A stabler world with the US

WHAT were you doing at that fateful moment, late in the night, Australian time, on September 11 last year? The terrorist attacks in the US were the sort of event that will make you remember the answer to that question forever.

Oddly enough, I was doing a telephone interview with BBC radio about Australia's refugee policy. The announcer interrupted to say a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York.

I thought at first it was an aviation disaster and turned on Sky News not to look at New York but to see whether there was any breaking news on the Tampa refugees.

But Sky switched almost instantly to CNN and I spent the rest of the night in shock and amazement, watching the towers collapse, racing between telephone, computer and television, trying to make some contribution to the next day's paper.

One conviction formed early in the night and has stayed with me ever since – that the world was changed utterly by September 11 The demonstration of American vulnerability coexisting with American hyper power has catapulted us into a new strategic realm.

The alteration to the international system has already been substantial and will only grow over time. We've seen, for one, the total re-engagement of the US in every aspect of global security. As Michael Hirsch argues in Foreign Affairs: "Whether the world likes it or not, American power is now the linchpin of stability in every region, from Europe to Asia to the Persian Gulf to Latin America." And, he adds, Central Asia and South Asia too.

Great power relations are transformed. US ties with Russia, China and India are invigorated. Getting missile defence accepted has been a breeze for Washington in this environment.

A huge gulf has opened up between the US and western Europe. Robert Kagan, in an influential essay, Power and Weakness, in Policy Review, argues that the European Union represents a postmodern system. Internal dealings in this system no longer rely on state power, especially the hard power of military capability.

This has produced a jarring culture clash with the US which is modern rather than postmodern. The US can behave in a postmodern fashion internally but externally still has to deal with not only other modern nations but also pre-modern or even anti-modern forces, such as Islamic fundamentalism.

Kagan sees Europe's relative power continuing to decline vis-a-vis the US, and comments: "The day could come, if it has not already, when Americans will no more heed the pronouncements of the EU than they do the pronouncements of ASEAN or the Andean Pact."

In many ways a fascinating counterpoint to this is provided by the brilliant neo-conservative Charles Krauthammer, who argues in The Weekly Standard that the US now finds more natural partners in east Europe than west Europe, because east Europeans, only recently liberated, are more sympathetic to core US values of liberty and national security. The west Europeans emphasise process and supranational institutions, Washington wants results and believes the primary players in the international system are individual nation-states.

Certainly the stark demonstration of the US's historically unique power has been another result of 9/11. The US now accounts for 34 per cent – and rising – of the global economy. It accounts for 36 per cent of global defence spending, 40 per cent of global research spending and nearly 85 per cent of global cinema revenues. The Economist last week drew attention to another critically important phenomenon: the US has a much younger and more fertile population than Europe. The US now has 285 million people, compared with west Europe's 400 million. By 2025 the US could overtake the EU area in absolute population. By the middle of the century there could easily be 500 million Americans. All straight-line extrapolations are fraught, but US power looks as though it's here to stay.

However, the power is not without problems. The past 12 months have also demonstrated that the Bush administration suffers serious internal divisions over how to use that power. Hirsch describes three main tendencies within the Bush administration. There are what he terms the moderate multilateralists around Secretary of State Colin Powell and his allies among some reluctant generals. There are the realist unilateralists – mainly Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And there are the neo-conservatives, led by Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps the most brilliant figure in the administration. The neo-cons are hawks but they add a high moral charge, an ideological norm in favour of supporting the spread of democracy, in foreign policy.

The other revelation is how important nation-building is going to be in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. Here the fault line is less likely to be hawk versus dove but realist unilateralist versus neo-con. The Bush administration's anaemic effort at nation-building in Afghanistan so far – not enough money, not enough commitment beyond Kabul – is the weakest point in its conduct of the war on terror to this point.

We've seen, too, how wrong most alarmist predictions about the futility and impossibility of effective US action have been, just as they were about the Gulf War in 1991. They will be seen as similarly alarmist after the US successfully completes its coming Iraq campaign.

This was a very well-written analysis, but I would take issue with this statement:

The past 12 months have also demonstrated that the Bush administration suffers serious internal divisions over how to use that power.

I think the past 12 months have really demonstrated the power of the NY Times to gin up controversy, based on anonymous quotes from supposed insiders, or real quotes from known outsiders (like Henry Kissinger and Bill Richardson.)

It also demonstrates how all other news media do not feel the need to independently research and confirm stories on their own. If the Times says it, it must be so, apparently. This despite the Times horrendous track record for falsifying, or at the very least spinning, stories to fit their own pacifist, liberal, pro-internationalist agenda.

The US now accounts for 34 per cent – and rising – of the global economy. It accounts for 36 per cent of global defence spending, 40 per cent of global research spending...

We are one incredible nation. It's no wonder we freak the world out the way we do.

Nice article. I've sent it off to my Australian friends who think the US is too powerful and their prime minister is a suck-up to Bush.

I think what we need to see this September 11th is Americans of all stripe once again remember the pain of 2001. With a brilliant prime-time speech by the President, perhaps we can turn the remembrance of that day into a growing resolve to get things done - all over the world.

Nice article, but I have to disagree that the world needs stability everywhere. In many countries the status quo sucks - lots of abscesses need popping in the Mideast, Africa, Asia, and Central and South America, and - of couse - Cuba.

Where would the world be if the American colonies hadn't rebelled, the Berlin wall hadn't fallen, or the Soviet Union hadn't imploded? Some dynamic rearrangement of today's "stability" is sorely needed.

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