Why even a superpower needs friends
United States President George W. Bush declared victory in the war against Iraq last week. Yet anyone expecting him to bask in success would have been surprised by the speech: Mr Bush made it clear that Iraq is merely one campaign in the ongoing 'war on terrorism'.
Yet a perfunctory reading of the administration's recent strategic pronouncements would have signalled what was coming. Mr Bush's speech underscored a critical point about the US government and its self-assigned role. It believes in power and using it to create a better world - a revolutionary approach to international relations and one which threatens to shake up the world as we know it.
Traditionally, great powers are status quo powers. They tend to be content with the existing international order, since it enshrines their status. That usually means they are conservative, preferring stability above other values.
In one sense the Bush administration is a traditional great power: It believes in power. No one in the upper reaches of the government loses sleep over America's overwhelming might and the responsibilities it entails. They embrace the assertion in the National Security Strategy, published last year, that no country will be allowed to even challenge US military supremacy.
Yet the administration departs from traditional great-power thinking by embracing the active use of that power to reshape the world. As Mr Bush explained in his speech aboard an aircraft carrier last week: 'Any person involved in committing or planning terrorist attacks against the American people becomes an enemy of this country and a target of American justice.
'Any person, organisation or government that supports, protects or harbours terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent and equally guilty of terrorist crimes. Any outlaw regime that has ties to terrorist groups and seeks or possesses weapons of mass destruction is a grave danger to the civilised world and will be confronted.'
That last bit is a revolutionary doctrine - the aggressive pursuit of a new world order that is based on the 'elimination of gathering threats' and the creation of a just peace. The framework for this thinking was laid out in the security strategy and has been developing ever since.
The document's authors are explicit: 'The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer, but better.' Combine that with Mr Bush's comment in his cover letter: 'The only path to peace and security is the path of action', and you have a potentially radical agenda.
Mr Bush is focused on the critical nexus of radicalism and technology, which has rendered obsolete many older ideas about security. The rise of non-state players (terrorists) and their access to catastrophic weapons has erased distinctions between immediate, imminent and future threats, and has fatally undermined the strategy of deterrence that seemed so successful during the cold war.
In response, the US seeks to maximise its flexibility to cope with these new threats. Possessed with overwhelming strength and certain of the rightness of its cause, the US is not willing to accept limits on the exercise of that power. But while America has made abundantly clear it will not shy away from the use of its power if it feels there is no alternative, it does not intend to act alone. The Bush administration invites other world powers to join this effort.
As Mr Bush said in his speech last week: 'Anyone in the world, including the Arab world, who works and sacrifices for freedom has a loyal friend in the United States of America.'
The US expects like-minded nations to join together. But the offer is not risk-free. The downside of this readiness to join forces is the price to be paid for missed opportunities. The administration is keeping score. There are already indications that it is rewarding some and punishing others for their stand on the war on Iraq. Expect equally careful scrutiny of Chinese efforts to bring North Korea to the table and strike a deal in the nuclear crisis. Some foreign-policy watchers in Washington believe that China's failure to join the anti-Iraq coalition has already marked it.
The United Nations was the first victim of this new activism. The Bush administration considers the organisation's failure to take action against Iraq after 12 years of lies, deception and evasion as proof of the bankruptcy of the 'liberal international order'.
For the Bush administration, the UN's failure means that nations and their citizens will remain vulnerable to attacks like those that occurred on September 11, 2001. That is an unacceptable choice for a government with the power and the will to act on its own.
