Forgotten stories in a year defined by just one day

George W. Bush was sworn in after winning the election - barely. Bill Clinton pardoned lots of people on his way out the door. A Navy spy plane ended up in China, and the US had a hard time getting it back. Timothy McVeigh was executed. The phrase "stem-cell research" figured in a culture war.

Do these seem like stories from another age? They aren't - and they are. All are from the past year. But all occurred before history drew the curtain of Sept. 11 across American life.

Rarely has a single day so altered the context of an entire year's events. To many in the US, anything that happened before terrorists struck seems somehow unimportant today. Everything after seems connected to it, part of the world's response.

That's not really true, of course. It's simply a phenomenon of comparison, plus media focus. Sept. 11 was epic, but that does not make the Democratic takeover of the Senate trivial. The war in Afghanistan has dominated news pages for months, but Enron's bankruptcy is no less important because it didn't appear above the page 1 fold.

The future is another country, and it is impossible for us to predict how it will rate 2001's events. Perspectives can change dramatically in only a few years. Consider that in early 1997, the Monitor ran several stories about the most important things that happened in the previous year. In the last story, in the section devoted to reader suggestions, near the bottom, below "the continued decline in world fisheries," came this: "the rise of the Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan."

Remember China? At the beginning of the year, some in Washington thought it a likely candidate for our new best enemy. Beijing seemed increasingly willing to challenge US influence in East Asia. After a US Navy surveillance plane collided with a Chinese fighter on April 1, and made a forced landing on Chinese soil, relations became particularly tense. In the end, Beijing forced the US to cut the plane up and ship it back in a Soviet-built airlifter.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the new cold war. In June, the US and China agreed on the last items blocking China's entry into the World Trade Organization. Then came Sept. 11 - and Chinese statements of support. Washington's new war turned out to be neither cold nor centered on the Far East.

"It's interesting how China has dropped out of the cross hairs," says Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Relations could still sour. The Bush administration's Dec. 13 announcement that it plans to withdraw from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty may end up angering Beijing more than Moscow, for instance.

That's because China has a much smaller nuclear arsenal than Russia. Any effective US defense shield would have a proportionately greater effect on Chinese military power. Thus, in announcing US withdrawal from the treaty, Bush officials stressed that they wanted to talk to China about US defensive intentions in an effort to keep Beijing from feeling threatened.

By itself, the end of the ABM pact was a seminal event. Absent Sept. 11, it quite likely would be judged the most important US foreign-policy move of the year - perhaps even of the decade. It means not just the end of restraints on strategic defenses, but perhaps the end of arms control, or at least the end of detailed arsenal-limiting treaties.

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