post-1990 is new and different and that applying old solutions to new problems is misguided.

What are we then to make of Mr. Steel's advice to policy makers 26 years ago in "Pax Americana" (1969), in which he urges a retreat from globalism? Or his pronouncement in "Imperialism and Other Heroes" (1971) that "for purposes of deterrence NATO is irrelevant"? In fact, Mr. Steel concluded that NATO was obsolete 30 years ago in his first book, "The End of Alliance." His observations from that book would come as no surprise to a reader of his new one. Even the title of the new book is an echo of lines from the first one: "Burdened by the yoke of power, America has been tempted by its greatness." The world has indeed changed, but Ronald Steel has not.

This is not an entirely critical statement. Never mind what Emerson said about hobgoblins and little minds, consistency is an admirable intellectual trait, and Mr. Steel's writings show a disciplined coherence over 30 years. But this very consistency makes it difficult to believe that his current set of recommendations are solutions specifically designed for today's new world and America's place in it. In fact, they are the expression of a distinct sensibility that holds that no matter what the world looks like, a minimalist foreign policy is best for both America and the world.

These convictions are heartfelt and expressed with moral clarity. They are, however, based on a profound suspicion of power. Mr. Steel is able to speak comfortably of the exercise of power in the abstract, or when it involves other countries. But when it comes to America he worries about the effects of using this power on the world at large, and on America itself.

In fact, America has wielded its power abroad in extraordinarily benign ways. While it was occasionally tempted into such foolish and costly adventures as the Vietnam War, for the most part it used its strength to rebuild Western Europe and Japan, guaranteed their security against the Soviet threat, helped create a stable and open world economy, and sponsored hundreds of programs that tried to aid poor countries. Had the U.S. not wielded so much power for the past 40 years, the world would look very different today. If the U.S. does not to play an important international role over the next 40, the world will look distinctly uglier.

But Mr. Steel's concern goes beyond the effects of American power abroad. The Cold War, in his view, corroded the fabric of America's domestic life through neglect and evasion. The most important foreign policy initiatives that the government can take in the post-Cold War world, he writes, are gun control and public investment.

Now, gun control and public investment may or may not solve America's problems, but they are manifestly not foreign-policy initiatives. To label every proposal one likes "foreign policy" -- presumably to gain the cachet that phrase brings -- is to encourage analytic incoherence. More important, the widespread notion that domestic problems were ignored during the Cold War is simply untrue.

The greatest domestic expansion of the state in American history took place during the Cold War. As Mr. Steel points out himself, war centralizes power and the Cold War was no exception. Because of the sense of national crisis that began with World War II and extended through the Cold War, Washington increasingly gained the authority to act in the national interest both abroad and at home. Powers previously held by local governments and civil society were taken over by the federal government. The Great Society, the alphabet soup of federal regulatory agencies, the explosion of legal rights, even federal gun control -- all these are as much legacies of the Cold War as are NATO and the CIA.

The end of the Cold War has begun a rethinking of Washington's role, both abroad and at home. Before it is over, Mr. Steel may decide that he liked the Cold War after all.

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