Is This the New World Order?(George W. Bush)

In the summer of 1990, before the first gulf war, an adviser to President George H.W. Bush instructed White House aides on how to deal with the media. "Tell them we can't just let Iraq get away with this," he said. "There is a new world order developing." Half an hour later, that famous catchphrase blipped up on CNN. The great consolidating idea of a new era was born.

Too bad about the son. Like some weird sort of geopolitical anti-force, Bush II seems bent on undoing much of his father's work. Call it the New World Disorder. The world is in crisis. The Western Alliance is split. So are the United Nations and the European Union. Almost everyone in the world hates America, whose messianic brand of 21st- century Manifest Destiny has propelled it toward a questionable war in the Middle East--even as it neglects a nuclear crisis in Asia. Stock markets have fallen everywhere. Oil prices are nearing record highs, and the forecast is for worse to come. The architects of the old postwar world thought themselves, in Dean Acheson's phrase, "present at the creation." Today? We're all present at the destruction.

As American attempts to build something resembling a "coalition of the willing" collapsed at the Security Council late last week, the costs of the diplomatic debacle mounted. The concerns went beyond the possible consequences of the war, in lives and money, and beyond even the economic and political dislocations that will accompany it. The fears went deeper, to the very foundations of the modern international system. At bottom, everyone recognizes that Washington's most recent effort to win a second resolution authorizing force against Iraq has been undertaken largely to support key allies, chiefly Britain's Tony Blair. It transparently did not grow out of a genuine commitment to multilateralism. On the other side of the great divide, the main concern of Germany, France and Russia is not having to cast a veto. If they do, and the United States goes to war anyway, says a ranking European diplomat, expressing an increasingly common view, "it's the end of the United Nations."

What would that mean for the world? An "irrelevant" United Nations, as the Bushies put it, could be more easily bypassed in future crises. Yet almost as if willing just that, Washington pushes ahead. Administration hawks led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard Cheney are said to want the U.N. on record--with the United States, or against ...