Republican News · Thursday 27 March 2002

New World Disorder

In an article in the Spectator magazine last week, Richard Perle, a key advisor to President Bush, crowed over the incipient demise of the United Nations. The "myth" of world security attained through international consensus and cooperation, he wrote, was dead and buried

At the end of the Cold War, George Bush Senior proclaimed the advent of a "new world order". In 2003, we face the reality of world disorder as American unilateralism undermines the arrangements that have maintained international stability since 1945. As American and British forces crossed into Iraq last week, we all stepped into dangerous and unknown territory.

For 50 years after the Second World War, international relations were based on the principles of multilateralism and mutual deterrence. A web of international organisations and treaties increasingly bound states in relations of mutual co-operation and dependence. The collapse of the Soviet Union destroyed one pillar of the international order - mutual deterrence - and left America the sole remaining superpower. Now the superpower has set aside the principles that international conflict should be avoided if at all possible, and that military intervention in a sovereign state is legitimate only if approved by the international community through the Security Council of the United Nations. The decision by America and its allies to invade Iraq without a mandate from the UN has undermined the authority of that body, perhaps fatally, and set a dangerous precedent. The UN has many flaws, but it remains the best hope for a world order built on law rather than violence. By openly disavowing the UN and its procedures, America has replaced the rule of law in international relations with the rule of force.

This is no accident, but a deliberate decision by the right-wing ideologues who have American foreign policy in their grip. In an article in the Spectator magazine last week, Richard Perle, a key advisor to President Bush, crowed over the incipient demise of the United Nations. The "myth" of world security attained through international consensus and cooperation, he wrote, was dead and buried. In future, "coalitions of the willing", like that invading Iraq, would deal with threats to world stability and peace. Such coalitions would intervene in places like Kosovo or Rwanda (given by Perle as instances where the UN failed to prevent genocide): they would also strike at "emerging threats" from states harbouring terrorists or weapons of mass destruction. This is the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive strikes against any state that Washington feels may one day pose a threat to American interests. It is a doctrine capable of limitless expansion, which might be invoked to justify almost any war America cared to launch. As the bombs falling on Baghdad go to prove, not only is the US prepared to go to war without the sanction of the United Nations; it is prepared to go to war on the slightest provocation and against the remotest threat.

The argument that waiting for international consensus means standing idly by while catastrophe unfolds would be more credible if we could trust the motives of the "willing". But American foreign policy has always been driven by interest rather than principle. Moralistic rhetoric is used to dress up policies shaped by more earthly motives. That is why the torture, the genocide, the rape, and the brutality perpetrated by the Iraqi regime did not prevent Saddam from being a valued ally of the West while at war with fundamentalist Iran in the 1980s, although today they appear as justifications for an invasion of Iraq. That is why America simultaneously fights to "liberate" the Iraqi people, and supplies Israel with weapons to suppress the Palestinians; why Israel can break UN resolutions with impunity, while Iraqi defiance calls down a holocaust on the heads of its defenceless people.

But what is most frightening about the American right is the utter contempt it shows for any country that dares hold a different opinion to the United States. France's diplomatic opposition to the rush to conflict has triggered manifestations of anti-French feeling in America that might seem excessive if the countries were at war. Before the invasion of Iraq, an American diplomat confided that Guinea would probably vote against a second UN resolution "on the advice of the president's witch-doctor".

Many Americans seem unable to conceive that there is any way but the American way; for them, the difference of other cultures is invariably a sign of backwardness and failure. Even "Old Europe", with its social market and its aversion to military conflict, is regarded with contempt. Bush and his cohorts are right-wing revolutionaries determined to re-make the world in the image of America. Their agenda goes far beyond defending the West against "terrorism" or "rogue states", to opening the entire globe for unlimited exploitation by free market capitalism. They aim to make the world safe, not for democracy, but for corporate America. What motivates them is the vision of a planet where everybody eats hamburgers, wears American clothes, watches American movies, slaves in American factories, and spends the money they earn on the latest in American consumer gadgetry - the vision of an American millennium, when the peoples of the earth are gathered beneath the golden arches of MacDonald's.

Even were their intentions of the best the unilateralism of the Bush White House is a recipe for disaster. Who will decide when a pre-emptive strike is justified? Who but the Americans themselves? And what court will call them to account?

Behind the rhetoric and spin, what Bush and his allies advocate is the rule of the strongest. Their policies amount to the replacement of international law by the law of the jungle. Deployed in aid of the political, economic and cultural domination of the world by American interests, the principles of unilateral action and pre-emptive strikes promise to unleash a spiral of violence whose end cannot be foreseen.

After Afghanistan and Iraq, who will be next? Iran? Syria? North Korea? Can even Europeans feel sure that if they act against American interests, the wrath of an enraged superpower will spare them? Under the shadow of American domination, hatred of the West will breed to hatch more Bin Ladens. No amount of bombs dropped abroad, no curtailment of civil liberties at home, will stop the attackers getting through. There will be more 9/11s.

The best hope for world stability and peace now lies in the mass politicisation of ordinary citizens in America and throughout the West. Presidential elections are less than two years away. Regime change in Washington might allow the genie of conflict Bush and Bin Laden have raised between them to somehow be charmed back into its bottle.

BY PAUL O'CONNOR