Two days after September 11th, the call went out from Washington. The lightning strike by terrorists was to be plucked out of time and filed in the category of seismic events which alter the universe. The world has changed. We are living in a new era, a new world order.
For George Bush the new world is simple, tough, uncomplicated by history, a warning to America's allies and enemies that the rules have changed. With the bluntness of the Koran, we are asked to divide into the friends and the foes of the US. "If you are not with us . . ." as they say in Grozny, Kabul, and the bazaars of the Middle East.
It was left to the British prime minister to add substance to a flimsy proclamation. From Tony Blair's passionate speech to the Labour Party conference, we learned that this was the moment when tragedy begot renewal. We were witnessing the conversion of the US to the principles of multilateralism. Even Polly Toynbee in the Guardian (and Paul Gillespie in this newspaper) interpreted the Blair/Bush partnership as announcing a change in the principles by which states relate to one another.
The problem with Blair's vision is that his new world "coming together with America as a community", as he said, is not the one the Bush administration has in mind. "The power of community is asserting itself," Blair claims. For Bush, this new world must henceforth be on notice that America's security is paramount. For Blair, what has been opened is a window of opportunity - the opportunity to escape from the world of states seeking security against others to a new order where security is achieved in common with others. Bush needs Blair to supply the ethical glue which will stick his coalition together. And Blair hopes that by playing his role he will convince the president that a unilateral foreign policy is no longer tolerable in a globalised world.
Too much has been made of America's conversion to co-operative behaviour in constructing the coalition - the sudden payment of its UN debts in return for a quick and favourable resolution, the hints of a rethink on the Kyoto Protocol, the new interest in a Palestinian state. To interpret this as a new departure and an indicator of US multilateralism is to misunderstand the term. It confuses multilateralism with strategic co-operation - a strategy which has always been an essential tool in the armory of statecraft, not least in that of the US. Unilateralism does not mean that states do not co-operate; multilateralism is not achieved by stitching together a coalition of convenience.
The US has always practised strategic co-operation whenever it was deemed useful to the pursuit of its national interests. What we have not seen is an administration prepared to submit its foreign policy to the rule-governed demands of international organisation and law - multilateralism, in other words. Its contempt for the World Court, its refusal to countenance an International Criminal Court to which its own citizens might be subject like everyone else, its calculated misuse of the authority of the UN for its own ends - this is not "the power of community asserting itself" but the abuse of power. What sticks in the craw of those on the receiving end of US policy is that the unilateral pursuit of American interests is invariably accompanied by a cloying moralism which hides the mundane pressures of domestic politics and corporate profit in a sickly goo of god-talk and universal Christian values. It is no crime to yield to such material pressures.
It is criminal to expect the world - not least the Arab world - to ignore the hypocrisy involved, under pain of being labelled "anti-American".
Dr Bill McSweeney lectures in the International Peace Studies programme of the Irish School of Ecumenics, TCD. His book, Security, Identity & Interests, was published last year by Cambridge University Press.