NEW NEW WORLD ORDER:

Peril of pre-emptive thinking (RAMESH THAKUR, October 20, 2002, The Japan Times

This is the true meaning of the Bush promise that the U.S. will not allow the world's most dangerous weapons to fall into the hands of the world's most dangerous regimes (and, one might add, the world's most destructive groups and individuals), as judged solely and unilaterally by Washington.

Therein lies the logic of pre-emption, if necessary, well before the threat actually materializes (as with Hussein, whose acquisition of nuclear weapons does not seem imminent, all bluster to the contrary notwithstanding). There is also an underlying belief that current criticism of any U.S.-led war to take out Hussein's weapons of mass destruction will be quickly muted with the success of the operation and eventually turn into gratitude for someone's having had the necessary foresight, fortitude and resolution.

But in turn this changes the basis of world order as we know it. And that might be the most profound and long-lasting significance of 9/11. It may indeed have changed the world and tipped us into a post-Westphalian world. U.S. policy is full of contradictions within the paradigm of world order since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) wherein all states are of equal status and legitimacy.

How can the most prominent dissident against many global norms and regimes--from arms control to climate change and international criminal justice--claim to be the world's most powerful enforcer of global norms and regimes, including nonproliferation?

How can the most vocal critic of the very notion of an international community anoint itself as the international community's sheriff? For that matter, by what right do the five unelected members of the Security Council claim a permanent monopoly on nuclear weapons?

The answer lies in a conception of world order rooted outside the framework of Westphalian sovereignty. This also explains why some of today's most potent threats come not from the conquering states within the Westphalian paradigm, but from failing states outside it.

In effect, Bush is saying that the gap between the fiction of legal equality and the reality of power preponderance, between equally legitimate and democratically legitimate states, has stretched beyond the breaking point.

Washington is no longer bound by such fiction. The Bush administration insists that the U.S. will remain as fundamentally trustworthy, balanced and responsible a custodian of world order as before -- but of a post-Westphalian order centered on the United States surrounded by a wasteland of vassal states.

Though we'd come to a different conclusion about this than Mr. Thakur, his basic analysis seems correct. When George Bush the Elder proclaimed a New World Order at the time of the last Iraq War it was indeed premised on the notion of all states being equally legitimate. Thus we went to war under the auspices of the UN, with countries like Syria at our side, even though the UN is filled with regimes just as vile as Iraq and even though, by any objective standard, Syria should be considered just as dangerous as Iraq. Likewise, the justification for the war at that time was to protect Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, even though neither meets any of the standards of Western governance--democratic pluralistic capitalistic liberalism.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 20, 2002 6:53 AM