A POPULAR song a few years ago envisaged<br >"there s a new world comin. " Is there? As 1992 is<br >ushered in， the Americas are celebrating the five bun-<br >dredth anniversary of the discovery of our "new world."<br > This is also the year the Old World of Western Europe<br >achieved the biblically predicted consummation of its<br >apolitical as well as economic reunion. The Treaty of<br >Rome in thirty-five years has evolved via the European<br >Common Market into a literal revived Roman Empire.<br >But in stark contrast what for seventy-four years has been<br >the USSR is no more. Sitting here in Russia as I am during<br >the first week of 1，992， U.S. secretary of state James Baker<br >on "Pace the Nation" has warned the world solemnly that<br >what we had known as the USSR could well be on the<br >verge of a civil war along the lines of what is happening<br > in Yugoslavia， the difference being that the contesting<br > republics could well resort to using some of their stock-<br > pile of twenty-seven thousand nuclear weapons. Mikhail<br > Gorbachev agrees， lamenting that such a struggle would<br > make the Yugoslavian bloodbath like a joke in compari-<br > son.<br > So is there a new world comin ? Yes， thank God， it is<br >