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.a big war. ³¹The enveloping effect of the international system is furthered alongby what my colleague Fareed Zakaria has described as the weakening ofthe strong state, which he says will make the once-straightforward riseand fall of great powers a complex, friction-filled process. Zakaria citesJapan and Germany: Consider Germany today, with its federal structure,weak central government, and fiercely independent central bank; many ofthe government s powers have been delegated to Brussels, others haveslipped out of its hands as Bonn has loosened its grip on the economyand the welfare state.Japan is trapped on one hand by its postwar consti-tution, which restrains its military might, and on the other by its entan-glement in the world of international institutions. ³² It is just such What Is the International Community ? 121entanglement, of course, that American sovereigntists fear for their owncountry.But next to the relatively small loss of sovereign freedom, thegain in international stabilityÞöand American securityÞöis enormous.What s in It for AmericaCo-opting the other major powers will, however, clearly require that theyfeel both unthreatened and protected by the United States.And Þö toreturn to the main theme of this bookÞöthis can happen only if Washing-ton itself embraces the international community that other nations nowsee themselves as part of at the same time as Washington projects itspower.As we saw in Chapter 1, that was not the message the incomingadministration of George W.Bush wanted to convey.Many conservativeswanted to roll back what they saw as the rabid globalism of the Clintonyears; they deplored the extent to which this globalized society sought toinfluence issues they wanted to reserve for U.S.sovereignty Þöfrom landmines to international war crimes tribunals to taxes.Most significant of all, many of these so-called sovereigntists at seniorlevels of the Bush administration, like John Bolton, renounced interna-tional law altogether.If they did not accept the international community,it followed that they failed to see that international law is the backbone ofthe international community, since it binds foreign leaders to the dictatesof the system (and gives them a face-saving way to tell their domestic con-stituencies that they have no choice but to, say, support U.S.efforts againstal-Qaeda or Iraq under a UN Security Council resolution).The Bushadministration s dismissive view of international law was especially dam-aging after 9/11, when the president announced his new doctrine of pre-emption.Preemption may have been necessary against an enemy, such asal-Qaeda, that could not be deterred through traditional means, but, asdiscussed in the last chapter, to embrace such a doctrine without the miti-gating effect of binding it to international law and norms recklessly invitedthe rest of the world to adopt preemption as a universal precedent.Aboveall, the abjuring of international law put the United States, legally at least,in the same camp as al-Qaeda: outside the international community.³³ 122 At War with OurselvesIn truth, by the time they took office, well before 9/11, the Bush sover-eigntists were already putting their fingers in a very leaky dike.The inter-national community had extended into America s national life in myriadways.The U.S.economy had become directly hooked in, like an addict, tothe Wall Street centered international financial system.Indeed, Americahad become a net user of other nations capitalÞöand this figure includesthe foreign aid we send outÞöenabling Americans to habitually buy moregoods from abroad than we sell to others.The antiglobalism of Boltonand other conservatives was, more than ever, in direct conflict with theinterests of their party s business base.U.S.businesspeople knew they hadto compete on the playing field of the international community, andunder the same rules.For example, when it came to postwar Iraqi oil, U.S.companies feared Iraqi revenues would get tied up in litigation if Wash-ington failed to operate through the UN.But nothing argues more that the international community is in thenational interest of the United States than the war on terror.Indeed, thehostility of bin Laden and his Islamic fundamentalist sympathizers can beproperly understood only in the context of the ever-widening circle ofWesternized international society.His jihad, remember, was launchedagainst Crusaders and Jews and the iniquitous United Nations as wellas America.Bin Laden may have been personally upset by the presence ofU.S.soldiers in Saudi Arabia, his home, but the problem is not that theArab world is surrounded by Western armies.The problem is that it is sur-rounded by a global society that is vastly richer and more successful thanthe Arab world.The terrorists represent the ragtag fringe of a region that isitself on the fringe of what remains a growing and vibrant internationalcommunity.The Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis traces today s Muslim rageto the final decline of Islamic society after a millennium-long war of pri-macy and self-esteem with the West: Compared with its millennial rival,Christendom, the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant.The dominance of the West was clear for all to see. ³tThis struggle of civilizational identity has occurred on other fronts aswell, and always the West has triumphed.In a brilliant essay, Ian Burumaand Avishai Margalit argue that in the history of what they call occiden- What Is the International Community ? 123talism, or repeated attempts to organize a hostile resistance to Western-ization, Islamists are only the latest incarnation.Today s fundamentalistswere preceded by Japanese nationalists in the early twentieth century,early German nationalists, and Slavophilic Russians.Like Islamism, both German fascism and Japanese militarism wereborn as resistance movements to the perceived corrupting tendencies ofthe West.In Japan, fealty to the emperor and kokutai, loosely translated as national essence, were the cardinal values; it is no accident that even asJapan, in the late nineteenth century, adopted the technology, the politicalsystems, and even the dress of the West, the unifying slogan of the MeijiRestoration was expel the barbarians
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