The New War.

For years, John Kerry has been known as the "other" senator, overshadowed by his more famous Massachusetts colleague Edward Kennedy, or confused with Nebraska's senatorial war hero Bob Kerrey. Even now, as he prepares for a possible presidential bid, John Kerry is perhaps less known for his genuine accomplishments than for his recent marriage to millionaire heiress Theresa Heinz, window of the ketchup magnate.

That's a shame, for John Kerry has been one of the few truly original -- even heroic -- members of Congress, consistently ahead of his time. Kerry investigated the secret world of Oliver North well before the Iran-Contra scandal went public, and took on Manuel Noriega's drug dealing when Panama's dictator was still a darling of the C.I.A. Kerry also led the charge against the corrupt B.C.C.I. bank, at a time when other Democrats deferred to its hired gun, Democrat Clark Clifford.

Now, Kerry has written a book connecting the dots of these and other seemingly unrelated international scandals, in a call-to-arms tided The New War. His thesis is simple: In the aftermath of the cold war, the new enemy has become global crime -- from Colombia's Cali cartel to the Russian mafia, from Chinese triads to Japanese yakuza, from respectable banks that launder dirty money to the politicians on the take world-wide that make it all possible. For just as technology and the economy have gone global, so, too, has crime.

At first blush, Kerry's slender and dryly sober book seems little more than a compendium of ethnic crimes encircling the globe, a kind of international edition of Reefer Madness. After all, now that the cold war is over, a new enemy must be invented to replace the Soviets; America's security apparatus is in search of a new mission to justify its swollen budget.

But it would be as wrong to dismiss Kerry now as it was to challenge his warnings about Manuel Noriega before 1989. Kerry is onto something important and serious in his frightening tale about the growing sophistication and ruthlessness of international criminal cartels, which threaten our national security in ways previously never dreamed of Today's transnational criminal cartels use high-speed moderns and encrypted faxes," Kerry points out:

They buy jet airplanes three or four at a time and even have stealth-like submersibles in their armadas. They hire the finest minds to devise encryption systems and provide the complex accounting procedures any multi-billion dollar empire requires. They engage the ablest lawyers ... the craftiest spin doctors ... the most persistent -- and generous - -lobbyists.

Not only is much of the violence on America's streets a direct outgrowth of global gangsters, Kerry writes, crack-cocaine was itself created and disseminated as a deliberate marketing decision by the Colombian cartel seeking to penetrate a new, less affluent American market. Kerry is careful not to minimize U.S. culpability for creating the demand for drugs in the first place; but "crime today is not simply random or local; more often it is purposeful and global"

For example:

* In England, cyberterrorists extorted tens of millions of pounds from British banks and defense companies after gaining access to their computers and threatening havoc. Law enforcement officials believe it is only a matter of time before airlines, communication satellites, or even missile systems are similarly penetrated.

* The Russian mafia are not only vying for nuclear stockpiles, they are hiring unemployed Russian scientists to create new and deadly synthetic drugs to export.

* Colombia's drug cartel is now working hand-in-hand with criminal groups from four continents, costing the United States an estimated $200 billion per year -- roughly equal to our entire defense budget.

The metaphor of war permeates Kerry's writing. "Having exhausted our rhetoric on everything from wars on poverty to wars on drugs, we may not think it's an all-out war, but they do," he writes "They know exactly what it is: War of a new kind, the whole globe its theater of operations" Kerry's prescription: "America must lead an international crusade ... just as we led the world in the fight against" communism and "rogue" states like Iraq.

Kerry offers a number of solutions: beefing up U.S. law enforcement abroad, expanding laws for extradition and asset forfeiture, cracking down on money laundering centers like the Cayman Islands, establishing transnational courts to try global gangsters, and creating sorely needed minimum standards in international law.

These are good ideas, but easier proposed than established. Perhaps the United Nations could push them through, expanding its portfolio in a way that even Jesse Helms could support.

At the heart of all this is the fundamental fact that we must redefine what threatens our "national security." It is no longer communism or a single antagonistic superpower like the Soviet Union, but numerous threats of lesser but equally lethal enemies: terrorists with access to conventional and nuclear weapons, ozone depletion or other environmental destruction that endangers the entire planet, food and water shortages that create refugees and destabilize governments, and, of course, the criminal cartels on which Kerry focuses.

Kerry is a better senator than author; his prose can be overly earnest and wooden, filled with accurate but sometimes grating self-promotion for his leadership on these issues. And for all of his soaring war rhetoric, he ducks the really hard question of whether the US. should use military force to tackle these global gangs.

Still, Kerry deserves credit for thinking big, and once again getting ahead of the curve, particularly since these issues have largely been cornered by conservatives. That's unfortunate, because as Kerry realizes the dangers posed by global gangs should not be a matter of ideology but simply of common sense. Yet the left has largely ignored this issue, focusing instead on the rise of another new international actor, the multinational corporation.

What neither the left nor the right seem to appreciate is the ironic parallel between the two. Of course, multinational corporations provide jobs and products we all use, while multinational criminal gangs are strictly parasites feeding off the violence and destruction they create. But both now exercise enormous power world-wide, often dwarfing -- sometimes controlling -- the increasingly weak governments that are supposed to be in charge. Both can undermine a nation's stability -- whether by force and terror or by exporting jobs. Neither have any genuine accountability to the communities whose fates they control.

For all the talk about the dangers of Big Government, we may be entering an era when government is the only antidote to the newfound power of both global gangs and global corporations.

Perhaps what we really need is another trustbuster like Teddy Roosevelt to take on both the criminal and the corporate cartels. John Kerry -- war hero, millionaire Yankee liberal, self-promoting iconoclastic thinker -- would seem the logical heir of TR's swashbuckling legacy, the man who would like to lead the charge up the next century's San Juan Hill.