LETTER FROM AMERICA: Writing in the Guardian last week, Salman Rushdie noted that he had been cast into the ranks of what the erstwhile revolutionary, Tariq Ali, has called sneeringly the "belligerati", those liberals and leftwingers who are prepared to stand up and be counted as defenders of the US campaign in Afghanistan (though not uncritically, or of its extension to Iraq).
Rushdie, who has good reason to view Islamic fundamentalism with some degree of suspicion, quotes the observation by John Lloyd of the New Statesman that the intellectual left in Europe insists on viewing America as "the largest danger in the modern world". And what I shall call the "LDMW" theory is by no means confined to the left.
Yet, as Rushdie argues, "in Afghanistan the Taliban, perhaps the cruellest regime on earth, had permitted the country to be hijacked by a parasitic terror organisation dedicated to the overthrow of western civilisation." "The cleansing of those stables by the US deserves a far better press than it is getting," he adds. "Sadly, cheap slogans and ad hominem sneers have long passed for reasoned argument in the British papers." And, I might add, our own.
The danger of such rhetoric is that by crying wolf every time the US lifts its finger abroad, we fail to understand the nature of the beast and the period we are going through.
What makes reporting from the US fascinating at the moment is precisely the dynamics arising from the tension between competing, unresolved definitions of the new American global role.
Crude, old-fashioned depictions of the US as LDMW, or analogies with its role in Vietnam, Chile, Panama.... simply do not do justice to the complexities and constraints on the US in the era of globalised capitalism.
Its reach may be further than ever, its might unmatched, but many of America's more far-sighted rulers understand that its touch must be lighter and more subtle, and its justification couched in more universal values, than ever before.
Joseph Nye, the political scientist, has written of the US as sole superpower, powerful enough to face down any challenge to its supremacy, yet not ever strong enough to dominate absolutely, always needing allies.
The two facets, supremacy and dependence, find their expression in those competing visions.
One view, expressed bluntly by Zalnay Khalilzad (From Containment to Global Leadership) sees the US imperative as "to preclude the rise of another global rival for an indefinite period . . . and to be willing to use force if necessary for the purpose".
Khalilzad, now US special envoy to Afghanistan, is close to the Cheney-Wolfowitz axis, and his is the rationale for the Bush attempt to extend the defintition of the war on terrorism to one which encompasses rogue states with the potential to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Bush has repeatedly made clear that although the US wants its friends at its side, it can and will do the job alone if necessary.
An alternative perspective is articulated by Richard Haass, the head of policy planning in the State Department, whose ideas are reported to be close to those of Colin Powell. He spoke recently to Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker of what he said was the important difference between an "imperial" role and an "imperialist" one.
"Great as our advantages are," he argued,"there are still limits. We have to have allies. We can't impose our ideas on everyone. We don't want to be fighting wars alone, so we need others to join us. American leadership yes, but not American unilateralism. It has to be multilateral."
He goes on to argue that the goal of US foreign policy "should be to persuade the other major powers to sign on to certain key ideas as to how the world should operate: opposition to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, support for free trade, democracy, markets."
That theme, which he calls "integration", "is about locking them into these policies, then building institutions that lock them in even more."
Building international institutions? The WTO, the UN? Heresies for the Republican right, but here is the authentic voice of multinational business in an age when the nation state as an institution, or one nation state, the US, is inadequate to provide the order it needs to conduct its business.
But when I say "alternative" I must enter a caveat - it may be a logical alternative, but politically the President has found no difficulty in regularly embracing the idea of multilateralism too. Stand up the real George Bush.
Indeed, Bush was praised from an unusual source this week, David Corn of the leftwing Nation magazine, for his willingness to embrace that related liberal heresy, what Corn calls the "root-causes-of-terrorism-crowd".
This is the view, often caricatured and pilloried here as "America-got-what-it-deserved", that terrorism cannot be defeated by military means alone and that poverty may have something to do with it.
"We fight against poverty, because hope is an answer to terror," Mr Bush said 10 days ago with Bono at his side, announcing a $10 billion increase in US aid to poor countries between 2004 and 2006.
Although the increase in spending, heavily hedged with new conditions, will only bring US aid spending up to 0.13 per cent of GDP, compared to an average 0.31 among donor nations, the move marks a dramatic U-turn. US aid has been declining from 0.5 per cent of GDP since the 1960s, and the decision, for which Bono can take some credit, marks an important acknowledgment of the interdependence which globalisation has brought in its wake.
So, LDMW? Perhaps. We may have reason to fear US certainty and hegemony.
We should be wary, and critical, and seek to constrain it. But the nature of the beast is contradictory and far from decided.
