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.This is clearly a generational project, and one that contains noguarantee of success.It will have to proceed in tandem with the otherprojects mentioned above, but it can and must begin now.There is noreason to accept that the Israel-Palestine problem or the reconstructionof Iraq must be solved before an overarching project of reform canbegin.On a regionwide basis, the first step is for the United States andEurope to get on the right side of the issue of reform in the Middle Eastand to stay there, in order to establish that Western oil interests will notalways trump human rights and concerns about democracy.If donewith sufficient humility, this will make it possible to engage the region-215ALLIES AT WARal actors in the type of forum envisaged.Concurrently, the UnitedStates and its partners must follow through on their promises to stabi-lize, reconstruct, and liberate both Iraq and Afghanistan as demonstra-tions of their goodwill, strength of purpose, and capacity.From a transatlantic perspective, the project of promoting politicalreform in the Middle East represents an opportunity to reinvigorate thealliance by creating a joint project that rests on common U.S.andEuropean values and that addresses their common security interests.Develop New Norms on Legitimacy and the Use of ForceThe crisis over Iraq did not just reflect differences over how to deal withSaddam Hussein s regime, but in fact revealed wider divides betweenthe United States and Europe over issues of world order and the appro-priate use of force.Simultaneously, the crisis served to demonstratehow differences on seemingly arcane issues of international law canmatter in practical circumstances.One important lesson all parties should take from this experienceis that it makes sense to begin now to address basic disagreements thathave emerged over world order before the next crisis begins.SinceSeptember 11, the Bush administration has forcefully made the pointthat the old laws and institutions established for the post-World War IIand Cold War realities are not effective in today s world.The combina-tion of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and rogue states meanthat the world can no longer define aggression in simple cross-borderterms, nor does it have the luxury of waiting for threats to definitivelymanifest themselves before it reacts with purpose and resolve.Before the Iraq crisis, Europeans paid some lip service to thesenotions, but they generally refused to take concrete action to reformthe institutions of international order to account for their implications.In this context, the Bush administration s preemption doctrine, soactively scorned in Europe, does not just represent the unilateralist216RESTORING THE ALLIANCEtendencies of a hard-line administration.It also reflects a generalAmerican frustration that the institutions of world order are too slowand too ineffective to confront the immediate problems of twenty-first-century security to include the physical security of the Americanhomeland.The idea of anticipating threats and preventing them through theuse of force, while always controversial, is hardly new.In fact, evenrecent French military doctrine contains provisions for using forceunder such circumstances.Similarly, the EU s first effort at a EuropeanSecurity Strategy a document drafted by High Representative for EUCommon Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana also acknowl-edged that threats such as terrorism and weapons of mass destructionmay require action even before crises arise.Americans and Europeans are unlikely to ever agree completely onwhat new principles should govern the use of force.But the solution isnot to dismiss the importance of maintaining any international rulesand norms, as some Americans would have it, and simply ask the worldto trust that a benign and wise United States will make the right deci-sions.Unfortunately, whatever the objective truth of this Americanself-image, it is not a view that is sufficiently shared throughout theworld, or even in Europe, to constitute an effective basis for legitimat-ing the use of force against sovereign entities.Nor, however, is the  European solution of unwavering attachmentto principles adopted by the United Nations over 50 years ago longbefore the specter of terrorists with weapons of mass destructionappeared viable in today s world.As Europeans implicitly accepted inthe Kosovo conflict, an agreement among the 19 Western democraciesof NATO can be as legitimate as agreement among 15 members of theSecurity Council [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]