Quand vous tuez cent civils innocents et un terroriste, est-ce que vous gagnez ou perdez la guerre contre le terrorisme ? (…) Israël a fait au Liban ce qu'il lui avait fait il y a vingt ans : il a saccagé son infrastructure et infligé une punition collective à une démocratie fragile, multiculturelle et résiliente qui s'efforçait de réconcilier ses différences confessionnelles et de vivre en bonne harmonie avec ses voisins. John Le Carré

Après Pete Seeger et Morton Sobell... John Le Carré!

"Pire que le McCarthyisme, pire que la Baie des cochons et à long terme potentiellement pire que la guerre du Vietnam", "la Junte de Bush et ses conspirateurs", "la junte néoconservatrice qui contrôle les Etats-Unis et qui a pratiquement fait d'Israël le prisme de toute politique" …

Pour ceux qui les avaient oubliées, ces analyses d’un gauchisme échevelé sur la guerre d’Irak, de l’un des plus grands romanciers d’espionnage de la guerre froide et ancien espion lui-même du célèbre MI6 …

S’éclairent d’un nouveau jour quand on apprend que le pourfendeur systématique d’Israël qui, au moment de sa fatwa iranienne, avait accusé Rushdie d'avoir volontairement provoqué les musulmans avec les Versets sataniques …

Avait lui-même, comme il vient de le révéler au Times, été tenté de passer à la Philby dans le camp soviétique dans les années 60...

Et qu’il n’avait apparemment été retenu que par les risques pour sa vie!

Ex-espion de Sa Majesté, John Le Carré a eu la tentation de passer à l'Est
LE MONDE
15.09.08

lI y a eu L'Espion qui venait du froid. Il y a maintenant "l'espion qui faillit trahir". Le premier est le roman qui a rendu John Le Carré célèbre il y a quarante-cinq ans. Le second fait la "une" d'un supplément du Sunday Times dans son édition du dimanche 14 septembre... et n'est autre que l'auteur du premier.

A 76 ans, l'ancien espion du MI6, les services secrets britanniques, devenu écrivain à succès, a révélé à l'hebdomadaire dominical qu'il avait été tenté de passer de l'autre côté.

On savait David Cornwell, de son vrai nom, de gauche. Mais de là à l'imaginer suppôt du régime soviétique... "Je n'étais pas tenté pour des raisons idéologiques. Oh mon Dieu, non, non et non", s'empresse-t-il de rassurer son interlocuteur du Sunday Times. "Mais quand on espionne intensément et qu'on se rapproche toujours plus (...), le pas à franchir semble si petit", poursuit le romancier, dont le dernier livre, A Most Wanted Man ("Un homme très recherché"), sort actuellement en Angleterre. A passer son temps sur un sujet, on finirait donc par avoir envie de le rejoindre, pour l'étudier d'encore plus près, pour valider ses théories et ses croyances.

C'était au tout début des années 1960, quand David Cornwell travaillait encore pour les services secrets de Sa Majesté. Il n'a pas sauté le pas. Et n'a plus eu à se poser la question par la suite.

La trahison, effective celle-ci, d'un autre agent britannique, Kim Philby, passé à l'Est en 1963, l'a contraint à changer de vie. L'agent double Philby avait livré à Moscou l'identité de nombreux collègues du MI6, dont beaucoup ont ensuite été assassinés. Sans doute cette expérience a-t-elle définitivement ôté à David Cornwell toute envie de travailler pour l'ennemi communiste, quand bien même cela aurait été à titre expérimental et ethnologique.

OCCASION UNIQUE

D'ailleurs quand, en 1987, un intermédiaire russe a contacté John Le Carré pour lui proposer de rencontrer Kim Philby, qui devait mourir un an plus tard, il a refusé catégoriquement. Que rêver de mieux, pourtant, pour un expert du roman d'espionnage ? Une occasion unique, historique même. "C'était juste inenvisageable", explique John Le Carré au Sunday Times, avant d'ajouter que Philby "a toujours été tenté par la corruption. Et il a envoyé nombre d'agents britanniques à la mort, plus de 40 en Albanie..."

Voir aussi:

John Le Carré et le crocodile islamiste

Quand un maître du roman d'espionnage se mêle de juger Israël à l'aune de ses préjugés, il faut lui "remonter les bretelles". C'est ce que font, avec modération mais sans complexes et avec brio, les quatre signataires du texte que voici. Bien envoyé ! (Menahem Macina).

Le Monde du 13/09/2006

Le Monde a publié dans son édition du 7 septembre un article de John Le Carré à propos de la récente guerre au Liban et de l'action menée par Israël. Le positionnement de ce texte, exceptionnellement en "une" du journal et non en page "Débats", lui confère un statut particulier. Est-ce un éditorial ? Exprime-t-il la position du journal ?

D'un écrivain dont l'oeuvre témoigne du souci porté aux demi-teintes, on attendrait une "interpellation" d'une autre teneur à propos d'un conflit complexe qui ne pâtit que trop des imprécateurs et des donneurs de leçons. Mais voilà. Habité par un venin qu'il peine à contrôler (la réunion de ces deux termes : "zélote égaré", pour désigner Israël mériterait de figurer dans un florilège des métaphores antijuives), John Le Carré est à mille lieues ici de l'éthique de l'écrivain comme de celle du politique.

Son article est une charge contre le seul coupable et le seul responsable, selon lui, des malheurs du Proche-Orient : Israël. Il nous présente une puissante armée de soudards, dirigée par des chefs incultes et barbares, qui ravage le Liban. Elle serait d'ailleurs coutumière du fait. A partir d'une comptabilité morbide des pertes, John Le Carré montre le déséquilibre des forces, ce qui lui permet, sans y toucher, de monter en épingle l'arrogante puissance de l'Etat juif.

Sous le prétexte du rapt de deux soldats, voilà une horde enivrée par le plaisir de la destruction du pays voisin sans que par ailleurs ces destructions n'aient une quelconque efficacité militaire contre un ennemi bien plus faible et potentiellement sympathique. Cet ennemi, le Hezbollah, n'est jamais présenté. Son mentor iranien est lui aussi absent de l'"interpellation". Les méthodes de guerre du Hezbollah consistant à installer des sites de fusée Katioucha au coeur des populations civiles ne sont pas mentionnées par notre agent secret. Les déclarations du président iranien ("Israël doit être rayé de la carte"), de sa créature libanaise, leurs projets politiques, les bombardements répétés des localités du nord d'Israël, la volonté exterminatrice du chef du Hezbollah ou d'Ahmadinejad ne font pas partie des éléments culturels ou idéologiques pris en compte par notre expert en intelligence qu'est John Le Carré.

Pas un mot

Pas un mot non plus sur la complaisance ou la duplicité de cet Etat libanais, qui a laissé s'installer, contre sa propre souveraineté, le "Parti de Dieu" et son armée. Pas de renvoi non plus à la guerre libano-libanaise qui a ravagé ce pays pendant plus de dix ans. Pas un mot sur la mainmise de la Syrie sur le Liban, pas un mot sur l'assassinat de celles et ceux, journalistes libanais, qui avaient dénoncé cette colonisation. Pas un mot sur l'élimination des chrétiens d'Orient par les islamistes, sauf quand délibérément ils acceptent leur servitude. Pas un mot enfin sur les projets nucléaires de l'Iran.

Non, le seul fautif, c'est Israël. Le barbare, c'est Israël. Celui qui fabrique du terrorisme, c'est Israël. Israël a sûrement de grands torts, en premier lieu d'avoir sous-estimé les capacités militaires du Hezbollah. En Israël, l'heure est aujourd'hui à la recherche des causes internes qui ont mené à cette situation. Preuve, s'il en était besoin, de l'extraordinaire vitalité démocratique de ce pays. Mais quoi, la démocratie, autrement dit la liberté d'opinion, l'exercice de l'esprit critique, le statut des femmes, tout cela compte pour rien dans les options politiques de quelques grandes consciences européennes à la John Le Carré.

Pour ceux-là, triste tradition européenne, la liberté est un artefact. La vision de bataillons d'enfants armés et enrégimentés - ces membres de la Hitlerjugend à la sauce islamiste - hurlant à la destruction d'Israël ne les trouble pas le moins du monde. Et sans doute John Le Carré n'est-il pas loin de croire, pour paraphraser la formule célèbre de Churchill, que la disparition d'Israël calmera à tout jamais les appétits du crocodile islamiste, espérant, de ce fait - pauvre espérance -, que le crocodile négligera de s'attaquer à lui. En 1938, l'Europe, croyant pouvoir protéger son confort, a pactisé avec Hitler. Elle avait cru sans doute trouver dans le chancelier allemand un facteur de stabilité dans la région.

On connaît la formule de Churchill adressée à Neville Chamberlain après les accords de Munich : "Vous avez choisi le déshonneur pour éviter la guerre ; vous aurez la guerre avec le déshonneur." Face à l'islamisme radical, Israël est en première ligne. Tout comme, en 1938, les juifs se voyaient être la première proie désignée par le nazisme. On sait ce qui s'en est ensuivi pour l'humanité entière.

Le jour où le monde occidental prendra conscience que la paix et la démocratie sont des valeurs suffisamment chères pour mériter d'être défendues au prix de lourds sacrifices, alors sa vision d'Israël changera peut-être, mais ce sera un peu tard pour tout le monde.

Signataires :

Philippe Gumplowicz, universitaire ;
Marc Lefèvre, physicien (tous deux membres fondateurs des Amis de La Paix maintenant) ;
Pierre-André Taguieff, sociologue et politologue ;
Jacques Tarnero, chercheur.

------------------------

Et voici le Point de vue exprimé par l'écrivain auquel les signataires du texte précédent ont "remonté les bretelles".

Interpellation

John Le Carré

Le Monde du 06.09.06

Répondez un peu à cette question, je vous prie. Quand vous tuez cent civils innocents et un terroriste, est-ce que vous gagnez ou perdez la guerre contre le terrorisme ? "Ah, me rétorquerez-vous, mais ce terroriste aurait pu tuer deux cents personnes, mille personnes, plus encore !" Se pose alors une autre question : si, en tuant cent personnes innocentes, vous provoquez l'émergence future de cinq nouveaux terroristes et leur procurez une base populaire qui jure de leur fournir aide et soutien, garantissez-vous un avantage aux prochaines générations de vos concitoyens, ou vous êtes-vous créé l'ennemi que vous méritez ?

Le 12 juillet, le chef d'état-major de l'armée israélienne nous a gratifiés d'un aperçu des subtilités de la pensée militaire de son pays. Les opérations militaires prévues au Liban, nous déclara-t-il, "allaient renvoyer ce pays vingt ans en arrière". Eh bien, j'étais là-bas il y a vingt ans, et ce n'était pas joli, joli. Après sa déclaration, le général a tenu sa promesse. J'écris ceci vingt-huit jours exactement après que le Hezbollah a enlevé deux soldats israéliens, pratique militaire assez fort courante que les Israéliens eux-mêmes ne s'interdisent pas.

Au cours de ces vingt-huit jours, neuf cent trente-deux Libanais ont été tués et plus de trois mille blessés. Neuf cent treize mille sont devenus des réfugiés. Le nombre de victimes israéliennes s'élève à quatre-vingt-quatre morts et huit cent soixante-sept blessés. Au cours de la première semaine du conflit, le Hezbollah tirait environ quatre-vingt-dix roquettes par jour sur Israël. Un mois plus tard - en dépit de huit mille sept cents sorties effectuées par les forces aériennes israéliennes sans qu'elles rencontrent la moindre résistance, et qui provoquèrent la paralysie de l'aéroport international de Beyrouth et la destruction de centrales électriques, de dépôts de carburant, de flottilles de pêche, de cent quarante-sept ponts et de soixante-douze axes routiers -, le Hezbollah porta sa moyenne quotidienne de tirs de roquettes à cent soixante-neuf. Et les deux soldats israéliens qui étaient la raison affichée de toute cette agitation ne sont toujours pas rentrés chez eux.

Alors oui, comme nous en avions été avertis, Israël a fait au Liban ce qu'il lui avait fait il y a vingt ans : il a saccagé son infrastructure et infligé une punition collective à une démocratie fragile, multiculturelle et résiliente qui s'efforçait de réconcilier ses différences confessionnelles et de vivre en bonne harmonie avec ses voisins.

Il y a encore un mois à peine, les Etats-Unis faisaient du Liban le modèle de ce que les autres pays du Proche-Orient pourraient devenir. Le Hezbollah, pensait-on avec un optimisme peut-être excessif dans la communauté internationale, allait peu à peu couper ses liens avec la Syrie et l'Iran et se muer en une force politique et non plus purement militaire. Et voilà qu'aujourd'hui l'Arabie entière célèbre cette force armée, la réputation de suprématie militaire dont jouissait Israël est en miettes et l'image dissuasive à laquelle il tenait tant ne dissuade plus personne. Et les Libanais sont devenus les dernières victimes d'une catastrophe globale qui est l'oeuvre de zélotes égarés et ne paraît avoir aucune issue.

Traduit de l'anglais par Gilles Berton.

Voir également:

Published on Wednesday, January 15, 2003 by the Times/UK
The United States of America Has Gone Mad
by John le Carré

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.

The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.

But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer’s pocket? At what cost — because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane people — in Iraqi lives?

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I’m dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam’s downfall — just not on Bush’s terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.

The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.

God also has pretty scary connections. In America, where all men are equal in His sight, if not in one another’s, the Bush family numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida and the ex-Governor of Texas.

Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90: senior executive of the Harken oil company. Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God’s work.

In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was visiting the ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks for liberating them, somebody tried to kill him. The CIA believes that “somebody” was Saddam. Hence Bush Jr’s cry: “That man tried to kill my Daddy.” But it’s still not personal, this war. It’s still necessary. It’s still God’s work. It’s still about bringing freedom and democracy to oppressed Iraqi people.

To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends, family and God, is there to tell us which is which. What Bush won’t tell us is the truth about why we’re going to war. What is at stake is not an Axis of Evil — but oil, money and people’s lives. Saddam’s misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn’t, won’t.

If Saddam didn’t have the oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart’s content. Other leaders do it every day — think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt.

Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to the US or Britain. Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, if he’s still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes’ notice. What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its military power to all of us — to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.

The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair’s part in all this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can’t. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can’t get out.

It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself against the ropes, neither of Britain’s opposition leaders can lay a glove on him. But that’s Britain’s tragedy, as it is America’s: as our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way. Blair’s best chance of personal survival must be that, at the eleventh hour, world protest and an improbably emboldened UN will force Bush to put his gun back in his holster unfired. But what happens when the world’s greatest cowboy rides back into town without a tyrant’s head to wave at the boys?

Blair’s worst chance is that, with or without the UN, he will drag us into a war that, if the will to negotiate energetically had ever been there, could have been avoided; a war that has been no more democratically debated in Britain than it has in America or at the UN. By doing so, Blair will have set back our relations with Europe and the Middle East for decades to come. He will have helped to provoke unforeseeable retaliation, great domestic unrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East. Welcome to the party of the ethical foreign policy.

There is a middle way, but it’s a tough one: Bush dives in without UN approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the special relationship.

I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect’s sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can’t explain is how he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the altar.

“But will we win, Daddy?”

“Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in bed.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise Mr Bush’s voters will get terribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him.”

“But will people be killed, Daddy?”

“Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people.”

“Can I watch it on television?”

“Only if Mr Bush says you can.”

“And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do anything horrid any more?”

“Hush child, and go to sleep.”

Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: “Peace is also Patriotic”. It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.

Voir enfin:

If Le Carre Could Vote

By John Le Carre
October 20, 2004
Maybe there’s one good reason – just one – for reelecting George W. Bush, and that’s to force him to live with the consequences of his appalling actions and answer for his own lies, rather than wish the job on a Democrat who would then get blamed for his predecessor’s follies.

Probably no American president in history has been so universally hated abroad as Bush: for his bullying unilateralism, his dismissal of international treaties, his reckless indifference to the aspirations of other nations and cultures, his contempt for institutions of world government, and above all for misusing the cause of anti-terrorism in order to unleash an illegal war – and now anarchy – upon a country that like too many others around the world was suffering under a hideous dictatorship but had no hand in the events of 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction and no record of terrorism except as an ally of the United States in a dirty war against Iran.

Is your president a great war leader because he allowed himself to be manipulated by a handful of deluded ideologues? Is Tony Blair, my prime minister, a great war leader because he committed Britain’s troops, foreign policy and domestic security to the same harebrained adventure?

You are voting in November. We will vote next year. Yet the outcome in both countries will in large part depend on the same question: How long can the lies last now that the truth has finally been told? The Iraq war was planned long before 9/11. Osama bin Laden provided the excuse. Iraq paid the price. American kids paid the price. British kids paid the price. Our politicians lied to us.

While Bush was waging his father’s war at your expense, he was also ruining your country. He made your rich richer and your poor and unemployed more numerous. He robbed your war veterans of their due and reduced your children’s access to education. And he deprived more Americans than ever before of healthcare.

Now he’s busy cooking the books, burying deficits and calling in contingency funds to fight a war that his advisors promised him he could light and put out like a candle.

Meanwhile, your Patriot Act has swept aside constitutional and civil liberties that took brave Americans 200 years to secure and were once the envy of a world that now looks on in horror, not just at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib but at what you are doing to yourselves.

But please don’t feel isolated from the Europe you twice saved. Give us back the America we loved, and your friends will be waiting for you. Here in Britain, for as long as we have Tony Blair singing the same lies as George W. Bush, your nightmares will be ours.

Il y a aujourd’hui beaucoup de discussions sur la soi-disant Doctrine Bush et ce qui peut la suivre. Beaucoup préfèrent croire que le monde est dans l'agitation non parce qu'il est dans l'agitation mais parce que Bush l'a fait ainsi en détruisant la nouvelle ère d'espoir. Et au départ de Bush, il pourra enfin retourner comme il était auparavant. Après avoir aperçu le mirage une fois, les gens veulent naturellement le revoir et croire en lui à nouveau. Robert Kagan

Dans la grande discussion sur l'anti-américanisme et de ses sources, les deux candidats ne pourraient être plus différents. La prémisse de M. Obama, c’est la culpabilité américaine: Nous avons déchainé les furies, croit-il. Notre guerre contre le terrorisme et notre guerre en Irak n’ont fait qu’ajouter à la violence. Il propose de remédier à cela en offrant sa propre personne (encore, la biographie) comme médiateur au monde. (...) M. McCain n'est, lui, pas désireux d'être aimé par les étrangers. En novembre, le pays aura un choix entre un candidat républicain forgé dans les vérités des années 50 et un rival démocrate issu tout droit des années 90. Fouad Ajami

Le choix paraît clair: il se pose entre ceux qui prévoient un monde d'affrontements et ceux qui croient à la recherche de la coopération. (…) John McCain et Barack Obama (…) incarnent deux attitudes bien différentes, l'instinct du conflit et celui de la coopération. Le premier se cherche des ennemis, tandis que le second préfère conclure des accords. Le premier est manichéen, tandis que le second se montre conciliant. Martin Wolf (ancien économiste britannique à la Banque mondiale)

BHL, Jack Lang, Sonia Rykiel, Pierre Bergé, et à présent… 80% des Français!

A l’heure où nos pontes médiatiques chipotent et pinaillent sur les détails de principes stratégiques qu’ils n’ont jamais compris que sur le papier (la fameuse "Doctrine Bush") …

Pendant que, suivant un instinct qui trompe rarement et à la différence d’une Europe qui en est à se réjouir de sa propre impuissance, la dernière venue de l’élection actuelle a tout de suite perçu les enjeux du retour de l’histoire incarné par la Russie de Poutine …

Si la perspective d’un comité de soutien français au candidat démocrate s’étendant à virtuellement toute la population française peut au premier abord paraître un peu ridicule, elle a le mérite de faire apparaître l’un des principaux enjeux de l’élection de novembre prochain.

Car, comme l’ont bien noté des commentateurs aussi différents voire opposés que Robert Kagan, Fouad Ajami ou Martin Wolf, c’est bien l’identité même de l’Amérique qui y est en jeu.

Entre l’Amérique, tout à tour nationale et impériale, de la révolution anglo-américaine qui a donné au monde en ces trois derniers siècles les grands principes de la démocratie représentative, de l’économie de marché et des révolutions industrielle et technologique, mais aussi qui a tenu tête et défait les ennemis de la société ouverte et notamment ses plus dangereux et récents représentants nazi et communiste.

Et l’Amérique cosmopolitaine de la repentance et de l’apaisement, incarnée par les nouvelles élites postmodernes dont, après Carter et Clinton, Obama est le plus pur représentant, qui, en rupture avec sa longue tradition de la croyance en sa destinée manifeste comme aux prétentions et aux fardeaux qu’elle suppose, est tentée de rejeter l’histoire et la guerre que souvent elle implique pour "conclure des accords" et "se montrer conciliant".

Qui ne peut qu’inquiéter, de par le monde, les amis de la liberté qui refusent eux de fermer les yeux sur les nouvelles menaces que cette dernière est vouée à rencontrer …
The Foreign Policy Difference
Fouad Ajami
The Wall Street Journal
September 10, 2008

The candidacy of Barack Obama seems to have lost some of its luster of late, and I suspect this has something to do with large questions many Americans still harbor about his view of the dangerous world around us. Those questions were not stilled by the choice of Joe Biden as his running mate.

To be sure, the Delaware senator is a man of unfailing decency and deep legislative experience; and his foreign policy preferences are reflective of the liberal internationalist outlook that once prevailed in the Democratic Party. To his honor and good name, Sen. Biden took a leading role in pushing for the use of American military power in the Balkans when the Muslims of Bosnia were faced with grave dangers a dozen years ago. Patriotism does not embarrass this man in the way it does so many in the liberal elite. But as Bob Woodward is the latest to remind us, it is presidents, not their understudies, who shape the destiny of nations.

So the Obama candidacy must be judged on its own merits, and it can be reckoned as the sharpest break yet with the national consensus over American foreign policy after World War II. This is not only a matter of Sen. Obama's own sensibility; the break with the consensus over American exceptionalism and America's claims and burdens abroad is the choice of the activists and elites of the Democratic Party who propelled Mr. Obama's rise.

Though the staging in Denver was the obligatory attempt to present the Obama Democrats as men and women of the political center, the Illinois senator and his devotees are disaffected with American power. In their view, we can make our way in the world without the encumbrance of "hard" power. We would offer other nations apologies for the way we carried ourselves in the aftermath of 9/11, and the foreign world would be glad for a reprieve from the time of American certitude.

The starkness of the choice now before the country is fully understood when compared to that other allegedly seminal election of 1960. But the legend of Camelot and of the New Frontier exaggerates the differences between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. A bare difference of four years separated the two men (Nixon had been born in 1913, Kennedy in 1917). Both men had seen service in the Navy in World War II. Both were avowed Cold Warriors. After all, Kennedy had campaigned on the missile gap -- in other words the challenger had promised a tougher stance against the Soviet Union. (Never mind the irony: There was a missile gap; the U.S. had 2,000 missiles, the Soviet Union a mere 67.)

The national consensus on America's role abroad, and on the great threats facing it, was firmly implanted. No great cultural gaps had opened in it, arugula was not on the menu, and the elites partook of the dominant culture of the land; the universities were then at one with the dominant national ethos. The "disuniting of America" was years away. American liberalism was still unabashedly tethered to American nationalism.

We are at a great remove from that time and place. Globalization worked its way through the land, postmodernism took hold of the country's intellectual life. The belief in America's "differentness" began to give way, and American liberalism set itself free from the call of nationalism. American identity itself began to mutate.

The celebrated political scientist Samuel Huntington, in "Who Are We?," a controversial book that took up this delicate question of American identity, put forth three big conceptions of America: national, imperial and cosmopolitan. In the first, America remains America. In the second, America remakes the world. In the third, the world remakes America. Back and forth, America oscillated between the nationalist and imperial callings. The standoff between these two ideas now yields to the strength and the claims of cosmopolitanism. It is out of this new conception of America that the Obama phenomenon emerges.

The "aloofness" of Mr. Obama that has become part of the commentary about him is born of this cultural matrix. Mr. Obama did not misspeak when he described union households and poorer Americans as people clinging to their guns and religion; he was overheard sharing these thoughts with a like-minded audience in San Francisco.

Nor was it an accident that, in a speech at Wesleyan University, he spoke of public service but excluded service in the military. The military does not figure prominently in his world and that of his peers. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention, as was the case on the campaign trail, he spoke of his maternal grandfather's service in Patton's army. But that experience had not been part of his own upbringing.

When we elect a president, we elect a commander in chief. This remains an imperial republic with military obligations and a military calling. That is why Eisenhower overwhelmed Stevenson, Reagan's swagger swept Carter out of office, Bush senior defeated Dukakis, etc.

The exception was Bill Clinton, with his twin victories over two veterans of World War II. We had taken a holiday from history -- but 9/11 awakened us to history's complications. Is it any wonder that Hillary Clinton feigned the posture of a muscular American warrior, and carried the working class with her?

The warrior's garb sits uneasily on Barack Obama's shoulders: Mr. Obama seeks to reassure Americans that he and his supporters are heirs of Roosevelt and Kennedy; that he, too, could order soldiers to war, stand up to autocracies and rogue regimes. But the widespread skepticism about his ability to do so is warranted.

The crowds in Berlin and Paris that took to him knew their man. He had once presented his willingness to negotiate with Iran as the mark of his diplomacy, the break with the Bush years and the Bush style. But he stepped back from that pledge, and in a blatant echo of President Bush's mantra on Iran, he was to say that "no options would be off the table" when dealing with Iran. The change came on a visit to Israel, the conversion transparent and not particularly convincing.

Mr. Obama truly believes that he can offer the world beyond America's shores his biography, his sympathies with strangers. In the great debate over anti-Americanism and its sources, the two candidates couldn't be more different. Mr. Obama proceeds from the notion of American guilt: We called up the furies, he believes. Our war on terror and our war in Iraq triggered more animus. He proposes to repair for that, and offers himself (again, the biography) as a bridge to the world.

Mr. McCain, well, he's not particularly articulate on this question. But he shares the widespread attitude of broad swaths of the country that are not consumed with worries about America's standing in foreign lands. Mr. McCain is not eager to be loved by foreigners. In November, the country will have a choice between a Republican candidate forged in the verities of the 1950s, and a Democratic rival who walks out of the 1990s.

For Mr. McCain, the race seems a matter of duty and obligation. He is a man taking up this quest after a life of military and public service, the presidency as a capstone of a long career. Mr. McCain could speak with more nuance about the great issues upon us. When it comes to the Islamic world, for example, it's not enough merely to evoke the threat of radical Islamism as the pre-eminent security challenge of our time. But his approach and demeanor have proven their electoral appeal before.

For Mr. Obama, the race is about the claims of modernism. There is "cool," and the confidence of the meritocracy in him. The Obama way is glib: It glides over the world without really taking it in. It has to it that fluency with political and economic matters that can be acquired in a hurry, an impatience with great moral and political complications. The lightning overseas trip, the quick briefing, and above all a breezy knowingness. Mr. Obama's way is the way of his peers among the liberal, professional elite.

Once every four years, ordinary Americans go out and choose the standard-bearer of their nationalism. Liberalism has run away with elite culture. Nationalism may be out of fashion in Silicon Valley. But the state -- and its citadel, the presidency -- is an altogether different calling.

Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. He is also an adjunct research fellow of the Hoover Institution.

Le grand récit historique des trois derniers siècles a été celui de la révolution anglo-américaine et des réactions qu'elle a suscitées parmi les peuples et les civilisations qu'elle a détruits, vaincus, humiliés et, surtout, transformés.

Au cours des trois derniers siècles, les Anglo-Américains ont apporté au monde le principe de grands pays gérés par des dirigeants responsables devant des assemblées élues. Ils ont inauguré le capitalisme fondé sur le marché et introduit les révolutions industrielle et technologique, toujours en cours.

Voir également:

Etats-Unis : l'enjeu de l'élection du 4 novembre
Martin Wolf
Le Monde
09.09.08

Le scrutin déterminera la nature de la prochaine - et peut-être ultime - période d'hégémonie globale anglo-américaine
« Le Monde Economie » publiera chaque semaine la chronique de Martin Wolf, éditorialiste économique au Financial Times, un partenariat exclusif. Ancien économiste à la Banque mondiale, Martin Wolf, 62 ans, a reçu de nombreux prix pour ses articles et ses ouvrages. En 2000, il a été fait Commander of the British Empire (CBE) pour « sa contribution au journalisme financier »

Nous sommes tous des Américains à présent. Je ne veux pas simplement dire par là que le leadership des Etats-Unis façonne le monde dans lequel nous vivons, mais que le monde dans lequel nous vivons est le monde que les Américains - ou, plus précisément, les Anglo-Américains - ont modelé. Les Etats-Unis continueront d'exercer une influence prépondérante. Comment l'utiliseront-ils ? C'est la question que nous devrions nous poser au regard de l'élection américaine. Le choix paraît clair : il se pose entre ceux qui prévoient un monde d'affrontements et ceux qui croient à la recherche de la coopération.

Dans le livre brillant qu'il a publié en 2007 (God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World, éditions Alfred A. Knopf à New York), Walter Russell Mead, membre du Council on Foreign Relations, replace les Etats-Unis d'aujourd'hui dans une tradition de puissance globale qui a débuté dans les Pays-Bas du XVIIe siècle, s'est développée dans l'Angleterre des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles et poursuivie dans les Etats-Unis du XXe siècle. Tous ces pays, écrit-il, ont développé le système « anglo-américain ».

Comment se définit ce système ? Il possède trois caractéristiques principales : il est maritime ; il est global ; enfin, il combine commerce et puissance militaire. Les Anglo-Américains ont une civilisation spécifique : civile mais belliqueuse, commerciale mais moraliste, individualiste mais organisée, novatrice mais conservatrice, idéaliste enfin, mais impitoyable. Pour ses adversaires, elle est brutale, superficielle et hypocrite. Pour ses partisans, elle est source de liberté et de démocratie.

Au cours des trois derniers siècles, les Anglo-Américains ont apporté au monde le principe de grands pays gérés par des dirigeants responsables devant des assemblées élues. Ils ont inauguré le capitalisme fondé sur le marché et introduit les révolutions industrielle et technologique, toujours en cours. Enfin, et ce n'est pas le point le plus négligeable, ils ont vaincu nombre d'ennemis puissants : l'empire espagnol ; la France royale puis impériale ; l'Allemagne impériale et nazie ; le Japon militariste ; et, enfin, le communisme soviétique. Ils ont détruit l'empire moghol en Inde, le shogunat nippon et, indirectement, la dernière dynastie impériale chinoise.

Les Anglo-Américains ont également affronté de nombreuses idéologies qui leur étaient hostiles. Le marxisme a représenté la plus importante idéologie alternative de la modernité. Son effondrement en tant que système idéologique a donné au philosophe américain Francis Fukuyama l'occasion de forger le concept de « fin de l'histoire ». La démocratie libérale, arguait-il, a prouvé qu'elle était le seul système adapté à la modernité.

Le grand récit historique des trois derniers siècles a été celui de la révolution anglo-américaine et des réactions qu'elle a suscitées parmi les peuples et les civilisations qu'elle a détruits, vaincus, humiliés et, surtout, transformés. Car cette évolution du pouvoir global n'était pas seulement de nature externe. Anglais et Américains ont apporté avec eux des transformations internes. Les plus grandes civilisations - islamique, indienne et même chinoise - ont été écrasées. Anglais et Américains sont enclins à considérer leurs interventions comme bien intentionnées, et leur impact comme bénéfique. Ce n'est pas ainsi, et c'est un euphémisme, que le reste de l'humanité les a ressenties. L'une des vertus de ce livre est de faire ressentir, depuis Louis XIV jusqu'à Oussama Ben Laden et Vladimir Poutine, le mépris et la haine qu'ont inspirés les Anglo-Américains.

Quel est, au XXIe siècle, l'avenir de ce système et du monde qu'il a façonné ? Et en quoi la réponse à cette question dépend-elle en partie de l'élection présidentielle américaine ?

Le premier point et le plus important est qu'aujourd'hui le monde a largement adopté l'économie de marché et son corollaire, la mondialisation. Ce processus est en train de transformer les deux géants mondiaux que sont la Chine et l'Inde. Il en résulte pour les Etats-Unis un relatif déclin économique. En deuxième lieu, les Etats-Unis resteront quand même l'économie la plus puissante, la plus avancée technologiquement et la plus novatrice du monde au cours du prochain quart de siècle. Ils sont également assurés de posséder l'appareil militaire le plus puissant du globe et par conséquent de rester la principale puissance mondiale pendant cette période. Les Etats-Unis resteront la seule superpuissance. En troisième lieu, John McCain et Barack Obama sont tous deux américains. Aux Etats-Unis, ce qui paraît frappant, ce sont leurs différences, alors que ce qui semble évident aux yeux de la majorité du reste du monde, ce sont leurs similarités. Tous deux représentent la tradition anglo-américaine, celle-ci étant une question de culture, pas d'ascendance. Ils croient tous deux à la destinée américaine et aux vertus de la puissance américaine.

Et pourtant, au sein de cette tradition, ils incarnent deux attitudes bien différentes, l'instinct du conflit et celui de la coopération. Le premier se cherche des ennemis, tandis que le second préfère conclure des accords. Le premier est manichéen, tandis que le second se montre conciliant.

L'administration Bush a toujours prôné et appliqué le premier point de vue. Elle a même embrassé le mal - la torture, notamment - afin de le combattre. M. McCain est lui aussi un combattant en guerre contre le mal. Dans un autre ouvrage passionnant, Robert Kagan, le plus intelligent des néoconservateurs, a défini le terrain sur lequel se dérouleront les prochains conflits (The Return of History and the End of Dreams, éditions Atlantic à Londres, 2008). Les démocraties, estime M. Kagan, doivent, pour façonner le monde, unir leurs forces contre « les grands pouvoirs autocratiques et les forces réactionnaires du radicalisme islamique ». Impressionnant « axe du Mal » que celui qui lie la Chine à la Russie, à l'Iran et à Oussama Ben Laden.

Cette vision est à la fois séduisante, plausible et dangereuse. Elle est dangereuse parce qu'elle pourrait se transformer en une prophétie autoréalisatrice. Elle est dangereuse parce que, du fait que le monde devient de plus en plus petit et que gérer les « communs » globaux représente un défi de plus en plus grand, la coopération est essentielle. Elle est dangereuse enfin car, et ce n'est pas la moindre raison, ce que l'on qualifie de nouvelles autocraties ne représente aucune menace mortelle et ne propose aucune idéologie séduisante. Il s'agit donc d'une surréaction disproportionnée face à une modeste menace.

Il est légitime pour un Occidental de ne pas apprécier les systèmes gouvernementaux de la Chine ou de la Russie. Mais il est évident aux yeux de tout observateur impartial que ces pays sont loin d'être ce qu'ils étaient il y a trente ans. Cela est particulièrement vrai de la Chine, qui a fait l'énorme pari de son intégration dans l'économie mondiale, et donc de l'ouverture concomitante de la société chinoise. Que cela débouche en définitive sur une Chine démocratique, nul ne saurait aujourd'hui le prédire. Mais il faudrait être fort audacieux pour en exclure la possibilité.

Cette élection présidentielle américaine pourrait bien déterminer la nature de la prochaine - et peut-être ultime - période d'hégémonie globale anglo-américaine. La question est de savoir si le peuple américain va choisir l'instinct de conflit ou l'instinct de coopération.

Dans la pratique, ni M. McCain ni M. Obama ne s'en tiendront à un seul choix. Pas plus qu'une seule approche ne pourra constituer la réponse unique. Mais la différence entre les deux tendances est claire. Les Etats-Unis se prépareront-ils à une nouvelle grande croisade contre le Mal ? Ou bien seront-ils disposés à s'asseoir à une table avec le reste du monde et à discuter ? L'approche correcte à l'égard du monde complexe qui est le nôtre n'est pas celle prônée par ceux qui considèrent accord et apaisement comme synonymes. Le choix semble clair. Il façonnera notre époque.

Voir enfin:

Compared to the ideal Kantian international order, in which all the world 's powers would be peace-loving equals, conducting themselves wisely, prudently, and in strict obeisance to international law, the unipolar system is both dangerous and unjust. Compared to any plausible alternative in the real world, however, it is relatively stable and less likely to produce a major war between great powers. It is also comparatively benevolent, from a liberal perspective, for it is more conducive to the principles of economic and political liberalism that Americans and many others value.

End of Dreams, Return of History
Robert Kagan
Real clear politics
July 19, 2007

The world has become normal again. The years immediately following the end of the Cold War offered a tantalizing glimpse at a new kind of international order, with nations growing together or disappearing altogether, ideological conflicts melting away, cultures intermingling through increasingly free commerce and communications. But that was a mirage, the hopeful anticipation of a liberal, democratic world that wanted to believe the end of the Cold War did not end just one strategic and ideological conflict but all strategic and ideological conflict. People and their leaders longed for "a world transformed." 1 Today the nations of the West still cling to that vision. Evidence to the contrary -- the turn toward autocracy in Russia or the growing military ambitions of China -- is either dismissed as a temporary aberration or denied entirely.

The world has not been transformed, however. Nations remains as strong as ever, and so too the nationalist ambitions, the passions, and the competition among nations that have shaped history. The world is still "unipolar," with the United States remaining the only superpower. But international competition among great powers has returned, with the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, Iran, and others vying for regional predominance. Struggles for honor and status and influence in the world have once again become key features of the international scene. Ideologically, it is a time not of convergence but of divergence. The competition between liberalism and absolutism has reemerged, with the nations of the world increasingly lining up, as in the past, along ideological lines. Finally, there is the fault line between modernity and tradition, the violent struggle of Islamic fundamentalists against the modern powers and the secular cultures that, in their view, have penetrated and polluted their Islamic world.

Creating and sustaining the unipolar world

How will the United States deal with such a world? Today there is much discussion of the so-called Bush Doctrine and what may follow it. Many prefer to believe the world is in turmoil not because it is in turmoil but because Bush made it so by destroying the new hopeful era. And when Bush leaves, it can return once again to the way it was. Having glimpsed the mirage once, people naturally want to see it and believe in it again.

The first illusion, however, is that Bush really changed anything. Historians will long debate the decision to go to war in Iraq, but what they are least likely to conclude is that the intervention was wildly out of character for the United States. Since the end of World War ii at least, American presidents of both parties have pursued a fairly consistent approach to the world. They have regarded the United States as the "indispensable nation"2 and the "locomotive at the head of mankind."3 They have amassed power and influence and deployed them in ever-widening arcs around the globe on behalf of interests, ideals, and ambitions, both tangible and intangible. Since 1945 Americans have insisted on acquiring and maintaining military supremacy, a "preponderance of power" in the world rather than a balance of power with other nations. They have operated on the ideological conviction that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government and that other forms of government are not only illegitimate but transitory. They have declared their readiness to "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation" by forces of oppression, to "pay any price, bear any burden" to defend freedom, to seek "democratic enlargement" in the world, and to work for the "end of tyranny." 4 They have been impatient with the status quo. They have seen America as a catalyst for change in human affairs, and they have employed the strategies and tactics of "maximalism," seeking revolutionary rather than gradual solutions to problems. Therefore, they have often been at odds with the more cautious approaches of their allies. 5

When people talk about a Bush Doctrine, they generally refer to three sets of principles -- the idea of preemptive or preventive military action; the promotion of democracy and "regime change"; and a diplomacy tending toward "unilateralism," a willingness to act without the sanction of international bodies such as the United Nations Security Council or the unanimous approval of its allies. 6 It is worth asking not only whether past administrations acted differently but also which of these any future administration, regardless of party, would promise to abjure in its conduct of foreign policy. As scholars from Melvyn P. Leffler to John Lewis Gaddis have shown, the idea of preemptive or preventive action is hardly a novel concept in American foreign policy. 7 And as policymakers and philosophers from Henry Kissinger to Michael Walzer have agreed, it is impossible in the present era to renounce such actions a priori.8 As for "regime change," there is not a single administration in the past half-century that has not attempted to engineer changes of regime in various parts of the world, from Eisenhower 's cia-inspired coups in Iran and Guatemala and his planned overthrow of Fidel Castro, which John F. Kennedy attempted to carry out, to George Herbert Walker Bush 's invasion of Panama to Bill Clinton's actions in Haiti and Bosnia. And if by unilateralism we mean an unwillingness to be constrained by the disapproval of the UN Security Council, by some of the NATO allies, by the OAS, or by any other international body, which presidents of the past allowed themselves to be so constrained? 9

These qualities of American foreign policy reflect not one man or one party or one circle of thinkers. They spring from the nation 's historical experience and are a characteristic American response to international circumstances. They are underpinned, on the one hand, by old beliefs and ambitions and, on the other hand, by power. So long as Americans elect leaders who believe it is the role of the United States to improve the world and bring about the "ultimate good,"10 and so long as American power in all its forms is sufficient to shape the behavior of others, the broad direction of American foreign policy is unlikely to change, absent some dramatic -- indeed, genuinely revolutionary -- effort by a future administration.

These American traditions, together with historical events beyond Americans' control, have catapulted the United States to a position of pre-eminence in the world. Since the end of the Cold War and the emergence of this "unipolar" world, there has been much anticipation of the end of unipolarity and the rise of a multipolar world in which the United States is no longer the predominant power. Not only realist theorists but others both inside and outside the United States have long argued the theoretical and practical unsustainability, not to mention undesirability, of a world with only one superpower. Mainstream realist theory has assumed that other powers must inevitably band together to balance against the superpower. Others expected the post-Cold War era to be characterized by the primacy of geoeconomics over geopolitics and foresaw a multipolar world with the economic giants of Europe, India, Japan, and China rivaling the United States. Finally, in the wake of the Iraq War and with hostility to the United States, as measured in public opinion polls, apparently at an all-time high, there has been a widespread assumption that the American position in the world must finally be eroding.

Yet American predominance in the main categories of power persists as a key feature of the international system. The enormous and productive American economy remains at the center of the international economic system. American democratic principles are shared by over a hundred nations. The American military is not only the largest but the only one capable of projecting force into distant theaters. Chinese strategists, who spend a great deal of time thinking about these things, see the world not as multipolar but as characterized by "one superpower, many great powers," and this configuration seems likely to persist into the future absent either a catastrophic blow to American power or a decision by the United States to diminish its power and international influence voluntarily. 11

The anticipated global balancing has for the most part not occurred. Russia and China certainly share a common and openly expressed goal of checking American hegemony. They have created at least one institution, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, aimed at resisting American influence in Central Asia, and China is the only power in the world, other than the United States, engaged in a long-term military buildup. But Sino-Russian hostility to American predominance has not yet produced a concerted and cooperative effort at balancing. China 's buildup is driven at least as much by its own long-term ambitions as by a desire to balance the United States. Russia has been using its vast reserves of oil and natural gas as a lever to compensate for the lack of military power, but it either cannot or does not want to increase its military capability sufficiently to begin counterbalancing the United States. Overall, Russian military power remains in decline. In addition, the two powers do not trust one another. They are traditional rivals, and the rise of China inspires at least as much nervousness in Russia as it does in the United States. At the moment, moreover, China is less abrasively confrontational with the United States. Its dependence on the American market and foreign investment and its perception that the United States remains a potentially formidable adversary mitigate against an openly confrontational approach.

In any case, China and Russia cannot balance the United States without at least some help from Europe, Japan, India, or at least some of the other advanced, democratic nations. But those powerful players are not joining the effort. Europe has rejected the option of making itself a counterweight to American power. This is true even among the older members of the European Union, where neither France, Germany, Italy, nor Spain proposes such counterbalancing, despite a public opinion hostile to the Bush administration. Now that the eu has expanded to include the nations of Central and Eastern Europe, who fear threats from the east, not from the west, the prospect of a unified Europe counterbalancing the United States is practically nil. As for Japan and India, the clear trend in recent years has been toward closer strategic cooperation with the United States.

If anything, the most notable balancing over the past decade has been aimed not at the American superpower but at the two large powers: China and Russia. In Asia and the Pacific, Japan, Australia, and even South Korea and the nations of Southeast Asia have all engaged in "hedging" against a rising China. This has led them to seek closer relations with Washington, especially in the case of Japan and Australia. India has also drawn closer to the United States and is clearly engaged in balancing against China. Russia 's efforts to increase its influence over what it regards as its "near abroad," meanwhile, have produced tensions and negative reactions in the Baltics and other parts of Eastern Europe. Because these nations are now members of the European Union, this has also complicated eu-Russian relations. On balance, traditional allies of the United States in East Asia and in Europe, while their publics may be more anti-American than in the past, nevertheless pursue policies that reflect more concern about the powerful states in their midst than about the United States. 12 This has provided a cushion against hostile public opinion and offers a foundation on which to strengthen American relations with these countries after the departure of Bush.

The Iraq War has not had the effect expected by many. Although there are reasonable-sounding theories as to why America 's position should be eroding as a result of global opposition to the war and the unpopularity of the current administration, there has been little measurable change in the actual policies of nations, other than their reluctance to assist the United States in Iraq. In 2003 those who claimed the U.S. global position was eroding pointed to electoral results in some friendly countries: the election of Schröder in Germany, the defeat of Aznar's party in Spain, and the election of Lula in Brazil.13 But if elections are the test, other more recent votes around the world have put relatively pro-American leaders in power in Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Canberra, and Ottawa. As for Russia and China, their hostility to the United States predates the Iraq War and, indeed, the Bush administration. Russia turned most sharply anti-American in the late 1990s partly as a consequence of NATO enlargement. Both were far more upset and angered by the American intervention in Kosovo than by the invasion of Iraq. Both began complaining about American hegemonism and unilateralism and calling for a multipolar order during the Clinton years. Chinese rhetoric has been, if anything, more tempered during the Bush years, in part because the Chinese have seen September 11 and American preoccupation with terrorism as a welcome distraction from America's other preoccupation, the "China threat."

The world's failure to balance against the superpower is the more striking because the United States, notwithstanding its difficult interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, continues to expand its power and military reach and shows no sign of slowing this expansion even after the 2008 elections. The American defense budget has surpassed $500 billion per year, not including supplemental spending totaling over $100 billion on Iraq and Afghanistan. This level of spending is sustainable, moreover, both economically and politically. 14 As the American military budget rises, so does the number of overseas American military bases. Since September 11, 2001, the United States has built or expanded bases in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia; in Bulgaria, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania in Europe; and in the Philippines, Djibouti, Oman, and Qatar. Two decades ago, hostility to the American military presence began forcing the United States out of the Philippines and seemed to be undermining support for American bases in Japan. Today, the Philippines is rethinking that decision, and the furor in Japan has subsided. In places like South Korea and Germany, it is American plans to reduce the U.S. military presence that stir controversy, not what one would expect if there was a widespread fear or hatred of overweening American power. Overall, there is no shortage of other countries willing to host U.S. forces, a good indication that much of the world continues to tolerate and even lend support to American geopolitical primacy if only as a protection against more worrying foes. 15

Predominance is not the same thing as omnipotence. Just because the United States has more power than everyone else does not mean it can impose its will on everyone else. American predominance in the early years after the Second World War did not prevent the North Korean invasion of the South, a communist victory in China, the Soviet acquisition of the hydrogen bomb, or the consolidation of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe -- all far greater strategic setbacks than anything the United States has yet suffered or is likely to suffer in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor does predominance mean the United States will succeed in all its endeavors, any more than it did six decades ago.

By the same token, foreign policy failures do not necessarily undermine predominance. Some have suggested that failure in Iraq would mean the end of predominance and unipolarity. But a superpower can lose a war -- in Vietnam or in Iraq -- without ceasing to be a superpower if the fundamental international conditions continue to support its predominance. So long as the United States remains at the center of the international economy and the predominant military power, so long as the American public continues to support American predominance as it has consistently for six decades, and so long as potential challengers inspire more fear than sympathy among their neighbors, the structure of the international system should remain as the Chinese describe it: one superpower and many great powers.

This is a good thing, and it should continue to be a primary goal of American foreign policy to perpetuate this relatively benign international configuration of power. The unipolar order with the United States as the predominant power is unavoidably riddled with flaws and contradictions. It inspires fears and jealousies. The United States is not immune to error, like all other nations, and because of its size and importance in the international system those errors are magnified and take on greater significance than the errors of less powerful nations. Compared to the ideal Kantian international order, in which all the world 's powers would be peace-loving equals, conducting themselves wisely, prudently, and in strict obeisance to international law, the unipolar system is both dangerous and unjust. Compared to any plausible alternative in the real world, however, it is relatively stable and less likely to produce a major war between great powers. It is also comparatively benevolent, from a liberal perspective, for it is more conducive to the principles of economic and political liberalism that Americans and many others value.

American predominance does not stand in the way of progress toward a better world, therefore. It stands in the way of regression toward a more dangerous world. The choice is not between an American-dominated order and a world that looks like the European Union. The future international order will be shaped by those who have the power to shape it. The leaders of a post-American world will not meet in Brussels but in Beijing, Moscow, and Washington.

The return of great powers and great games

If the world is marked by the persistence of unipolarity, it is nevertheless also being shaped by the reemergence of competitive national ambitions of the kind that have shaped human affairs from time immemorial. During the Cold War, this historical tendency of great powers to jostle with one another for status and influence as well as for wealth and power was largely suppressed by the two superpowers and their rigid bipolar order. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has not been powerful enough, and probably could never be powerful enough, to suppress by itself the normal ambitions of nations. This does not mean the world has returned to multipolarity, since none of the large powers is in range of competing with the superpower for global influence. Nevertheless, several large powers are now competing for regional predominance, both with the United States and with each other.

National ambition drives China's foreign policy today, and although it is tempered by prudence and the desire to appear as unthreatening as possible to the rest of the world, the Chinese are powerfully motivated to return their nation to what they regard as its traditional position as the preeminent power in East Asia. They do not share a European, postmodern view that power is passé; hence their now two-decades-long military buildup and modernization. Like the Americans, they believe power, including military power, is a good thing to have and that it is better to have more of it than less. Perhaps more significant is the Chinese perception, also shared by Americans, that status and honor, and not just wealth and security, are important for a nation.

Japan, meanwhile, which in the past could have been counted as an aspiring postmodern power -- with its pacifist constitution and low defense spending -- now appears embarked on a more traditional national course. Partly this is in reaction to the rising power of China and concerns about North Korea 's nuclear weapons. But it is also driven by Japan's own national ambition to be a leader in East Asia or at least not to play second fiddle or "little brother" to China. China and Japan are now in a competitive quest with each trying to augment its own status and power and to prevent the other 's rise to predominance, and this competition has a military and strategic as well as an economic and political component. Their competition is such that a nation like South Korea, with a long unhappy history as a pawn between the two powers, is once again worrying both about a "greater China" and about the return of Japanese nationalism. As Aaron Friedberg commented, the East Asian future looks more like Europe's past than its present. But it also looks like Asia's past.

Russian foreign policy, too, looks more like something from the nineteenth century. It is being driven by a typical, and typically Russian, blend of national resentment and ambition. A postmodern Russia simply seeking integration into the new European order, the Russia of Andrei Kozyrev, would not be troubled by the eastward enlargement of the EU and NATO, would not insist on predominant influence over its "near abroad," and would not use its natural resources as means of gaining geopolitical leverage and enhancing Russia 's international status in an attempt to regain the lost glories of the Soviet empire and Peter the Great. But Russia, like China and Japan, is moved by more traditional great-power considerations, including the pursuit of those valuable if intangible national interests: honor and respect. Although Russian leaders complain about threats to their security from NATO and the United States, the Russian sense of insecurity has more to do with resentment and national identity than with plausible external military threats. 16 Russia's complaint today is not with this or that weapons system. It is the entire post-Cold War settlement of the 1990s that Russia resents and wants to revise. But that does not make insecurity less a factor in Russia 's relations with the world; indeed, it makes finding compromise with the Russians all the more difficult.

One could add others to this list of great powers with traditional rather than postmodern aspirations. India 's regional ambitions are more muted, or are focused most intently on Pakistan, but it is clearly engaged in competition with China for dominance in the Indian Ocean and sees itself, correctly, as an emerging great power on the world scene. In the Middle East there is Iran, which mingles religious fervor with a historical sense of superiority and leadership in its region. 17 Its nuclear program is as much about the desire for regional hegemony as about defending Iranian territory from attack by the United States.

Even the European Union, in its way, expresses a pan-European national ambition to play a significant role in the world, and it has become the vehicle for channeling German, French, and British ambitions in what Europeans regard as a safe supranational direction. Europeans seek honor and respect, too, but of a postmodern variety. The honor they seek is to occupy the moral high ground in the world, to exercise moral authority, to wield political and economic influence as an antidote to militarism, to be the keeper of the global conscience, and to be recognized and admired by others for playing this role.

Islam is not a nation, but many Muslims express a kind of religious nationalism, and the leaders of radical Islam, including al Qaeda, do seek to establish a theocratic nation or confederation of nations that would encompass a wide swath of the Middle East and beyond. Like national movements elsewhere, Islamists have a yearning for respect, including self-respect, and a desire for honor. Their national identity has been molded in defiance against stronger and often oppressive outside powers, and also by memories of ancient superiority over those same powers. China had its "century of humiliation." Islamists have more than a century of humiliation to look back on, a humiliation of which Israel has become the living symbol, which is partly why even Muslims who are neither radical nor fundamentalist proffer their sympathy and even their support to violent extremists who can turn the tables on the dominant liberal West, and particularly on a dominant America which implanted and still feeds the Israeli cancer in their midst.

Finally, there is the United States itself. As a matter of national policy stretching back across numerous administrations, Democratic and Republican, liberal and conservative, Americans have insisted on preserving regional predominance in East Asia; the Middle East; the Western Hemisphere; until recently, Europe; and now, increasingly, Central Asia. This was its goal after the Second World War, and since the end of the Cold War, beginning with the first Bush administration and continuing through the Clinton years, the United States did not retract but expanded its influence eastward across Europe and into the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Even as it maintains its position as the predominant global power, it is also engaged in hegemonic competitions in these regions with China in East and Central Asia, with Iran in the Middle East and Central Asia, and with Russia in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. The United States, too, is more of a traditional than a postmodern power, and though Americans are loath to acknowledge it, they generally prefer their global place as "No. 1" and are equally loath to relinquish it. Once having entered a region, whether for practical or idealistic reasons, they are remarkably slow to withdraw from it until they believe they have substantially transformed it in their own image. They profess indifference to the world and claim they just want to be left alone even as they seek daily to shape the behavior of billions of people around the globe.

The jostling for status and influence among these ambitious nations and would-be nations is a second defining feature of the new post-Cold War international system. Nationalism in all its forms is back, if it ever went away, and so is international competition for power, influence, honor, and status. American predominance prevents these rivalries from intensifying -- its regional as well as its global predominance. Were the United States to diminish its influence in the regions where it is currently the strongest power, the other nations would settle disputes as great and lesser powers have done in the past: sometimes through diplomacy and accommodation but often through confrontation and wars of varying scope, intensity, and destructiveness. One novel aspect of such a multipolar world is that most of these powers would possess nuclear weapons. That could make wars between them less likely, or it could simply make them more catastrophic.

It is easy but also dangerous to underestimate the role the United States plays in providing a measure of stability in the world even as it also disrupts stability. For instance, the United States is the dominant naval power everywhere, such that other nations cannot compete with it even in their home waters. They either happily or grudgingly allow the United States Navy to be the guarantor of international waterways and trade routes, of international access to markets and raw materials such as oil. Even when the United States engages in a war, it is able to play its role as guardian of the waterways. In a more genuinely multipolar world, however, it would not. Nations would compete for naval dominance at least in their own regions and possibly beyond. Conflict between nations would involve struggles on the oceans as well as on land. Armed embargos, of the kind used in World War i and other major conflicts, would disrupt trade flows in a way that is now impossible.

Such order as exists in the world rests not merely on the goodwill of peoples but on a foundation provided by American power. Even the European Union, that great geopolitical miracle, owes its founding to American power, for without it the European nations after World War ii would never have felt secure enough to reintegrate Germany. Most Europeans recoil at the thought, but even today Europe 's stability depends on the guarantee, however distant and one hopes unnecessary, that the United States could step in to check any dangerous development on the continent. In a genuinely multipolar world, that would not be possible without renewing the danger of world war.

People who believe greater equality among nations would be preferable to the present American predominance often succumb to a basic logical fallacy. They believe the order the world enjoys today exists independently of American power. They imagine that in a world where American power was diminished, the aspects of international order that they like would remain in place. But that 's not the way it works. International order does not rest on ideas and institutions. It is shaped by configurations of power. The international order we know today reflects the distribution of power in the world since World War ii, and especially since the end of the Cold War. A different configuration of power, a multipolar world in which the poles were Russia, China, the United States, India, and Europe, would produce its own kind of order, with different rules and norms reflecting the interests of the powerful states that would have a hand in shaping it. Would that international order be an improvement? Perhaps for Beijing and Moscow it would. But it is doubtful that it would suit the tastes of enlightenment liberals in the United States and Europe.

The current order, of course, is not only far from perfect but also offers no guarantee against major conflict among the world 's great powers. Even under the umbrella of unipolarity, regional conflicts involving the large powers may erupt. War could erupt between China and Taiwan and draw in both the United States and Japan. War could erupt between Russia and Georgia, forcing the United States and its European allies to decide whether to intervene or suffer the consequences of a Russian victory. Conflict between India and Pakistan remains possible, as does conflict between Iran and Israel or other Middle Eastern states. These, too, could draw in other great powers, including the United States.

Such conflicts may be unavoidable no matter what policies the United States pursues. But they are more likely to erupt if the United States weakens or withdraws from its positions of regional dominance. This is especially true in East Asia, where most nations agree that a reliable American power has a stabilizing and pacific effect on the region. That is certainly the view of most of China 's neighbors. But even China, which seeks gradually to supplant the United States as the dominant power in the region, faces the dilemma that an American withdrawal could unleash an ambitious, independent, nationalist Japan.

In Europe, too, the departure of the United States from the scene -- even if it remained the world's most powerful nation -- could be destabilizing. It could tempt Russia to an even more overbearing and potentially forceful approach to unruly nations on its periphery. Although some realist theorists seem to imagine that the disappearance of the Soviet Union put an end to the possibility of confrontation between Russia and the West, and therefore to the need for a permanent American role in Europe, history suggests that conflicts in Europe involving Russia are possible even without Soviet communism. If the United States withdrew from Europe -- if it adopted what some call a strategy of "offshore balancing" -- this could in time increase the likelihood of conflict involving Russia and its near neighbors, which could in turn draw the United States back in under unfavorable circumstances.

It is also optimistic to imagine that a retrenchment of the American position in the Middle East and the assumption of a more passive, "offshore" role would lead to greater stability there. The vital interest the United States has in access to oil and the role it plays in keeping access open to other nations in Europe and Asia make it unlikely that American leaders could or would stand back and hope for the best while the powers in the region battle it out. Nor would a more "even-handed" policy toward Israel, which some see as the magic key to unlocking peace, stability, and comity in the Middle East, obviate the need to come to Israel 's aid if its security became threatened. That commitment, paired with the American commitment to protect strategic oil supplies for most of the world, practically ensures a heavy American military presence in the region, both on the seas and on the ground.

The subtraction of American power from any region would not end conflict but would simply change the equation. In the Middle East, competition for influence among powers both inside and outside the region has raged for at least two centuries. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism doesn 't change this. It only adds a new and more threatening dimension to the competition, which neither a sudden end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians nor an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq would change. The alternative to American predominance in the region is not balance and peace. It is further competition. The region and the states within it remain relatively weak. A diminution of American influence would not be followed by a diminution of other external influences. One could expect deeper involvement by both China and Russia, if only to secure their interests. 18 And one could also expect the more powerful states of the region, particularly Iran, to expand and fill the vacuum. It is doubtful that any American administration would voluntarily take actions that could shift the balance of power in the Middle East further toward Russia, China, or Iran. The world hasn 't changed that much. An American withdrawal from Iraq will not return things to "normal" or to a new kind of stability in the region. It will produce a new instability, one likely to draw the United States back in again.

The alternative to American regional predominance in the Middle East and elsewhere is not a new regional stability. In an era of burgeoning nationalism, the future is likely to be one of intensified competition among nations and nationalist movements. Difficult as it may be to extend American predominance into the future, no one should imagine that a reduction of American power or a retraction of American influence and global involvement will provide an easier path.

Liberalism and autocracy

Complicating the equation and adding to the stakes is that the return to the international competition of ambitious nations has been accompanied by a return to global ideological competition. More precisely, the two-centuries-old struggle between political liberalism and autocracy has reemerged as a third defining characteristic of the present era.

The Cold War may have caused us to forget that the more enduring ideological conflict since the Enlightenment has not been between capitalism and communism but between liberalism and autocracy. That was the issue that divided the United States from much of Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it divided Europe itself through much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The assumption that the death of communism would bring an end to disagreements about the proper form of government and society seemed more plausible in the 1990s, when both Russia and China were thought to be moving toward political as well as economic liberalism. Such a development would have produced a remarkable ideological convergence among all the great powers of the world and heralded a genuinely new era in human development.

But those expectations have proved misplaced. China has not liberalized but has shored up its autocratic government. Russia has turned away from imperfect liberalism decisively toward autocracy. Of the world 's great powers today, therefore, two of the largest, with over a billion and a half people, have governments that are committed to autocratic rule and seem to have the ability to sustain themselves in power for the foreseeable future with apparent popular approval.

Many assume that Russian and Chinese leaders do not believe in anything, and therefore they cannot be said to represent an ideology, but that is mistaken. The rulers of China and Russia do have a set of beliefs that guide them in both domestic and foreign policy. They believe autocracy is better for their nations than democracy. They believe it offers order and stability and the possibility of prosperity. They believe that for their large, fractious nations, a strong government is essential to prevent chaos and collapse. They believe democracy is not the answer and that they are serving the best interests of their peoples by holding and wielding power the way they do. This is not a novel or, from a historical perspective, even a disreputable idea. The European monarchies of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were thoroughly convinced of the superiority of their form of government. They disdained democracy as the rule of the licentious and greedy mob. Only in the past half-century has liberalism gained widespread popularity around the world, and even today some American thinkers exalt "liberal autocracy" over what they, too, disdain as "illiberal democracy." If two of the world's largest powers share a common commitment to autocratic government, autocracy is not dead as an ideology. The autocratic tradition has a long and distinguished past, and it is not as obvious as it once seemed that it has no future.

The foreign policies of such states necessarily reflect the nature and interests of their governments. In the age of monarchy, foreign policy served the interests of the monarchy. In the age of religious conflict, it served the interests of the church. In the modern era, democracies have pursued foreign policies to make the world safe for democracy. And autocracies pursue foreign policies aimed at making the world safe, if not for all autocracies, at least for their own continued rule. Today the competition between them, along with the struggle of radical Islamists to make the world safe for their vision of Islamic theocracy, has become a defining feature of the international scene.

The differences between the two camps appear on many issues of lesser strategic importance -- China's willingness to provide economic and political support to certain African dictatorships that liberal governments in Europe and the United States find odious, for instance. But they are also shaping international relations at a more fundamental level. Contrary to expectations at the end of the Cold War, the question of "regime" or "polity" is once again becoming a main subject of international relations.

The world looks very different from Moscow and Beijing than it does from Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris. In Europe and the United States, the liberal world cheered on the "color revolutions" in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan and saw in them the natural unfolding of humanity 's proper political evolution. In Russia and China, these events were viewed as Western-funded, CIA-inspired coups that furthered the geopolitical hegemony of America and its (subservient) European allies. The two autocratic powers responded similarly to NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999, and not only because China's embassy was bombed by an American warplane and Russia's slavic orthodox allies in Serbia were on the receiving end of the NATO onslaught. What the liberal "West" considered a moral act, a "humanitarian" intervention, leaders and analysts in Moscow and Beijing saw as unlawful and self-interested aggression. Indeed, since they do not share the liberal West 's liberalism, how could they have seen it any other way?

What is more, the allied intervention in Kosovo was unlawful, at least according to centuries of international law and the UN Charter. It was undertaken without authorization by the UN Security Council and against a sovereign nation that had committed no act of aggression beyond its borders. Americans and Europeans went to war in service of what they regarded as a "higher law" of liberal morality. For those who do not share this liberal morality, however, such acts are merely lawless, destructive of the traditional safeguards of national sovereignty.

Of course, it is precisely toward a less rigid conception of national sovereignty that the liberal world of Europe and the United States would like to go. It is their conception of progress and a beneficial evolution of international legal principles. Ideas that are becoming common currency in Europe and the United States -- limited sovereignty, "the responsibility to protect," a "voluntary sovereignty waiver" -- all aim to provide liberal nations the right to intervene in the affairs of nonliberal nations. The Chinese and Russians and the leaders of other autocracies cannot welcome this kind of progress. Nor is it surprising that China and Russia have become the world 's leading defenders of the Westphalian order of states, with its insistence upon the inviolable sovereign equality of all nations.

This is more than a dispute over the niceties of international law. It concerns the fundamental legitimacy of governments, which at the end of the day is a matter of life and death. Autocrats can hardly be expected to aid in legitimizing an evolution in the international system toward "limited sovereignty" and "the responsibility to protect." For even if the people and governments pushing this evolution do not believe they are establishing the predicate for international interventions against Russia and China, the leaders of those nations have no choice but to contemplate the possibility and to try to shield themselves. China, after all, has been a victim of international sanctions imposed by the U.S.-led liberal world, and for killing far fewer people than the governments of Sudan or Zimbabwe. Nor do China 's rulers forget that if the liberal world had had its way in 1989, they would now be out of office, probably imprisoned, possibly dead.

Because autocratic governments have a vital interest in disputing liberal principles of interventionism, they will often resist efforts by the liberal international community to put pressure on other autocracies around the world. Many in the United States and Europe have begun to complain about Chinese policies that provide unfettered aid to dictatorships in Africa and Asia, thereby undermining American and European efforts to press for reforms in countries such as Zimbabwe and Burma. To ask one dictatorship to aid in the undermining of another dictatorship, however, is asking a great deal. Chinese leaders will always be extremely reluctant to impose sanctions on autocrats when they themselves remain subject to sanctions for their own autocratic behavior. They may bend occasionally so as to avoid too-close association with what the West calls "rogue regimes." But the thrust of their foreign policy will be to support an international order that places a high value on national sovereignty.

Neither Russia nor China has any interest in assisting liberal nations in their crusade against autocracies around the world. Moreover, they can see their comparative advantage over the West when it comes to gaining influence with African, Asian, or Latin American governments that can provide access to oil and other vital natural resources or that, in the case of Burma, are strategically located. Moscow knows it can have more influence with governments in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan because, unlike the liberal West, it can unreservedly support their regimes. And the more autocracies there are in the world, the less isolated Beijing and Moscow will be in international forums such as the United Nations. The more dictatorships there are, the more global resistance they will offer against the liberal West 's efforts to place limits on sovereignty in the interest of advancing liberalism.

The general effect of the rise of these two large autocratic powers, therefore, will be to increase the likelihood that autocracy will spread in some parts of the world. This is not because Russia and China are evangelists for autocracy or want to set off a worldwide autocratic revolution. It is not the Cold War redux. It is more like the nineteenth century redux. Then, the absolutist rulers of Russia and Austria shored up fellow autocracies -- in France, for instance -- and used force to suppress liberal movements in Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain. China and Russia may not go that far, at least not yet. But Ukraine has already been a battleground between forces supported by the liberal West and forces supported by Russia. The great-power autocracies will inevitably offer support and friendship to those who feel besieged by the United States and other liberal nations. This in itself will strengthen the hand of autocracy in the world. Autocrats and would-be autocrats will know they can again find powerful allies and patrons, something that was not as true in the 1990s.

Moreover, China and (to a much lesser extent) Russia provide a model for successful autocracy, a way to create wealth and stability without political liberalization. This is hardly novel, of course. Hugo Chavez did not need China to show him the possibilities of successful autocracy, least of all in Latin America. In the 1970s, autocratic regimes such as Pinochet's Chile, the shah's Iran, and Suharto's Indonesia also demonstrated that economic success could come without political liberalization. But through the 1980s and 1990s the autocratic model seemed less attractive as dictatorships of both right and left fell before the liberal tide. That tide has not yet turned in the other direction, but the future may bring a return to a global competition between different forms of government, with the world 's great powers on opposite sides.

This has implications for international institutions and for American foreign policy. It is no longer possible to speak of an "international community." The term suggests agreement on international norms of behavior, an international morality, even an international conscience. The idea of such a community took hold in the 1990s, at a time when the general assumption was that the movement of Russia and China toward western liberalism was producing a global commonality of thinking about human affairs. But by the late 1990s it was already clear that the international community lacked a foundation of common understanding. This was exposed most blatantly in the war over Kosovo, which divided the liberal West from both Russia and China and from many other non-European nations. Today it is apparent on the issue of Sudan and Darfur. In the future, incidents that expose the hollowness of the term "international community" will likely proliferate.

As for the United Nations Security Council, after a brief awakening from the Cold War coma, it has fallen back to its former condition of near-paralysis. The agile diplomacy of France and the tactical caution of China have at times obscured the fact that the Security Council on most major issues is clearly divided between the autocracies and the democracies, with the latter systematically pressing for sanctions and other punitive actions against Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and other autocracies and the former just as systematically resisting and attempting to weaken the effect of such actions. This is a rut that is likely to deepen in the coming years. It will hinder, as it has already hindered, international efforts to provide assistance in humanitarian crises such as Darfur. It will also obstruct American and allied efforts to impose pressure and punishments on nations seeking nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, as it has already done in the cases of Iran and North Korea.

The problem goes beyond the Security Council. Efforts to achieve any international consensus in any forum are going to be more and more difficult because of the widening gap between liberal and autocratic governments. The current divisions between the United States and its European allies that have garnered so much attention in recent years are going to be overtaken by more fundamental ideological divisions, and especially by growing tensions between the democratic transatlantic alliance and Russia.

The divisions will be all the sharper where ideological fault lines coincide with those caused by competitive national ambitions. It may be largely accidental that two of the world 's more nationalistic powers are also the two leading autocracies, but this fact will have immense geopolitical significance.

Under these circumstances, calls for a new "concert" of nations in which Russia, China, the United States, Europe, and other great powers operate under some kind of international condominium are unlikely to succeed. The early nineteenth-century "Concert of Europe" operated under the umbrella of a common morality and shared principles of government. It aimed not only at the preservation of a European peace but also, and more importantly, at the maintenance of a monarchical and aristocratic order against the liberal and radical challenges presented by the French and American revolutions and their echoes elsewhere in Europe. The concert gradually broke down under the strains of popular nationalism, fueled in part by the rise of liberalism.

Today there is little sense of shared morality and common political principle among the great powers. Quite the contrary: There is suspicion, growing hostility, and the well-grounded view on the part of the autocracies that the democracies, whatever they say, would welcome their overthrow. Any concert among them would be built on a shaky foundation likely to collapse at the first serious test.

American foreign policy should be attuned to these ideological distinctions and recognize their relevance to the most important strategic questions. It is folly to expect China to help undermine a brutal regime in Khartoum or to be surprised if Russia rattles its saber at pro-Western democratic governments near its borders. There will be a tendency toward solidarity among the world 's autocracies, as well as among the world's democracies.

For all these reasons, the United States should pursue policies designed both to promote democracy and to strengthen cooperation among the democracies. It should join with other democracies to erect new international institutions that both reflect and enhance their shared principles and goals. One possibility might be to establish a global concert or league of democratic states, perhaps informally at first but with the aim of holding regular meetings and consultations on the issues of the day. Such an institution could bring together Asian nations such as Japan, Australia, and India with the European nations -- two sets of democracies that have comparatively little to do with each other outside the realms of trade and finance. The institution would complement, not replace, the United Nations, the G-8, and other global forums. But it would at the very least signal a commitment to the democratic idea, and in time it could become a means of pooling the resources of democratic nations to address a number of issues that cannot be addressed at the United Nations. If successful, it could come to be an organization capable of bestowing legitimacy on actions that liberal nations deem necessary but autocratic nations refuse to countenance -- as NATO conferred legitimacy on the conflict in Kosovo even though Russia was opposed.

Some will claim that such an organization will only create divisions in the world. But those divisions are already there. The question now is whether there is any way to pursue American interests and liberal democratic ends despite them.

Others will worry that European democracies are either unwilling or unable to share the burden in pursuing common goals with the United States. That may be true. But there is still reason to hope that an effort to reinvigorate democratic solidarity may increase European willingness to take on such burdens, especially when it coincides with the increasingly autocratic and belligerent behavior of Russia and the continuing rise of autocratic China.

In such an international environment the United States should continue, as it has in the past, to prefer democracy over autocracy and to use its influence to promote the former when opportunities arise. This is more than just a matter of moral preference, although Americans often cannot avoid expressing and acting on that preference. But in a world where autocracies increasingly look for allies in fellow autocracies, the democracies will want to do the same. The United States should discourage moves toward autocracy in democratic nations, both by punishing steps that undo democratic institutions and by providing support to those institutions and individuals who favor democratic principles. It should isolate autocratic governments when possible while encouraging internal pressure for democratic reform. History suggests that external influences, especially by the global superpower, have a positive if not determinative influence on the political course nations take. The United States should express support for democracy in word and deed without expecting immediate success. It should support the development of liberal institutions and practices, understanding that elections alone do not guarantee a steady liberal democratic course. But neither should Americans lose sight of the centrality of free and fair elections for both democracy and true liberalism.

The United States need not engage in a blind crusade on behalf of democracy everywhere at all times, nor need it seek a violent confrontation with the autocratic powers. For one thing, all the world 's great powers share some important common interests, especially in the economic realm. Nor can an intelligent foreign policy ever be guided solely by one set of principles. Promoting democracy cannot and should not be the only goal of American foreign policy, any more than can producing wealth, fighting terrorism, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, or any other national goal or ambition. There will be times when promoting democracy will have to take a back seat to other objectives. The job of statesmen is to determine when. But democracy should be as highly valued as the others, for it is, like them, of strategic importance. As the hard-headed Dean Acheson put it, Americans "are children of freedom" and "cannot be safe except in an environment of freedom." 19

The emphasis on democracy, liberalism, and human rights has strategic relevance in part because it plays to American strengths and exposes the weaknesses of the autocratic powers. It is easy to look at China and Russia today and believe they are simply getting stronger and stronger. But one should not overlook their fragility. These autocratic regimes may be stronger than they were in the past in terms of wealth and global influence. But they do still live in a predominantly liberal era. That means they face an unavoidable problem of legitimacy. They are not like the autocracies of nineteenth-century Europe, which still enjoyed a historical legitimacy derived partly from the fact that the world had known nothing but autocracy for centuries. To be an autocrat today is to be constantly concerned that the powerful forces of liberalism, backed by a collection of rich, advanced nations, including the world 's only superpower, will erode or undermine the controls necessary to stay in power. Today 's autocracies struggle to create a new kind of legitimacy, and it is no easy task. The Chinese leaders race forward with their economy in fear that any slowing will be their undoing. They fitfully stamp out signs of political opposition partly because they live in fear of repeating the Soviet experience. Having watched the Soviet Union succumb to the liberal West, thanks to what they regard as Mikhail Gorbachev's weakness and mistakes, they are determined neither to show weakness nor to make the same mistakes.

Vladimir Putin shares both their contempt for Gorbachev and their commitment to the lessons learned from his downfall. In a nice historical irony, the Russian leader, in order to avoid a Russian d énouement, is trying to adopt a Chinese model of modern autocracy, using oil and gas wealth instead of entrepreneurship to buy off the Russian elite as he consolidates power in the name of stability and nationalism. In both countries, the renewed international competition among ambitious nations is helpful in this respect. It allows the governments to charge dissidents and would-be democrats as fifth-columnists for American hegemony. In Russia 's case, it has been easy for Putin to tarnish liberal democrats by associating them in the popular mind with past policies of accommodation and even subservience to the United States and the West.

Nevertheless, the Chinese are not just pretending when they claim their deep internal problems make them hesitant to pursue a more adventurous foreign policy. Leaders in Beijing rightly fear they are riding a tiger at home, and they fear external support for a political opposition more than they fear foreign invasion. Even promoting nationalism as a means of enhancing legitimacy is a dangerous business, since in Chinese history nationalist movements have evolved into revolutionary movements.

The Russian regime is also vulnerable to pressures from within and without, for unlike China, Russia still maintains the trappings of democracy. It would not be easy for a Russian leader simply to abandon all pretense and assume the role of tsar. Elections must still be held, even if they are unfair or are merely referendums on the selection of the leadership. This provides an opportunity for dissidents within and liberals on the outside to preserve the possibility of a return to democratic governance in Russia. It certainly would be a strategic error to allow Putin and any possible successor to strengthen their grip on power without outside pressures for reform, for the consolidation of autocracy at home will free the Russian leadership to pursue greater nationalist ambitions abroad. In these and other autocracies, including Iran, promoting democracy and human rights exacerbates internal political contradictions and can have the effect of blunting external ambitions as leaders tend to more dangerous threats from within.

In most of the world today -- in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and even Africa -- the idea of supporting democracy against autocracy is not very controversial, though there are heated debates over precisely how to do it. The issue becomes more complicated when one turns to the Middle East, where some observers believe the Arab people are simply not ready for democracy and where the prospect of electoral victories by Islamist movements seems to some the worst possible outcome. Should the United States and others promote democracy in the Middle East too?

Part of the answer comes if one turns the question around and asks: Should the United States support autocracy in the Middle East? That is the only other choice, after all. There is no neutral stance on such matters. The United States is either supporting an autocracy, through aid, recognition, amicable diplomatic relations, and regular economic intercourse, or it is using its manifold influence in varying degrees to push for democratic reform. The number of American thinkers who believe that the United States should simply support Middle Eastern autocrats and not push for change at all is small, and the number of policymakers and politicians who support that view is even smaller. After September 11, 2001, most observers agreed that American support for autocratic regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia was the "principal source of resentment" of the terrorists who launched the attack on the United States and that, therefore, a policy of simply supporting autocrats in those and other Middle Eastern countries would be a mistake. 20

The main questions, then, are really a matter of tactics and timing. But no matter whether one prefers faster or slower, harder or softer, there will always be the risk that pressure of any kind will produce a victory for radical Islamists. Is that a risk worth taking? A similar question arose constantly during the Cold War, when American liberals called on the United States to stop supporting Third World dictators and American conservatives and neoconservatives warned that the dictators would be replaced by pro-Soviet communists. Sometimes this proved true. But other times such efforts produced moderate democratic governments that were pro-American. The lesson of the Reagan years, when pro-American and reasonably democratic governments replaced right-wing dictatorships in El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Korea, to name just a few, was that the risk was, on balance, worth taking.

It may be worth taking again in the Middle East, and not only as a strategy of democracy promotion but as part of a larger effort to address the issue of Islamic radicalism by accelerating and intensifying its confrontation with the modern, globalized world.

Modernization, globalization, Islam, and their discontents

The Islamists' struggle against the powerful and often impersonal forces of modernization, capitalism, and globalization is another significant fact of life in the world today. Much of this fight has been peaceful, but some of it has been violent and now, oddly, poses by far the greatest threat of a catastrophic attack on the mainland of the United States.

It is odd because the struggle between modernization and globalization, on the one hand, and traditionalism, on the other, is largely a sideshow on the international stage. The future is more likely to be dominated by the struggle among the great powers and between the great ideologies of liberalism and autocracy than by the effort of some radical Islamists to restore an imagined past of piety. But of course that struggle has taken on a new and frightening dimension. Normally, when old and less technologically advanced civilizations have confronted more advanced civilizations, their inadequate weapons have reflected their backwardness. Today, the radical proponents of Islamic traditionalism, though they abhor the modern world, are nevertheless not only using the ancient methods of assassination and suicidal attacks, but also have deployed the weapons of the modern world against it. Modernization and globalization inflamed their rebellion and also armed them for the fight.

It is a lonely and ultimately desperate fight, for in the struggle between tradition and modernization, tradition cannot win -- though traditional forces armed with modern technology can put up a good fight. All the world's rich and powerful nations have more or less embraced the economic, technological, and even social aspects of modernization and globalization. All have embraced, albeit with varying degrees of complaint and resistance, the free flow of goods, finances, and services, and the intermingling of cultures and lifestyles that characterize the modern world. Increasingly, their people watch the same television shows, listen to the same music, and go to the same movies. And along with this dominant modern culture they have accepted, even as they may also deplore, the essential characteristics of a modern morality and aesthetics: the sexual as well as political and economic liberation of women, the weakening of church authority and the strengthening of secularism, the existence of what used to be called the counterculture, free expression in the arts (if not in politics), which includes the freedom to commit blasphemy and to lampoon symbols of faith, authority, and morality -- these and all the countless effects of liberalism and capitalism unleashed and unchecked by the constraining hand of tradition, a powerful church, or a moralistic and domineering government. The Chinese have learned that while it is possible to have capitalism without political liberalization, it is much harder to have capitalism without cultural liberalization.

Today radical Islamists are the last holdout against these powerful forces of globalization and modernization. They seek to carve out a part of the world where they can be left alone, shielded from what they regard as the soul-destroying licentiousness of unchecked liberalism and capitalism. The tragedy for them is that their goal is impossible to achieve. Neither the United States nor the other great powers will turn over control of the Middle East to these fundamentalist forces, if only because the region is of such vital strategic importance to the rest of the world. The outside powers have strong internal allies as well, including the majority of the populations of the Middle East who have been willing and even eager to make peace with modernity. Nor is it conceivable in this modern world that a people can wall themselves off from modernity even if the majority wanted to. Could the great Islamic theocracy that al Qaeda and others hope to erect ever completely block out the sights and sounds of the rest of the world and thereby shield their people from the temptations of modernity? The mullahs have not even succeeded at doing that in Iran. The project is fantastic.

The world is thus faced with the prospect of a protracted struggle in which the goals of the extreme Islamists can never be satisfied because neither the United States nor anyone else has the ability to give them what they want. The West is quite simply not capable of retreating as far as the Islamic extremists require.

If retreat is impossible, perhaps the best course is to advance. Of the many bad options in confronting this immensely dangerous problem, the best may be to hasten the process of modernization in the Islamic world: more modernization, more globalization, faster. This would require greater efforts to support and expand capitalism and the free market in Arab countries, as many have already recommended, as well as efforts to increase public access to the modern world through television and the internet. Nor should it be considered a setback if these modern communication tools are also used to organize radical extremism. That is unavoidable so long as the radical Islamist backlash persists, which it will for some time.

Finally, the liberal world should continue to promote political modernization and liberalization; support human rights, including the rights of women; and use its influence to support repeated elections that may, if nothing else, continually shift power from the few to the many. This, too, will produce setbacks. It will provide a channel for popular resentments to express themselves and for radical Islamism itself to take power. But perhaps this phase is as unavoidable as the present conflict. Perhaps the sooner it is begun, the sooner a new phase can take its place. 21

Throughout all these efforts, whose success is by no means guaranteed and certainly not any time soon, the United States and others will have to persist in fighting what is, in fact, quite accurately called "the war on terrorism." Now and probably for the coming decades, organized terrorist groups will seek to strike at the United States, and at modernity itself, when and where they can. This war will not and cannot be the totality of America 's worldwide strategy. It can be only a piece of it. But given the high stakes, it must be prosecuted ruthlessly, effectively, and for as long as the threat persists. This will sometimes require military interventions when, as in Afghanistan, states either cannot or will not deny the terrorists a base. That aspect of the "war on terror" is certainly not going away. One need only contemplate the American popular response should a terrorist group explode a nuclear weapon on American soil. No president of any party or ideological coloration will be able to resist the demands of the American people for retaliation and revenge, and not only against the terrorists but against any nation that aided or harbored them. Nor, one suspects, will the American people disapprove when a president takes preemptive action to forestall such a possibility -- assuming the action is not bungled.

The United States will not have many eager partners in this fight. For although in the struggle between modernization and tradition, the United States, Russia, China, Europe, and the other great powers are roughly on the same side, the things that divide them from each other -- the competing national ambitions and ideological differences -- will inevitably blunt their ability or their willingness to cooperate in the military aspects of a fight against radical Islamic terrorism. Europeans have been and will continue to be less than enthusiastic about what they emphatically do not call "the war on terror." And it will be tempting for Russian and Chinese leaders to enjoy the spectacle of the United States bogged down in a fight with al Qaeda and other violent Islamist groups in the Middle East, just as it is tempting to let American power in that region be checked by a nuclear-armed Iran. Unfortunately, the willingness of the autocrats in Moscow and Beijing to run interference for their fellow autocrats in Pyongyang, Tehran, and Khartoum increases the chance that the connection between terrorists and nuclear weapons will eventually be made.

The end of grand expectations

When the Cold War ended, it was possible to imagine that the world had been utterly changed: the end of international competition, the end of geopolitics, the end of history. When in the first decade after the Cold War people began describing the new era of "globalization," the common expectation was that the phenomenon of instantaneous global communications, the free flow of goods and services, the rapid transmission of ideas and information, and the intermingling and blending of cultures would further knit together a world that had already just patched up the great ideological and geopolitical tears of the previous century. "Globalization" was to the late twentieth century what "sweet commerce" was to the late eighteenth -- an anticipated balm for a war-weary world.

In the 1990s serious thinkers predicted the end of wars and military confrontations among great powers. European "postmodernism" seemed to be the future: the abandonment of power politics in favor of international institutions capable of managing the disagreements among nations. Even today, there are those who believe the world is moving along the same path as the European Union. John Ikenberry recently described the post-Cold War era, the decade of the 1990s, as a liberal paradise:

NAFTA, APEC, and the WTO signaled a strengthening of the rules and institutions of the world economy. NATO was expanded and the U.S.-Japan alliance was renewed. Russia became a quasi-member of the West and China was a "strategic partner" with Washington. Clinton's grand strategy of building post-Cold War order around expanding markets, democracy, and institutions was the triumphant embodiment of the liberal vision of international order. 22

Perhaps it was these grand expectations of a new era for humankind that helped spur the anger and outrage at American policies of the past decade. It is not that those policies are in themselves so different, or in any way out of character for the United States. It is that to many people in Europe and even in the United States, they have seemed jarringly out of place in a world that was supposed to have moved on.

As we now know, however, both nationalism and ideology were already making their comeback in the 1990s. Russia had ceased to be and no longer desired to be a "quasi-member" of the West, and partly because of NATO enlargement. China was already on its present trajectory and had already determined that American hegemony was a threat to its ambitions. The forces of radical Islam had already begun their jihad, globalization had already caused a backlash around the world, and the juggernaut of democracy had already stalled and begun to tip precariously.

After the Second World War, another moment in history when hopes for a new kind of international order were rampant, Hans Morgenthau warned idealists against imagining that at some point "the final curtain would fall and the game of power politics would no longer be played. " But the world struggle continued then, and it continues today. Six decades ago American leaders believed the United States had the unique ability and the unique responsibility to use its power to prevent a slide back to the circumstances that produced two world wars and innumerable national calamities. Although much has changed since then, America 's responsibility has not.
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1 This was the title chosen by former President George H. W. Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, for their account of American foreign policy at the end of the Cold War.

2 Second Inaugural Address of William J. Clinton (January 20, 1997).

3 Dean Acheson, quoted in Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2006), 372.

4 The quotations are of course from Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

5 See Stephen Sestanovich, "American Maximalism," National Interest (Spring 2005).