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...As he observed in his Fourth Inaugural Ad112 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 dress, "We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace...

...They don't have to oppose us openly...

...America was now faced with a world in which "without warning or justification" civilians are "ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air...

...When, in 1941, FDR spoke about the Four Freedoms, he pictured a future in which freedom from want and fear were as important as freedom of religion and expression...

...and four years before Pearl Harbor, he warned, "If these things come to pass in other parts of the world, let no one imagine that America will escape...

...There was solace to be taken from the fact that in the future no country could afford to think only of itself...

...But Roosevelt did not think that America had to be paralyzed by these transformations...

...At the heart of Roosevelt's thinking was the idea, first articulated in his 1937 "Quarantine the Aggressors" speech, delivered in response to Japan's invasion of China, that a new kind of terrifying war had become the norm...

...They can be detected and caught only if intelligence agencies and governments cooperate...

...112 n DISSENT / Winter 2003...

...Otherwise, why join us in a battle with terrorism that promises to be long and painful and that a nation just might, if it made the right deals, avoid...

...What has not changed since the 1940s, however, are the risks for America in going it alone...

...But fifty-nine years later, as America edges closer to a second Gulf War, it is FDR who provides the best historical example of a wartime president we can learn from...

...We have learned that we must live as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger...

...What makes Roosevelt so relevant, as the Bush administration wavers between unilateralism and multilateralism, is that, from 1937 until his death in 1945, he constantly strove to maintain a policy that, in a time of unprecedented danger, balanced American self-interest with American commitment to a shared world order...

...In an age of biological and nuclear weapons, the great advantage terrorists have over conventional armies is that they can move rapidly across borders...

...The only way for us to secure the cooperation we need in fighting terrorism is for other nations to want to help us...

...Roosevelt saw no point in sugarcoating the significance of America's new vulnerability, and, even more important, he did not imagine war becoming less terrifying with the passage of time...

...As we face the possibility of war with Iraq and try to figure out the best way to prevent future 9/11s, the hopes FDR voiced about international cooperation seem increasingly remote from our experience...

...The poorest countries could identify with the Four Freedoms...

...All of which brings us back to Roosevelt's view of the struggle to defeat Japan and Germany as inseparable from the struggle to secure a shared world order...

...The old restraints, Roosevelt argued, in eerily contemporary language, were gone...

...Today, America needs to offer the world, as the Bush administration has not, an equally compelling picture of the future...

...To be sure, over a short period of time, wars and interventions can be successfully undertaken by a great power like America acting alone...

...that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away...

...IN THE MIDST of the Second World War and the 1944 election, it was the example of Abraham Lincoln, "the greatest wartime President in our history," that Franklin D. Roosevelt evoked when he addressed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago...

...But unilateralism cannot be sustained over an extended period on multiple fronts...

...Technology would, he believed, only make warfare worse...

...And that is America's problem...

...In such a world, America's survival was threatened, FDR believed...

...their neutrality is enough to undermine our battle with terrorism...