The New World Order

There’s been an awful lot of bad news recently. The war in Afghanistan isn’t going particularly well, the FBI has no idea who’s sending us anthrax, and every few weeks there’s the rumor of another opus by bin Laden & Co. We live in a scarier world now, and it’s becoming clear that we can’t go back. We can’t build a wall or hire more Homeland Security police and hope the problem will go away.

Our vulnerability is part of how we live. Our society is founded on self-interest—not in the economic sense, but in the sense of a community assembled to promote a common good. For hundreds of years, we’ve built our societies on the assumption that human beings are so motivated by fear that they would constrain their liberties (or give up them up altogether) in order to enjoy the benefits of collective security—that even “a race of devils” could be manageably governed by the right system of contracts and incentives.

But suicide bombers have set themselves outside of contracts. They no longer need guarantees of security. Instead they use as tools of war the bonds of trust that allow society to function—the trust that a stranger is not trying to kill us whenever we board an airplane or open our mail. We can improve our airport security and watch our toxic waste trucks, but we can never think hard enough to imagine everything a bin Laden could imagine—like attacking the Pentagon with boxcutters. And no matter how many armed guards we post, they only work against someone who’s afraid of getting shot.

To move beyond policing, some have suggested a “hearts and minds” approach—attempting to make our enemies like us, or at least not to hate us enough to kill innocent Americans. Again, although there are certain responsible steps we should take, there’s good reason to doubt whether even a kinder, gentler America will have its virtue recognized. Even if we changed our Israel policy or dropped our sanctions on Iraq at bin Laden’s request, we would still be the most prominent and most successful devotee of the Western, secular spirit against which the radicals of the Muslim world have defined themselves.

And wartime, unfortunately, is not the best opportunity to make subtle appeals to hearts and minds. The distinction between fighting terrorism and fighting Islam may be clear in Cambridge, Mass., but it gets a lot fuzzier where the bombs are falling on Red Cross warehouses.

But if we can’t take away the terrorists’ motives or opportunities, we still can deprive them of the means. We can disrupt their organizations and cut off their access to cash or weapons-grade anthrax. And to do this, as the U.S. is slowly recognizing, we need other nations to act on our behalf. Our intelligence services are forced to share sensitive information with “allies” such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. We may soon see effective controls on international money laundering. And President George W. Bush has reversed his campaign positions to support the Biological Weapons Convention and to suggest U.N. nation-building in Afghanistan once the troops have come home.

In other words, international institutions are coming back into style—not because the U.S. wants to please other nations and to show that we’re a team player, or because bin Laden is nursing a secret grudge about the death penalty and the Kyoto Accords, but because we have become painfully aware of our vulnerability and the need for some collective security of our own. Just as NATO has for the first time invoked its mutual defense clause, that an attack on one state is an attack on all, we have suddenly realized that an abuse of any nation’s terrorism laws or banking regulations will have effects far beyond its borders. Witness the success of those who disfigured New York from a cave in Central Asia.

Of course, there are powerful reasons not to give the “international community”—the same folks who put Sudan on the Human Rights Commission and Syria on the Security Council—a veto on our actions. Any international order we erect must satisfy our own national interests more often than it frustrates them; any other system would not be worth joining and would never retain long-term support.

But we must pursue such agreements with other states because we are assembled for a common good. States are the only actors we can deal with, who can enforce treaties and achieve our aims. Unlike private armies or loose terrorist networks, states—even ones that sponsor terrorism—have interests in self-preservation that run counter to the suicide-bomber ethic. A state can’t slink into a cave for several months, emerging only to carry out some new monstrosity.

Today, the greatest danger to stability doesn’t come from rogue nations or evil empires, but from “states of concern” where the ink on the social contract isn’t dry, quasi-nations whose borders are just lines on a dead British general’s map. After all, what is a United Nations peacekeeping mission but an alliance of the states against the non-states? The line between “nation-building” and our national interest, drawn so often by Bush during the campaign, is looking blurrier all the time.

If remaking the world order sounds difficult, it is. But look at what’s already on our plate. To win the war against terrorism, we first have to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict and settle the 50-year-old crisis in Kashmir. We have to restore order in Pakistan, a country on the verge of falling apart, without irreparably casting our lot with its military government and against its people. And we have to create order ex nihilo in Afghanistan, a country that has rarely in modern times known peace.

This is the work of decades or centuries, and we’re being forced to achieve it on a timescale of months. There’s no guarantee we will succeed. But at least we have some idea of what to try.

Stephen E. Sachs ’02 is a history concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.