THE US: Richard Cheney, the US vice-president, spelled out the case for a pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq on Monday in an address to American war veterans. Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons "fairly soon". He has already acquired biological and chemical weapons, which he is "prepared to share" with terrorists.
He needs time to perfect this arsenal. Given that, he "could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail". The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action in those circumstances. The Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment no longer apply against terrorists who have no country to defend or dictators willing to share deadly weapons with them.
This was a carefully crafted speech. It was written and delivered in the middle of an extraordinary counter-attack against the developing Iraq policy from what seems like a roll call of senior figures in his father's administration.
Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Laurence Eagleberger and Norman Schwarzkoph have joined Henry Kissinger, Chuck Nagel and other Republican luminaries and geopolitical strategists such as Zbigniew Bzrezinski and Richard Holbrooke in criticising such a strategy, saying it is dangerous without a fresh United Nations mandate and support from European and Middle Eastern allies.
Cheney and the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, dismiss these criticisms. They say the Iraqis are so skilled at prevarication that another UN resolution would play into their hands and the US should go it alone if necessary, since it is better to be right than rely on irresolute allies.
What's more, they have won a major element of the argument against more moderate antagonists within the Bush administration: its commitment to regime change in Iraq, and not only the need for Saddam Hussein to abide by UN resolutions and arms inspections into weapons of mass destruction. Knowing that, there is less incentive for the Iraqis to let the UN arms teams back in, since they could provoke a row with the UN, giving the US an excuse to attack.
There could also be an orchestration between the different administration voices and key allies with a view to getting a new UN resolution, with a deadline making it clear military action would follow from an Iraqi refusal to comply. That would give the Europeans cover and possibly defer Russian or Chinese vetoes.
Such tactical issues should not obscure the much more important shift in strategic thinking involved in the evolution of US policy. The respected analyst G. John Ikenberry of Georgetown University writes in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs that "for the first time since the dawn of the Cold War a new grand strategy is taking shape in Washington".
According to this paradigm, the US is "less bound to its partners and to global rules and institutions while it steps forward to play a more unilateral and anticipatory role in attacking terrorist threats and confronting rogue states seeking weapons of mass destruction. The US will use its unrivalled military power to manage the global order."
Ikenberry says this strategy contains a fundamental commitment to maintain US hegemony over any coalition of other great powers, rather than using the previous strategies of balance of power realism or liberal multilateralism. The combination of terrorism with rogue states requires techniques of preventive elimination, not containment or deterrence. It involves a new contingent attitude to the national sovereignty of potential assailants if the US believes it is going to be attacked.
This new approach depreciates international rules, treaties and security partnerships. It removes constraints on the US response to perceived threats. And it pays substantially less attention than heretofore to the likely destabilising effects of applying such a strategy, whether in the Middle East or East Asian contexts. The priority must be to dislodge dangerous regimes, as Cheney puts it, "when the gravest of threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace".
Ikenberry describes this as a "neoimperial grand strategy", superseding the older realist and liberal ones. It is indeed striking how often the imperial analogy is used to describe the US stance in recent policy and analytical writing. But he believes it is ill-advised and misconceived because such unilateralism is unsustainable, even by such a powerful country as the US now is. Balancing power and participating in multilateral institutions will remain essential if US hegemony is to be maintained and the rest of the world is to keep good relations with it.
Should this new strategic doctrine be regarded as substantially under way or is it still subject to continued debate within the Bush administration or change if the Democrats return to office? If the latter, there is an opportunity for other states, or regional blocs such as the EU, to influence its evolution - whether over Iraq or more general issues. If the former, they had better learn to adjust to these geopolitical realities. This is the essential context in which European foreign and defence policy is evolving. The hard power values projected from the evolution of US policy - unilateralism, sovereigntism, military hegemony and intervention - are consistently counterposed to the soft power ones of human rights, development aid, peaceful resolution of conflict and environmentalism projected by the EU.
Even if one grants that these are stereotypes, it is quite clear where Ireland's values stand between these sets of values and interests. They coincide much more with those of the EU - and the gulf between what is projected by the US and the EU is increasing. That means we are better off choosing between them and seeing how best Irish values can influence EU policy-making. In that case there is a compelling case for remaining within the mainstream of EU policy-making and making the best effort to change it.
Unfortunately it is difficult to get an informed Irish debate going on these subjects, rather than crude assumptions about militarisation of EU structures, which usually miss the point of the wider transatlantic setting. The Dáil debates on the Nice Treaty over the coming weeks provide an opportunity to open up these subjects in a more informed manner. But so far it has been difficult to get clarity on them from the Irish political class.