Euroblogger

Loudly, With a Big Stick
By DAVID BROOKS

I don't like John Bolton's management style. Nor am I a big fan of his foreign policy views. He doesn't really believe in using U.S. power to end genocide or promote democracy.
But it is ridiculous to say he doesn't believe in the United Nations. This is a canard spread by journalists who haven't bothered to read his stuff and by crafty politicians who aren't willing to say what the Bolton debate is really about.
The Bolton controversy isn't about whether we believe in the U.N. mission. It's about which U.N. mission we believe in.
From the start, the U.N. has had two rival missions. Some people saw it as a place where sovereign nations could work together to solve problems. But other people saw it as the beginnings of a world government.
This world government dream crashed on the rocks of reality, but as Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell has observed, the federalist idea has been replaced by a squishier but equally pervasive concept: the dream of "global governance."
The people who talk about global governance begin with the same premises as the world government types: the belief that a world of separate nations, living by the law of the jungle, will inevitably be a violent world. Instead, these people believe, some supranational authority should be set up to settle international disputes by rule of law.
They know we're not close to a global version of the European superstate. So they are content to champion creeping institutions like the International Criminal Court. They treat U.N. General Assembly resolutions as an emerging body of international law. They seek to foment a social atmosphere in which positions taken by multilateral organizations are deemed to have more "legitimacy" than positions taken by democratic nations.
John Bolton is just the guy to explain why this vaporous global-governance notion is a dangerous illusion, and that we Americans, like most other peoples, will never accept it.
We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes and the losers accepting majority decisions.
Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.
Second, we will never accept global governance because it inevitably devolves into corruption. The panoply of U.N. scandals flows from a single source: the lack of democratic accountability. These supranational organizations exist in their own insular, self-indulgent aerie.
We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.
Fourth, we understand that these mushy international organizations liberate the barbaric and handcuff the civilized. Bodies like the U.N. can toss hapless resolutions at the Milosevics, the Saddams or the butchers of Darfur, but they can do nothing to restrain them. Meanwhile, the forces of decency can be paralyzed as they wait for "the international community."
Fifth, we know that when push comes to shove, all the grand talk about international norms is often just a cover for opposing the global elite's bêtes noires of the moment - usually the U.S. or Israel. We will never grant legitimacy to forums that are so often manipulated for partisan ends.
John Bolton is in a good position to make these and other points. He helped reverse the U.N.'s Zionism-is-racism resolution. He led the U.S. rejection of the International Criminal Court. Time and time again, he has pointed out that the U.N. can be an effective forum where nations can go to work together, but it can never be a legitimate supranational authority in its own right.
Sometimes it takes sharp elbows to assert independence. But this is certain: We will never be so seduced by vapid pieties about global cooperation that we'll join a system that is both unworkable and undemocratic.

The Calm Before the Storm?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

So here's a question that I've been wrestling with lately: With all these reports about the bungling of U.S. intelligence, and the C.I.A.'s relying on bogus informants with names like "Curveball" or "Knucklehead" or whatever, why have there been no terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11? I've got my own pet theory about what's produced this period of calm - and, more important, why it may be coming to an end.
Let's start with the facts. Despite all the code reds and code oranges we've been subjected to by the Department of Homeland Security, and despite the mountain of newspaper articles about how underprotected our ports and borders are, the fact is that not only has there not been another 9/11, but there has not even been a serious failed attempt that we know of.
I'm not complaining - I'm just wondering why. It still seems to me ridiculously easy to blow up a car in the heart of Chicago. And anyone who has flown on a private jet since 9/11 can tell you that security at these private terminals is still so lax that if you showed up in a Saudi headdress with a West Virginia driver's license under the name of "Billy Bob bin Laden" and asked for flight directions for your chartered Learjet to Lower Manhattan, there's a good chance no one would stop you.
So, how then do we explain the calm? To begin with, I'd give a tip o' the hat to the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. I have no doubt that their increased vigilance - and coordination with European and Arab intelligence services - has made it much harder for terrorists to organize. Moreover, thanks to Gen. John Abizaid's Centcom forces in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda no longer has a whole country from which to plan, train and coordinate terrorist attacks with impunity. The fact that Al Qaeda effectively controlled a country is what made it unique. Also, new U.S. visa policies have made it much harder for bad guys to get into America.
If your name is Muhammad and you are a 21-year-old single Arab man and you have not visited Disney World yet, well, you may want to consider Euro Disney, because your chances of getting a U.S. tourist visa are very low. Frankly, I wish this were not the case because we're keeping a lot of good, talented Arab men and women from getting educated in America, which is the best way of building friends. This is one of the sad byproducts of 9/11 - but it has undoubtedly made it more difficult for the few bad apples to get in as well.
Despite all of that, I fear that we may now be entering the most dangerous period since 9/11. Why? Because I've always believed that one of the most important reasons there has been no new terrorist attack in America has to do with the U.S. invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not only that the Bush administration has taken the fight to the enemy, but that the enemy has welcomed that fight.
To the extent that the Baathists and Jihadists have a coordinated strategy, their first priority, I think, is to defeat American forces in the heart of their world. Because if they can defeat America in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, it will have so much more resonance than setting off a car bomb in Las Vegas - especially now that 9/11 has set the terrorism bar so high in terms of effect.
If the Jihadists can defeat us in the heart of their world, and force us from Iraq, it will have a huge impact on the Arab street and shake every pro-American Arab regime. The Jihadists have always understood that Iraq is the ballgame. Iraq is the big one. Winning there is what really advances their agendas.
The reason things may be getting more dangerous now is that the formation of a freely elected government in Iraq may signal that the Baathist-Jihadist insurgency is being gradually defeated. The U.S. may even be able to withdraw some troops. And there is nothing worse for the Baathists and Jihadists than to be defeated in the heart of their world - and, even more so, to be defeated in the heart of their world by other Arabs and Muslims who are repudiating the Jihadists' vision and tactics.
I fear that when and if the Jihadists conclude that they have been defeated in the heart of their world, they will be sorely tempted to throw a Hail Mary pass. That is, they may want to launch a spectacular, headline-grabbing act of terrorism in America that tries to mask, and compensate for, just how defeated they have become at home.
In short, the more the Jihadists lose in Iraq, the more likely they are to use their rump forces to try something really crazy in America to make up for it. So let's stay the course in Iraq, but stay extra-vigilant at home.

Bellow's Democratic Nobility of the Intellect
By DAVID BROOKS

In this country we have hotels that are democratized versions of European palaces. We have parks that are democratized versions of royal hunting grounds. And we have the novels of Saul Bellow, which are European novels of ideas adapted to the idiom of the American wisenheimer.
So much of the best American culture has been an imitation, adaptation or rejection of European forms and ideas. But Bellow's death reminds us that we're now living in a unipolar moment, culturally as well as politically. Today's writers and artists are much less likely to be Americanizing European stuff, and a way of writing and thinking is dying.
In the 1950's, when Bellow came of age, European ideas enjoyed immense prestige. Hannah Arendt and other émigrés brought their central European intellectual seriousness with them, and it was natural that a young, ambitious writer like Bellow would want to take on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Proust and Kafka. It was natural that he would go on to write a novel, "Herzog," in which the hero tries to make sense of the world by writing letters to Martin Heidegger.
"American readers sometimes object to a kind of foreignness in my books," Bellow once observed.
But contact with European seriousness only made him more acutely aware of his own Americanness, as it has with so many others. While admiring the intellectual aristocracy of Europe, he grew up on the streets of Chicago, a full-bore democrat. Attracted by the hierarchies of the best that has been thought and said, he still had that American instinct to take any hierarchy and - Marx Brothers-style - ridicule it to smithereens.
Attracted by the rarefied but often anti-Semitic world of high culture, he had that Jewish instinct to want entree into that world and yet not want it at the same time.
Out of that tension between European elitism, which stoked Bellow's ambition, and America's leveling democratic shtick, which was in his bones, emerged Bellow's manic conception of the American dream. In his first great book, "The Adventures of Augie March," Bellow writes of "the universal eligibility to be noble." As Christopher Hitchens wrote in a wonderful essay for The Wilson Quarterly a few years ago, that's as "potent a statement of the American dream as has ever been uttered."
This idea, that we can all grow up to be noble, acknowledges the virtue of aristocratic greatness and reconciles it with equality. It spiritualizes the American scramble for success.
"Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand," Augie March exults. Bellow's comic twist on this idea is that these soaring big ideas and big ambitions often end up detaching Americans from reality. Bellow's characters are often on these epic voyages - even if only in their own minds - and they flit wildly between the hyper-materialism of American commercial life and the hyper-attenuated aspirations in their heads.
As one of the characters says to Augie, "You have a nobility syndrome. You can't adjust to the reality situation."
Bellow's best America would be a Times Square version of a German university, with intellectual rigor on one side and scrambling freedom - sex included - on the other.
The tension that propelled Bellow's work is now mostly absent from American life. On the one hand, you have a generation of students who are educated in a way that doesn't bring them into contact with the European canon, the old "best that has been thought and said." They don't have a chance to push back and assert their own Americanness. On the other hand, there are those in the academic and literary stratosphere who are part of the global circuit of conferences and academic appointments. They seem aloof from or ashamed of America, so they are not driven to define, the way Bellow did, an American identity.
Finally there are the rest of us who don't pay attention to what is being written and said in Europe because it doesn't seem that exciting, (Quick, what book is the talk of Berlin? Who is the François Truffaut of our moment?)
American democracy is no longer engaged in an Oedipal struggle with European aristocracy, the way it was from the days of the American Revolution all the way up until Bellow's heyday.
We're living in a unipolar culture, and it's lonely at the top.