The failings of the UN in the Balkan wars of the 1990s were the failings of the countries that made it up, and above all of the great powers with permanent seats on the Security Council.  Since the Security Council is a veto-driven body, it can only be as determined to act as its most weak-kneed permanent member, which is a large problem if you have ambitions to see the UN become the full-time policeman of a new world order, fighting evil wherever it appears.

            The problem is exactly the same, however, if you propose to fight evil instead with Richard Perle’s “coalitions of the willing” – in the case of Iraq, the United States, Britain and whichever countries it can beg, bully or bribe into coming along.  Just as there are some jobs that the Security Council will take on and others that it cannot agree upon, so there are some evils that Washington wants to fight, and others that it either doesn’t care enough about – the Burmese dictatorship, for example – or does not dare take on, like North Korea or Iran.

            In any case, the United Nations was not created to fight evil wherever it appears.  It was designed primarily to stop the kind of straightforward cross-border aggression that had triggered both the First and the Second World Wars, but must not be allowed to cause a Third – and indeed, unprovoked invasions of the classic kind have been remarkably rare since 1945, presumably because the new international rules embodied in the UN Charter really do have some deterrent value.  Since the veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council stand to lose everything themselves in another world war, they have generally been able to act in a surprisingly coordinated and decisive manner at the UN when events elsewhere threatened to drag them into such a conflict.

            The first real test of the new rules came in June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea.   The Security Council passed the test with flying colours, promptly authorizing the dispatch of a UN military force under American command which fought a three-year war to repel the aggression.  True, that resolution probably only passed because the Soviet Union, North Korea’s ally, was boycotting the Security Council at the time over the issue of China’s membership and therefore was not present to cast its veto.

            Stalin in his final years was not wholly sane, and post-Soviet research in Russia suggests that he encouraged North Korea to invade the South.  But Stalin’s successors in the Soviet Union were generally as aware of their duty to avoid another world war as their Western counterparts, and when real crises came along the Security Council functioned fairly well.  It managed to obtain rapid cease-fires in the various Arab-Israeli and Indo-Pakistani wars that dotted the last half of the twentieth century.  On the other hand, the veto meant that it could take no collective stand on aggressions that occurred entirely within the sphere of influence of one of the superpowers themselves, like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the US invasion of Grenada in 1983.  And the Security Council completely dodged the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, mainly because, with both Washington and Moscow solidly supporting Saddam Hussein, the conflict presented no danger to world peace.

            Saddam’s subsequent invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was different, and not only because it threatened American interests in the Gulf.  Although all Iraqi governments since independence had maintained a territorial claim to Kuwait, there was no recent history of tit-for-tat interventions and provocations as there had been between Iraq and Iran:  the invasion of Kuwait came utterly out of the blue.  It was one of the most blatant cases of unprovoked international aggression since Korea in 1950, and Saddam’s declaration that he was annexing Kuwait compounded the offence:  for the first time ever, a member of the UN was being conquered and absorbed by another member.

            The situation was almost identical to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 that had demonstrated the inability of the League of Nations to respond to aggression and so initiated the slide into the Second World War, and leaders who understood that history were determined that the United Nations should not go the same way as its predecessor.  As it happened, the historically minded people in power at the time included Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H.W. Bush, both of whom were strongly committed to using the Security Council more vigorously to ensure global order in a post-Cold War world.   So there was virtually no hesitation:  the Security Council voted full legal authority for an American-led army to drive Saddam out of his conquest, and Mr Bush did everything possible to ensure that the Gulf War of 1991 would be a useful precedent for future UN military operations to contain aggression and enforce international law.  The elder Bush was a man of immense international experience – former US ambassador to China, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, global business connections – and he actually understood the way the world works.  In particular, he was conscious of the limitations of US power, the importance of restraint in military operations, and the absolute primacy of international law.

            We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order – a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful – and we will be – we have a chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the UN’s founders.

                   President George H.W. Bush, announcing the start of hostilities in the first Gulf                     War, January 16, 1991

            He actually meant it, too: what he was going to do in Iraq was precisely what the UN Security Council had authorised him to do, and not a bit more. “Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs,” George Bush senior wrote in his 1998 book A World Transformed (co-authored with his former National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft). “....We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.  The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well.  There was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles.  Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world.  Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish.”

            George Bush senior did not want Saddam Hussein to go on ruling in Iraq.  He even encouraged rebellions against Saddam in the Shia south and Kurdish north of Iraq, although he probably regretted that in the end because without direct American support the revolts simply got a lot of people killed for nothing.  (Most of the bodies found in mass graves in Iraq after the 2003 invasion were people killed in the unsuccessful revolt against Saddam that Bush called for in 1991.) But he would not order US forces to invade Iraq and overthrow  Saddam Hussein even though the road to Baghdad was open, because that would be going beyond the law. 

            The elder Bush also had grave reservations on a purely military level about going to Baghdad – “Had we gone the invasion route,” he wrote in 1998, “the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land” – but his first concerns were the United Nations and international law.  He believed that the end of the Cold War had created an opportunity for the UN Security Council to begin functioning as a real enforcer of international peace and order, and he was not going to throw that away by exceeding his legal mandate from the Security Council.  When he spoke of a “New World Order,” he really meant it.  He had lived his whole adult life under the threat of a major nuclear war, and for him the strengthening of international law was an absolute priority.  There was much more at stake than the fate of one tinpot dictator or even the fate of the Shia rebels, so once he reached the limit of his UN mandate to liberate Kuwait, he stopped.

            Twelve years later his son George W. carried out the invasion and occupation of the whole of Iraq without plausible provocation, legal justification, or Security Council approval.  His administration formally adopted a US national strategy of maintaining absolute military superiority over any rival power or combination of powers on the planet in perpetuity – an absurd ambition, but no less serious for all that.  His challenge to the United Nations on the eve of his invasion of Iraq contained a scarcely hidden threat that the organization would henceforward be ignored by its most powerful member if it didn’t follow Washington’s lead:  “All the world faces a test and the UN a difficult and defining moment.  Will it serve the purpose of its founding [by giving Washington permission to attack Iraq], or will it be irrelevant?”  And there was no coherent criticism of this blatant rejection of international law by the Democratic presidential candidate during the 2004 campaign, either; just promises to pursue the same course more efficiently and with more attention to bringing important allies along. How did we get from the elder George Bush’s “New World Order” to this desperate situation so fast?

            It was not a straight downward path.  In the afterglow of the successful Gulf War in 1991 and with better cooperation among the veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, there were several attempts to expand the UN’s ability to intervene in armed conflicts beyond the limits laid down by the Charter.  The various UN peacekeeping forces that had been sent to troubled corners of the world during the long decades of the Cold War had always gone at the request or at least with the consent of the ‘host’ governments, since the UN’s own rules forbade it to intervene in the affairs of sovereign member states without permission, but in the 1990s some peacekeeping missions and more robust ‘peace-enforcement’ operations began to edge beyond the traditional boundaries.

            The first of these, the ill-starred Somali intervention in 1992, was undertaken without any invitation or request for help from the host government because there simply wasn’t any central government any more:  Somalia had become a mere battlefield where rival militias fought amid a starving populace.  In the minds of some of the authors of the action, in particular that of President George H.W. Bush, part of the attraction of ‘doing’ Somalia may have been precisely that it gave the UN an opportunity to redefine and expand the nature of peacekeeping operations in a case that was not strictly illegal under the Charter. Nevertheless, it was an operation quite startling in its altruism, for none of the intervening powers had anything to gain from the intervention nor did the chaos and misery of Somalia threaten any of their vital interests.

            Unfortunately, it was also a very difficult operation in an intensely hostile environment.  For for the United States, which lost eighteen soldiers killed in a single day in Mogadishu in an ill-advised and badly managed raid (the ‘Black Hawk down’ episode) that also killed up to a thousand Somalis, it ended up being perceived as an abject failure.  One of President Bill Clinton’s first acts in office in 1993 was to pull the whole US force out of Mogadishu, and the experience left such deep scars on the new administration that Clinton flatly refused to allow the UN to mount a major military operation in Rwanda in 1994 to stop the genocide there. It was not so easy to ignore the savage wars that began to wreck the countries of former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, however, and gradually and reluctantly Clinton’s administration was drawn back into the business of military intervention.

            The Balkan military interventions of the 1990s – Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 – were undertaken in a quite different political atmosphere from Somalia.  They were in a part of the world where the great powers had major political and security interests (and even, in the case of the Russians, strong emotional ties).  They ran straight up against the ban on UN intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states:  Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was a vicious sponsor of ethnic cleansing and mass murder, but he was definitely the legitimate ruler of a sovereign state, and bombing Serbia to make him stop what he was doing definitely constituted intervention in its internal affairs.  So Russia, where public opinion is instinctively pro-Serb and anti-Muslim for historical reasons, and China, which is perennially nervous about any change in the rules about sovereignty that might expose it to future intervention, were both unwilling to authorize offensive military operations in the Balkans under UN auspices.

            Since Russia and China both wielded vetos on the UN Security Council, nothing could legally be done to stop the slaughter of Muslims by forces operating with Milosevic’s tacit approval in Bosnia and later in Kosovo – yet something had to be done.  The solution was to wage limited air-only wars against Serbia using “coalitions of the willing” (in practice, the forces of the Nato alliance) that operated on a nod-and-a-wink basis, with the unspoken understanding that these operations would receive UN approval after the fact.  The Kosovo war in 1999 was a particularly dodgy business from the legal point of view because Kosovo, unlike Bosnia, was still part of Serbia and so all the horrors there were, strictly speaking, a Serbian domestic affair.

            NATO undertook the Kosovo operation only because all the major powers understood that the Russian government, while obliged by public opinion at home to veto any proposal for military action against Serbia that came before the Security Council,  wasn’t really planning to die in a ditch to stop it from happening.  It was virtually certain that the Russian government, which was run by quite sensible people, would allow the UN to take ownership of the occupation and retrospectively legitimize the war once the shooting stopped – and so would the Chinese government, which had no wish to isolate itself further in a world where every other major power is at least formally democratic.

            If it was acceptable for NATO to attack Serbia over Kosovo in 1999 without Security Council authority, on the assumption that the legal details could be tidied up later, then why was it wrong for the United States to invade Iraq without UN authority in 2003?  The answer is that in 2003 there was not even tacit support for the US action among a majority of the members of the Security Council.

            When the UN’s members, driven mainly by humanitarian considerations, began to stretch the rules against outside intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states after the end of the Cold War, they did so on the understanding that it would always be done on the basis of a broad consensus, and there was no such consensus on Iraq.  On the contrary, few governments believed the Bush administration’s allegation that Iraq represented a threat to world peace urgent enough to justify the unprovoked invasion of an independent country, nor was the humanitarian situation there any worse than it had been for the previous ten or twenty years.  Other countries simply did not believe Washington’s “evidence” or trust its motives, so the Bush administration went to war virtually alone.

            In attacking Iraq in March 2003, Washington not only violated international law, but it also abandoned the multilateral consensus that had more or less legitimized the various attempts to move beyond the strict UN rules in the name of humanitarian intervention during the 1990s.  There are those who would argue, with the wisdom of hindsight, that those attempts to move beyond the old ban on invading a sovereign state even for humanitarian reasons were therefore a mistake, since they gave Washington a precedent of sorts to work with.  However, this argument implicitly assumes that the Bush administration actually cared about the UN rules and merely wanted to expand the scope for legal intervention further to embrace cases like Iraq.  This was not the case.

I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing....International law would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone.

                                                                                  Richard Perle, London, November 20, 2003

            The real ambition of the neo-conservatives who came to power with George W. Bush, frankly expressed in their speeches and writings, was to sweep aside all impediments to the unilateral exercise of American power, starting with the legal authority of the Security Council.  Many of them were therefore quietly pleased when the United States ended up invading Iraq illegally and virtually alone apart from Britain:  that helped to drive home to everybody the fact that America’s actions were showing the United Nations to be, in Bush’s word, “irrelevant.”  In a nod to the old rules, the US government’s international lawyers did throw up a legal smokescreen of claims that the United States was free to attack Iraq without explicit UN authorization on the basis of old Security Council resolutions dating back to before the first Gulf war in 1991, but there was scarcely an independent expert on international law in the world who accepted those claims – and the neo-cons couldn’t have cared less.

            So they got their war, and of course they won it easily (annual US military spending was about 140 times greater than Iraq’s).  To a considerable extent, they also succeeded in sidelining the United Nations, which lacked the ability to stop the American action and realised that it would be counter-productive to condemn it openly.  But if the UN sinks into irrelevance, what replaces it?  Will the other countries of the world – the other 96 per cent of the human race – accept the unilateral exercise of US power as an adequate substitute for the rule of law in international affairs?  Certainly not.

            The entire international community has been in a state of suspended animation since the United States invaded Iraq.  Most other governments deplored what the Bush administration did, but they were so appalled by the choices they would have to make if this turned out to be a permanent new reality that they put everything on hold until at least early 2005.  They continued to believe that the United Nations is our only real bulwark against a return to the lethal old world of international anarchy, and they did not want to abandon the work of sixty years in response to a unilateralist US foreign policy that might prove to be a passing phase in America’s adjustment to the changing global balance of power.  They even devised a strategy of sorts for trying to shepherd the United States back inside the system without a confrontation.

            In October 2003, the Security Council even passed a unanimous resolution that recognized US responsibility to hand over control to a new Iraqi government as soon as possible, and in June 2004 it passed a further resolution recognising the ‘sovereign government’ that the United States had selected to replace direct US rule in Iraq.  On the surface, it looked as if the invasion of Iraq had been just another Kosovo-style exercise where a “coalition of the willing” was given a nod and a wink from the UN to do the job, with legitimation after the fact by the Security Council a foregone conclusion.  But it was nothing of the sort.

            The US was given the quasi-legitimation of the two post-war Security Council resolutions on Iraq because the only real alternative would have been to condemn the organization’s most powerful member as an international outlaw.  Such an action would have elicited only defiance and abuse from the Bush administration, and would have alienated precisely the American voters whom everybody else was counting on to reverse the disastrous course of their government.  Better to paper over cracks for the moment and pretend that the US was still committed to the United Nations – though it will be noted that the two resolutions shook loose very little new money and virtually no extra non-American troops for the US occupation forces in Iraq.

            But time is running out on these stalling tactics.  If the outcome of the November 2004 election in the United States is a second Bush administration that dumps the leading neo-conservatives and abandons the unilateralist adventure, or a Kerry administration that clearly accepts the primacy of international law, then the panic will be over and the relatively benign international climate of the 1990s will return (though there will be a lot of repair work to do at the UN).  But if the Bush administration embarks on another four-year term with the same crew in charge, or if a Kerry administration shows itself to be infected with the same unilateralist virus, then the other major countries will start moving to protect their own interests by creating countervailing centres of power.  They will not be called alliances at first, but that is what they may become.

            A war which lacks legitimacy does not acquire legitimacy if it is won....We have a vision of the world based on the view that war should not be used to settle a crisis which can be resolved by other means.  War must be the ultimate resort.  The world today obliges us to seek a consensus when we act, and not to act alone.

The US has a vision of the world which is very unilateralist.  I hold a vision of a multilateral world which apparently – and I say apparently – is opposed to this.  Europe is, and certainly will be in the future, here to stay as a major world power.  Then we have to take account of the emergence of China on the world stage, and India too....whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not...we are moving towards a multipolar world.

                           French President Jacques Chirac at the G8 summit, Evian, France, May 25, 2003

            You can live safely in a multipolar world that has multilateral reflexes and a respect for international law, but great-power politics is lethally dangerous in a multipolar world with no effective international institutions.   The Cold War was a bipolar world with a partially effective UN as a buffer between the two blocs, and the 1990s was a time of unprecedented international amity when it could truly be said that no great power had reason to fear the intentions of any other.  The best recent historical parallel for the process we may soon embark upon is the early twentieth century, when the alliances that later fought the First World War initially took shape.

            There was a paramount power, Britain, which had allowed itself to become isolated.  There were anxious established powers that had already been in relative decline for some time: France, Austria-Hungary and Turkey.  There were ambitious rising powers: Germany and Japan.  There was absolutely no system of collective security – countries were free to attack one another, seize colonies and even annex parts of each other’s homelands – so the only way to protect yourself was to band together with other countries in alliances.  And there was a very gradual, often secretive process in which the major powers did move into alliances over a period of years.  Any resemblance between this history and the process that we may embark upon in the next ten years is all too plausible.

            History does not repeat itself, but patterns of international behaviour do.  In a world where the UN has been gutted and the law of the jungle has returned, you would expect nations to respond by increasing armaments and forming something like the alliances that emerged in the years before 1914.  That does not mean that the public will read about it when it happens, or that these new arrangements will be formal alliances like NATO and the old Warsaw Pact, with joint military command centres and the like.  Indeed, the husk of NATO may survive, like the Holy Roman Empire of former times, even as its members informally align themselves with new partners – and ‘informal’ is probably the key word if we go through this pattern again, for formal military alliances with no ideological cement have been unfashionable for a long time.  Even a hundred years ago, the arrangement between Russia, France and Britain, though in reality something close to an alliance, was known simply as the ‘Friendly Understanding’ (Entente Cordiale).

            It’s not all that hard to guess what the global line-up would be circa 2015 if Washington continues to pursue its unilateral fantasy of absolute power and there is a global retreat from multilateralism.  The choice of potential alliance partners is never that wide for any country, as it is driven by geography, shared concerns about the behaviour of certain other countries, and the question of whether a given relationship is a good military and political fit.

            Every single alliance relationship that is sketched out below has been a reality at some point in the past 150 years, with the sole exception of the United States and India.

            NATO would certainly be the first victim of a realignment of the great powers, though it is not true that “the Atlantic is getting wider,” as some claim:  the body of water that is rapidly expanding is the English Channel.  Of NATO’s three militarily significant European members, France and Germany have taken the lead in opposing the trend of American policy since 2001, while Britain remains indissolubly wedded to the United States not only by the Blair government’s choice but more profoundly through its dependence on the United States for key elements in its “independent” nuclear deterrent force.  Although many people in Britain feel very uncomfortable about it, the Anglo-American alliance, now almost a century old, will probably remain as firm in any plausible future that starts from here as it was in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (where Britain was Oceania’s ‘Airstrip One’ off the coast of Eurasia).

            America’s other allies in this changed world would include Canada (whether it likes it or not), Australia, Israel (by far the greatest military power in its own region despite its small population) – and probably India.  This is a world in which the American military presence in the Muslim Middle East would persist and might even expand, with possible invasions of Syria and Iran following those of Afghanistan and Iraq to create a solid block of US-controlled territory from the eastern border of Israel to the western border of Pakistan.  Since India’s immediate security concerns focus mainly on Pakistan and to a lesser extent on other Muslim countries that back Pakistan in the Kashmir dispute, it would be hard for any Indian government to resist the temptation to throw its lot in with an America that had effectively subjugated its Muslim near-neighbours.  It would be equally hard for the US to resist the attraction of Indian military manpower if it were bogged down in a series of occupations of Middle Eastern countries (though this raises the question of what would become of America’s current alliance with nuclear-armed Pakistan).  An Indo-American alliance is a particularly good fit because strategists of a traditional bent in both countries see China as their emerging strategic rival, in India’s case for dominance in Asia and in the US case for global domination.

            China, as usual, would be global odd man out:  none of its larger neighbours trusts its current government enough to contemplate a close security relationship with it, although as the international outlook darkens the Europeans are working to ensure that it does not feel cornered by a uniformly hostile West.  President Bush’s National Security Strategy document of 2002, trying to provide a rationale for fearing China, stated: “in pursuing advanced military capabilities that can threaten its neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region, China is following an outdated path.”  (As if the US had ceased to pursue advanced military capabilities.)  But in early 2004 France became the first Eruopean country to conduct joint naval exercises with China, and Eruopean Union chief Romano Prodi has made sure that China has access to key technologies such as Europe’s satellite geo-positioning system so that Beijing can target its missiles more accurately.

            Just straws in the wind, at this point, and they are not the precursor to some European-Chinese strategic alliance.  Quite apart from the political gulf between democratic Europe and autocratic China, the sheer scale of China makes the whole business of building an alliance less urgent in Beijing’s eyes, and its rapid growth towards full industrialized country status reinforces its go-it-alone distaste for alliance games.  Beijing has been playing a very long game since the death of Deng Xiao-ping, seeking to avoid any confrontation with the established great powers and especially with the United States while it grows back into great-power status itself. But at a certain point the aggressive promotion of Pax Americana would invalidate this strategic policy: China would definitely act to constrain the unilateral exercise of American power in its part of the world, where unresolved questions about the future of Taiwan and North Korea offer plenty of potential for confrontation.  If there’s a return to the old world with the old rules, then China would urgently build up its own military power, including most especially its nuclear deterrent power.  It was genuine restraint, not lack of resources, that held China to fewer than 200 long-range nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles all these years.  It is already moving past that self-imposed limit with the Type 94 ballistic missile submarines that carry sixteen missiles each, and there is no treaty that would prevent it from going up to thousands of warheads.

            This would leave us with not a two- but a three-bloc world, however, for it is hard to imagine that either the Western Europeans or the Russians would find an alliance with China attractive or even comfortable. However, they might well make an alliance with each other. Within the European Union, France and Germany were already moving towards closer military and political coordination outside the Nato framework, but even with the addition of most of the smaller members of the European Union, a Franco-German alliance would not counter-balance the military and economic power of the United States.  Paris and Berlin would have to find a great-power partner with a big resource base and a serious nuclear weapons capability, and the obvious candidate is Russia.

            Would Russia be attracted by such an alliance?  Moscow greatly prefers the current world where it is not forced to choose between the United States and Europe, but in the end the Russian leadership knows that it is European.  Its great ambition is to join the European Union, and the reward that the Western European great powers could offer in exchange for EU access to Russia’s huge natural resources and nuclear weapons capabilities is accelerated EU membership (though it might by then be membership in a European Union that has lost the United Kingdom).  If Russia concludes that its dream of a real partnership with Washington, even a junior partnership, is just a fantasy – and it is already pretty close to that conclusion – then a Paris-Berlin-Moscow deal is not a far-fetched alternative.

            There have already been some cautious diplomatic explorations of this strategic option. In the months after the invasion of Iraq, Paris and Berlin began for the first time to talk seriously of a “union of France and Germany” that would merge their foreign and defence policies. (French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin called it “the only historic gamble that we cannot possibly lose.”) if it came into existence, such an entity, with about 140 million people, would be able to approach Russia (population 145 million) as an equal in any discussions about a possible alliance – and such discussions, in the most tentative and informal way, may already have taken place.  In July 2003, Alain Juppe, a former French prime minister and foreign minister who was then the leader of President Chirac’s reformed Gaullist party, visited Moscow.  What was said in private is not known, but Juppe afterwards commented that “the idea of a strategic partnership between the European pole and the Russian pole” did not exclude “dialogue with the other poles, the American pole, of course, and China.” And he added: “The world of the coming decades will function this way.”

            This would give pleasure to some in France, where it is commonplace to discuss NATO as “a tool to prevent Europe from having a common defence,” but it would not please most Germans or Russians, and the notion has now been placed on a back burner while the prospective strategic partners wait to see which way the United States jumps.  But they could make such an alliance work if they felt they had to, and it could grow into a serious strategic competitor to the United States in less than a decade.

            As for the ‘New Europe’ (as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it) of former Soviet-bloc countries in Eastern Europe whose governments have aligned themselves with the United States over Iraq, they would have little choice but to go along with this sort of continental European alliance in the end.  They want to be in the EU even more than they mistrust the Russians, and a large majority of their own citizens already strongly opposes the commitments their governments have made to support American policy in the Middle East.

            Among the major players there remains only Japan, whose relatively isolated and invulnerable position suggests that its future may be that of a giant Asian Switzerland, heavily armed but increasingly neutral.  Other middle powers like Italy, Spain, Turkey and South Korea, currently in US-led alliances, would have a difficult time deciding where their future lies, though the first three would probably end by opting for ‘Eurasia’.  This would be an inherently unstable situation, since it would mean that much or most of the Middle East was effectively US-occupied territory, but for quite a long time, nothing terrible might happen. 

            In sketching out this possible world of  ten years hence, I am drawing a not-quite-worst-case scenario that may never come to pass.  It is possible that a change of course or of administration in Washington will quickly return us to the relatively safe and orderly world of the later 1990s, with little to remind us of this interlude except the mess in Iraq and a heightened consciousness about the risk of terrorist attacks.  But if these informal alliances do begin to take shape, then the level of trust in the world will go down dramatically – think how short a time it took during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq for many Americans to become persuaded that France, of all places, was their enemy – and vicious circles of entirely familiar historical types will start to rotate.  At that point we would be in a situation that is probably more dangerous, though less overtly hostile, than the Cold War.

            It would be less overtly hostile, because the immense movements of people, goods and money around the world that are the hallmark of this globalized era would not cease, though they might diminish, and because international information flows would continue to be relatively free, if only for economic reasons.  It would be a situation reminiscent of the early twentieth century, another globalized, free-trading era when most ordinary people did not even need passports to move between countries – but the level of international mistrust was very high, and the lethal military calculations of the alliances lurked behind the peaceful facade of everyday life.  The danger is not that some madman might launch a deliberate war of conquest; it is that various governments would begin to worry once again that local clashes between the alliances or their proxies might escalate, and that threats might be made which must be deterred to preserve their credibility, and that they therefore have to think about what they would do in the awful contingency that deterrence doesn’t work or that somebody misunderstands....

            Neither of the great alliances of the Cold War ever seriously considered launching an all-out nuclear attack against the other except as “preemption” of an anticipated surprise attack, usually in the midst of some escalating local crisis, but they still came quite close to war a number of times.  If only evil dictators bent on world conquest began wars, we would be fairly safe, but a belief that preemption (“first strike,” as they called it back then) might mean survival for the people on our side can persuade even normally sane and moral people that destroying millions of foreigners’ lives with nuclear weapons is a rational option.  The psychologists who regularly tested the crews in the missile silos for reliability during the Cold War looked for exactly that sort of rationalization in their clients, and they had no trouble finding it.  They probably still don’t.

            For over half a century, far-sighted people in many countries have been working on a project for international law and order that is our best and perhaps our only chance of avoiding global disaster on an unprecedented scale.  It is obviously a hundred-year project at the very least, for it flies in the face of history and of traditional ideas about human nature, as most of its supporters were well aware from the start.  They had to try anyway, because all the alternative outcomes were so much worse in a world of nuclear weapons, and they have made encouraging progress towards their goal.  By the late 1990s it was becoming possible to believe that the project might actually succeed, and that the worst of the horrors that infested our future might never come to pass.  Now all that is at risk.