The Real New World Order

...When war broke out, eyes opened...

...It was cold realpolitik...

...India, facing its own Taliban-related terrorism in Kashmir, immediately invited the United States to use not just its airspace but its military bases for the campaign in Afghanistan...

...For half a century since Nehru's declaration of nonalignment, India had defined itself internationally in opposition to the United States...

...This was the meaning of Francis Fukuyama's End of History...

...Within days, two Great Powers that had confusedly fumbled their way through the period of unchallenged American hegemony in the 1990s began to move dramatically...

...It has no Chechnya or Kashmir...

...The Arab states played both sides against the middle during the Cold War, often abruptly changing sides (e.g., Egypt during the '60s and '70s...

...and its defeat is our supreme national objective, as overriding a necessity as were the defeats of fascism and Soviet communism...

...But the truly world-historical struggles were over...

...To understand the utter bankruptcy of this approach, one needs but a single word: anthrax...

...Today we welcome Russia as a regional power, particularly in Islamic Central Asia...

...And respect...

...We know what it is...

...Whenever there is a conflict, it tries to decide who is going to win, and joins that side...

...The future of Islamic and Arab allegiance will depend on whether the Taliban are brought to grief...

...Indeed, for reasons of regional politics (Pakistan's relations with China and with the United States) as well as ideology, India aligned itself firmly with the Soviet Union...

...But in a world realigned to face the challenge of radical Islam, it is hard to see why Russia could not, in principle, be part of the West...

...They hide everything...

...No great idea would arise to challenge it...

...The Democrats who yesterday were touting international law as the tool to fight bioterrorism are today dodging anthrax spores in their own offices...

...That day may be over...

...That moment lasted precisely ten years, beginning with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991...

...The religious parties in Pakistan, for example, in the past decade never got more than 5 percent of the vote combined...

...The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention sits, with the ABM treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, in the pantheon of arms control...

...With the United States and Russia facing a similar enemy—the radical Islamic threat is more virulent towards America but more proximate to Russia—Russia finds us far more accommodating to its aspirations in the region...

...The expected anti-American Great Power coalition never materialized...

...We looked with suspicion on Russia's reassertion of hegemony over once-Soviet space...

...It is an iron law: History abhors hegemony...

...You no longer hear that the real issue for American foreign policy is global warming, the internal combustion engine, drug traffic, AIDS, or any of the other transnational trendies of the '90s...

...With Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa on the sidelines, the one region still in play—indeed the prize in the new Great Game—is the Islamic world...

...Everyone understands that it is hard, even for a superpower, to go on a cave-to-cave manhunt...

...But just as France and Germany and Britain have learned to harmonize their old geopolitical rivalries within a Western structure, there is no reason Russia could not...

...III...

...Success does, however, mean demonstrating that the United States has the will and power to enforce the Bush doctrine that governments will be held accountable for the terrorists they harbor...

...For the first decade of the post-Cold War era, we showed little sympathy for the first of these goals and none for the second...

...The bad news is that because it is a sub-state infiltrative entity, the al Qaeda network and its related terrorists around the world lack an address...

...It was symbolized by the announcement on October 17 that after 37 years Russia was closing its massive listening post at Lourdes, Cuba...

...This is the self-proclaimed Bush doctrine—the Truman doctrine with radical Islam replacing Soviet communism...

...In the Gulf War, it first decided wrong, then switched to rejoin the American side...

...Because they had violated the universal nonproliferation "norm," the United States automatically imposed sanctions, blocking international lending and aid, and banning military sales...

...The great fight over Caspian oil, for example, was intended to ensure that no pipeline went through Russia (or Iran), lest Russia end up wielding too much regional power...

...Success therefore requires making an example of the Taliban...

...But bin Ladenism clearly has support in the Islamic "street...

...During those eight Clinton years, while the United States was engaged in (literally) paperwork, the enemy was planning and arming, burrowing deep into America, preparing for war...

...There is no Russian junior partner to play...

...The War The asymmetry is almost comical...

...Just before September 11, a serious debate was actually about to break out in Congress about the Bush administration's decision to reject the biological weapons treaty's new, and particularly useless, "enforcement" protocol that the Clinton administration had embraced...

...With the Soviet ideology abandoned, Russia's grievances against the West are reduced to the standard clash of geopolitical ambitions...

...China is the least directly threatened by radical Islam...

...After September 11, the world awaited the show of American might...

...Those relations needed shoring up because of U.S...

...The third and most reluctant player in the realignment game is China...

...No one expects a quick victory over an entrenched and shadowy worldwide network...

...The West had won...

...The New World Order The post-September 11 realignments in the international system have been swift and tectonic...

...The fear of radical Islam has created a new, almost unprecedented coalition of interests among the Great Powers...

...India had openly declared itself ready to join Pax Americana...

...This decade-long folly—a foreign policy of norms rather than of national interest—is over...

...Amazingly, however, this anti-hegemonic alliance includes not a single Great Power...

...The improbable pro-American Gulf War coalition managed to include such traditional American adversaries as Syria because of an accurate Syrian calculation of who could overawe the region...

...Call it hyper-unipolarity...

...Radical Islam is not yet a great idea, but it is a dangerous one...

...From this web of mutual obligations, a new and vital "international community" would ultimately regulate international relations and keep the peace...

...True, the street has long been overrated...

...It is sympathetic to any attempt to tame radical Islam because of the long-term threat it poses to Chinese unity...

...For the foreseeable future, the energies of the West will be directed against a common enemy...

...The three powers in question— India, Russia, and China—have one thing in common: They all border Islam, and all face their own radical Islamic challenges...

...That organizing principle was enunciated by President Bush in his historic address to Congress...

...Inevitably, the pro-American coalition fell apart...

...Indeed, we would be delighted to give it back Afghanistan—except that Russia (and Afghanistan) would decline the honor...

...The challenge, long-awaited, finally declared itself on September 11 when the radical Islamic movement opened its worldwide war with a, literally, spectacular attack on the American homeland...

...But they were unlikely allies from the start...

...it is a global opponent of worldwide reach, armed with an idea, and with the tactics, weapons, and ruthlessness necessary to take on the world's hegemon...

...Throughout the three and a half centuries of the modern state system, whenever a hegemonic power has emerged, a coalition of weaker powers has inevitably arisen to counter it...

...Not only do we know that it does...

...We were living an even greater anomaly...

...Naval base in South Vietnam, leased rent-free in 1979 for 25 years), it signaled a new orientation of Russian policy...

...When Napoleonic France reached for European hegemony, an opposing coalition of Britain, Prussia, Russia, and Austria emerged to stop it...

...And there is no real point...

...The Bush administration is trying to get like-minded countries to sign onto an agreement to prevent individuals from getting easy access to the substrates of bioweapons...

...Getting Osama is not the immediate goal...

...Russia can provide it...

...Not just in the trivial sense that the United States finally learned the meaning of physical vulnerability...

...The American Mind It took only a few hours for elite thinking about U.S...

...Pakistan, which has thrown in with the United States, will not play either...

...It also acquired a new organizing principle: We have an enemy, radical Islam...

...The Afghan campaign marks the first stage of a new, and quite possibly historic, rapprochement between Russia and the West...

...But that coalition of fear is held together also by respect for American power and its ability to provide safety under the American umbrella...

...If in the end the United States, backed by every Great Power, cannot succeed in defeating some cave dwellers in the most backward country on earth, then the entire structure of world stability, which rests ultimately on the pacifying deterrent effect of American power, will be fatally threatened...

...Thus Britain was forever balancing power on the Continent by supporting coalitions of the weak against a succession of would-be hegemons...

...The Bush doctrine marks the restoration of the intellectual and conceptual simplicity that many, including our last president, wistfully (and hypocritically) said they missed about the Cold War...

...In Brussels, he not only relaxed his opposition to NATO's expansion to the borders of Russia, not only signaled his willingness to compromise with the United States on missile defense, but broadly hinted that Russia should in essence become part of NATO...

...The assumption after September 11 was that an aroused America will win...

...On his trip to European Union headquarters in early October, President Vladimir Putin made clear that he sees Russia's future with the West—and that he wants the West to see its future including Russia...

...From their side, the Russians need hands off their own Islamic problem in Chechnya...

...Nonetheless, after five years of ceaseless agitation through Al Jazeera, and after yet another decade of failed repressive governance, the street is more radicalized and more potentially mobilizable...

...The other candidate for anti-hegemonic opposition allies like Cuba, Iraq, even North Korea...

...During the Gulf War, it was utterly silent and utterly passive...

...At the just completed Shanghai Summit, China was noticeably more accommodating than usual to the United States...

...China's posture of sympathetic neutrality is thus a passive plus: It means that not a single Great Power on the planet lies on the wrong side of the new divide...

...Putin came to deal...

...But American recognition of the legitimacy of Russian Great Power status in Central Asia is clearly part of the tacit bargain in the U.S.-Russian realignment...

...At least for now...

...Which is why so much hinges on the success of the war on terrorism...

...Their summits would issue communiqués denouncing hegemony, unipolarity, and other euphemisms for American dominance...

...This would, of course, come at the expense of American power...

...Moreover, with the covert support of some rogue regimes, this terrorist network commands unconventional weapons and unconventional tactics, and is fueled by a radicalism and a suicidal fanaticism that one does not normally associate with adversary states...

...Indeed, as the war drags on, their renown, particularly in the Islamic world, will only grow...

...We now know that its signing marks the acceleration of the Soviet bioweapons program, of which the 1979 anthrax accident at a secret laboratory at Sverdlovsk was massive evidence, largely ignored...

...After Sep-l tember 11, reality once again set in, and such refined nonsense was instantly put aside...

...It is obviously divided on the question of jihad against the infidel...

...treatment of India and Pakistan after their 1998 nuclear tests...

...foreign policy to totally reorient itself, waking with a jolt from a decade-long slumber...

...And on September 11, it arose...

...With no countervailing coalition emerging, American hegemony had no serious challenge...

...For now, the corrupt ruling Arab elites have largely lined up with the United States, at least on paper...

...But for those brought up to distrust, and at times detest, American power, this diminution of dominance was a bonus...

...Toppling regimes is another matter...

...States line up with more powerful states not out of love but out of fear...

...Bin Laden still speaks for a minority...

...Russian accommodation to NATO expansion is the other part...

...Should we fail, it will be sauve qui peut...

...Russia and China flirted with the idea repeatedly, but never consummated the deal...

...The war on terrorism, and in particular the Afghan war, will be decisive in determining in whose camp the Islamic world will end up: ours—that of the United States, the West, Russia, India—or Osama bin Laden's...

...Now, leaving Lourdes is no miracle...

...With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and the emergence of the United States as the undisputed world hegemon, the inevitable did not happen...

...But with subsequent American weakness and irresolution, in the face both of post-Gulf War Iraqi defiance and of repeated terrorist attacks that garnered the most feckless American military responses, respect for American power declined...

...The Nehru era had ended in a flash...

...Every day that they remain in place is a rebuke to American power...

...The potential warming of relations with India after the death of its Cold War Soviet alliance was put on hold...

...But their holding power against the radical Islamic challenge is not absolute...

...Other countries—and not just our new allies but even our old allies in Europe—will seek their separate peace...

...But for the Russians this was even more a losing proposition than during their first go-round in the Cold War when both the Soviet Union and the satellites had more to offer each other than they do today...

...Lourdes was one of the last remaining symbols both of Soviet global ambitions and of reflexive anti-Americanism...

...That is perfectly reasonable...

...But taken together with the simultaneously reported Russian decision to leave Cam Ranh Bay (the former U.S...

...This is historically unprecedented...

...He failed, in part because he allowed himself to lose a war he had just won...

...That is the good news...

...For the Taliban to hold off the United States is an astounding triumph...

...Nonetheless, September 11 made the transition instantaneous...

...It is still no ally, and still sees us, correctly, as standing in the way of its aspirations to hegemony in the western Pacific...

...If that show fails, then the list of countries lining up on the other side of the new divide will grow...

...It was handed to him on Sept...

...Great Powers, on the other hand, tend to support coalitions of the weak as a way to create equilibrium...

...The whole world against one man...

...Henry Kissinger's latest book, brilliant though it is, published shortly before September 11, is unfortunately titled Does America Need a Foreign Policy...

...Nonetheless, the notion of China's becoming the nidus for a new anti-American coalition is dead...

...To maintain it, however, he has a war to win...

...It retains great influence over the "-stans," the former Soviet Central Asian republics...

...Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...It is now over...

...From that day forth, American foreign policy would define itself—and define friend and foe—according to who was with us or against us in the war on terrorism...

...And for the United States, it is potentially a great gain...

...Cam Ranh Bay and Lourdes signal Russia's renunciation of global ambitions...

...It is a $200 million a year luxury at a time when the Russian military is starving...

...But that—and Jfw...

...And a fixed address—the locus of any retaliation—is necessary for effective deterrence...

...That began to fade with the end of the Cold War, and over time relations with the United States might have come to full flower...

...When war breaks out, even treaty advocates take to the foxholes...

...It would likely have happened anyway...

...Modernization was the way...

...Weaker states invariably seek to join coalitions of the strong...

...This shift is tactical for now...

...The United States would not mind if Moscow once again gained hegemony in Central Asia...

...This is particularly true of the Arab world with its small, fragile states...

...the post-Gulf War evidence that Iraq, another treaty signatory in good standing, had been building huge stores of bioweapons—made little impression on the liberalinternationalist faithful...

...But it does have simmering Islamic discontent in its western provinces...

...Nonalignment was dead...

...First to embrace the United States was India, a rising superpower, nuclear-armed, economically vibrant, democratic, and soon to be the world's most populous state...

...If we demonstrate that we cannot win, no coalition with moderate Arabs will long survive...

...The current pro-American coalition will fall apart even more quickly if the Taliban prove a match for the United States...

...This radicalism and fanaticism anchored in religious ideology only increased our shocked surprise...

...It was particularly hard to see why Russia would risk building up a more populous and prosperous next-door neighbor with regional ambitions that would ultimately threaten Russia itself...

...But much more depends on our success than just the allegiance of that last piece of the geopolitical puzzle, the Islamic world...

...The liberal internationalists of the Clinton era could not quite match the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact abolishing war forever for sheer cosmic stupidity...

...Jordan is the classic example...

...Contrary to the current delusion that the Islamic states will respond to American demonstrations of solici-tousness and sensitivity (such as a halt in the fighting during Ramadan), they are waiting to see the success of American power before irrevocably committing themselves...

...Guided by the vision of an autonomous, active, and norm-driven "international community" that would relieve a unilateralist America from keeping order in the world, the Clinton administration spent eight years signing one treaty, convention, and international protocol after another...

...Initially, success need not be defined globally...

...After the apocalypse, there are no believers...

...We had given ourselves to believe that after the success of our classic encounters with fascism and Nazism, then communism, the great ideological struggles were finished...

...For 300 years since Peter the Great, Russia has been unable to decide whether it belongs east or west...

...On September 11, American foreign policy acquired seriousness...

...If the guarantor of world peace for the last half century cannot succeed in a war of self-defense against Afghanistan(l), then the whole post-World War II structure—open borders, open trade, open seas, open societies—will begin to unravel...

...And not just in the sense that our illusions about the permanence of the post-Cold War peace were shattered...

...And traditionally strong U.S.-Pakistani relations were cooled as a show of displeasure...

...What remain are Russia's regional ambitions—to protect the integrity of the Russian state itself, and to command a sphere of influence including its heavily Islamic "near abroad...

...For obvious reasons of safety, they go with those who appear to be the winners...

...And it is totally different from having some kind of universal enforcement bureaucracy going around the world checking biolabs, which would have zero effect on the bad guys...

...There would, of course, be the usual depredations, invasions, aggressions, and simple land grabs of time immemorial...

...As one of the founders in 1955 of the nonaligned movement at Bandung, India helped define nonalignment as anti-American...

...A third, while not altering its commitments, mollified its militancy...

...Similarly during Germany's two great reaches for empire in the 20th century...

...It includes hardly any states at all, other than hostage-accomplice Afghanistan...

...Should we succeed in the war on terrorism, first in Afghanistan, we will be cementing the New World Order—the expansion of the American sphere of peace to include Russia and India (with a more neutral China)—just now beginning to take shape...

...America needs help in the Afghan war...

...This foreign policy of norms turned out to be not just useless but profoundly damaging...

...The transformation of Russian foreign policy has been more subtle but, in the long run, perhaps even more far-reaching...

...But they tried hard...

...The exclamation mark came with our urgent post-September 11 scurrying to Pakistan and India to shore up relations for the fight with Afghanistan...

...Were this movement to develop and deepen, to become strategic and permanent, it could become one of the great revolutions in world affairs...

...They lined up with the United States against Iraq at the peak of American unipo-larity at the beginning of the 1990s...

...And they came close...

...The entire new world alignment is at stake...

...That was not out of affection for Washington...

...The first President Bush sought to establish a New World Order...

...Yet for a decade, the decade of the unipolar moment, there was no challenge to the United States anywhere...

...It was not until the fall of the Soviet Union that the vast extent of that bioweapons program was acknowledged...

...The second President Bush never sought a New World Order...

...During the 1990s, American foreign policy became more utopian and divorced from reality than at any time since our last postwar holiday from history in the 1920s...

...The very idea of safety-in-parchment is risible...

...Each had more to gain from its relations with America than from the other...

...The movement was all in one direction: toward alignment with the United States...