A World Shaken Up: Consequences of the first important event of the 21st century -- good and bad.

The Anglo-American action in Iraq, to which the Arab terrorist attack on September 11 was the prolegomenon, is likely to rank as the first important event of the 21st century. The reasons are twofold, the first negative, the second positive.

The action, and responses to it, brought to the surface the need for fundamental change in various international organizations. The first is the United Nations, an omnium-gatherum of states whose permanent membership on the General Assembly and whose periodic membership on the Security Council is automatic without any regard to their qualifications. Thus military dictatorships, gangster-run states, and failed states overrun by terrorists have voting rights as valid as those exercised by law-abiding states that have succeeded in making democracy work and abided by the rule of law.

Moreover, the Security Council system, invented in 1945, is more than half a century out of date and no longer corresponds to global realities. These weaknesses explain why the U.N. failed even to address the problem of international terrorism, let alone deal with it. When, following 9/11, America, as the injured power, finally determined to do so, it found the U.N. an obstacle, not a help. The U.S. government suspected this all along, and involved the U.N. machinery only at the urgent request of its principal ally, Britain. In the event, the Allies refused the requests of France and Russia for bribes in return for allowing the U.N. machine to function. This rejection of the U.N.'s characteristically corrupt way of doing things amounted to rejecting the U.N. altogether. The U.N.'s failure to involve itself in the first major crisis of the 21st century effectively ends any attempt to make it an instrument of world government.

Second, the use made by the French government (and its temporary ally Germany) of the NATO structure to impede America's plans to act in Iraq again exposed the antiquity of an organization that had fulfilled its original purpose -- to protect Western Europe from Soviet expansion -- and showed conclusively that it is now obsolete. There is, indeed, no further point in keeping large forces from the U.S., U.K., and Canada in central Europe, and their withdrawal at this point becomes inevitable and urgent.

The question of what should replace these two organizations, both damaged beyond repair, is linked to a third negative event -- the crisis inside the European Union. This was inevitable sooner or later, for the EU, in its fundamental structure, is also half a century out of date. It has proceeded systemically toward some forms of economic union, including a common currency, and is now contemplating a constitutional union. But it has made no progress at all toward a common foreign policy, and has actually gone backward from a common armed force to give it muscle, since the "European Army" proposal was voted down by the French in 1954. Britain excepted, the armed forces of the EU member states have declined in size and effectiveness in relation to the rest of the world, and there are no present proposals to modernize them. This helps to explain the EU's total failure to solve the biggest problem on its own doorstep, the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Indeed Continental Europe is physically and morally incapable of acting outside its own borders.

This weakness is likely to become more pronounced as the 21st century progresses. The four largest EU Continental powers now have some of the world's lowest birth rates: France, Spain, Germany, Italy (in descending order), and the portion of the total population dependent on the workforce is the highest in the world (Japan excepted). As the EU specifies a 35-hour working week, soon to be reduced to 30 hours, it will become increasingly difficult to finance existing pension commitments, let alone future ones dictated by demographic definitions. It is unrealistic to suppose EU governments will be willing or even able to support large armed forces.

By contrast, the U.S., with a comparatively high birth rate, and with policies that enable it to absorb more high-quality immigration than the rest of the world put together, is poised to increase its demographic wealth base. Its population is now approaching the 300 million mark and is expected to pass 400 million by midcentury.

Seen against this background, criticism of Tony Blair for "positioning Britain too far from Europe and too close to America" seems singularly lacking in realism. In fact, Blair has been guided by his moral principles and by his accurate judgment of the relative integrity of America and Europe. But if he had been acting simply on principles of Realpolitik, the answer would have been the same.

Let us now look at the positive aspect. Without the means of defending itself, and with its power, wealth, and numbers declining every year, the EU has no long-term future, and it is becoming startlingly obvious, anyway, that Britain has no long-term future in it.

Events have obliged Britain to act with the U.S. in Iraq and that is likely to remain the pattern. With the marginalization of the U.N., the disintegration of NATO, and the enfeeblement of the EU, the future of Britain seems more likely to be secure as part of a constellation of democratic states with common traditions of law, language, culture, and morality, grouped around the U.S. and including other English-speaking peoples such as the Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders. As English becomes even more a world language, the choice of participants will widen. An Atlantic free-trade union, including Britain, to which an Australasian and Pacific appendix (including, for instance, Singapore) would be added, seems the first, obvious step in this direction.

The U.S. will not allow its irritation with certain European states to influence its policy emotionally. Global policy must be determined by strict national interest. But this points increasingly to bringing the great Asian communities -- India, China, and Japan -- into America's plans for a peaceful and law-abiding world, for which a majestic combination of the English-speaking states will provide the democratic, military, and, indeed, moral leadership.