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April 30, 2002 8:45 a.m. This Kind of War Cracks in the foundation.

re we at war right now? I say yes, but I'm not sure how many others would agree. Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict part of America's war on terrorism? I think so, but many might say no. There is, in short, an oddness to this war, and it's something we have yet to name or define. American wars haven't been formally declared for some time. Even so, this war seems uniquely difficult to put one's finger on. It isn't always easy to say just what this war is, how and when it is being fought, or who it is being fought against. And the amorphousness of the war has political consequences.

Let us begin with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but it seems fairly obvious that the campaign of suicide bombings that led to the current conflict was orchestrated by some of our friends from the Axis of Evil. I've heard occasional speculation to this effect, but without concrete proof, the press is understandably reluctant to emphasize the point. The object of such orchestration, of course, would be to get the United States sufficiently bogged down in the dispute over Palestine to distract it from the conquest of Iraq.

In any case, since opinion is divided on the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a part of our broader war against terror, the Left, including mainstream liberals, have found an opening through which to indirectly express their doubts about the conduct of the war as a whole. We saw this as the demonstrations in Washington last week turned into a pro-Palestinian rally. We see it as well in the pro-Palestinian tilt of even many mainstream liberals in the United States, not to mention Europe.

More important, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has brought out what may soon become the fundamental domestic division that accompanies the larger war on terror — the split between liberals, who look to negotiations, agreements, and international cooperation to solve conflicts, and those who see the threat or exercise of American force as the mainspring of our policy. Although they have yet to turn it into their mantra, the Democrats are itching to take the same line toward the larger war on terror that they took on the Powell mission to the Middle East — military policy is important, but only one part of a larger and more complicated diplomatic picture that the administration continues to ignore.

The Democrats haven't quite raised this objection yet to the broader war on terror, and the seeming separation between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that larger war has partially obscured the issue. But John Judis has done us the service of ferreting out, connecting, and articulating the mumbled or implicit Democratic objections to the administration's war policy that may someday become the common currency of America's internal political debates.

Judis styles the coming foreign-policy controversies between the Republicans and Democrats as a case of Hobbes versus Locke. The Republicans see the international arena as a Hobbesian "state of nature," in which force is the ultimate arbiter. The Democrats, on the other hand, believe in the possibility of a Lockean "social contract" between nations. (Philosophically, it may not be quite right to pose this as a contrast between Hobbes and Locke, since Hobbes was also a believer in the social contract. But I take Judis's point.)

Republicans interpret the attacks of Sept. 11 as proof that, under the surface of international trade and comity, there lurks a dangerous "state of nature," an implicit anarchy, in which protection stems, most fundamentally, from a nation's command of force and its willingness to deploy it. Democrats, on the other hand, believe that globalization, interdependence, the Internet, and trade, make international agreements both necessary and attainable as fundamental instruments of policy (not merely as ratifications of what our raw military power has brought about). Republicans, says Judis, see a U.S. military monopoly as a prerequisite for security. In contrast, according to Judis, Democrats see America's military monopoly as "a waste of precious resources — and an invitation to future conflict."

The only problem with the Democratic approach to foreign policy, as described by Judis, is that it is comprehensively wrong — mistaken about international relations in general, and about the war on terror in particular. The world is, in fact, a state of nature writ large, for there exists no overarching world government in possession of a monopoly of global force. The United Nations is only the palest imitation of what an authentic worldwide "social contract" would lead to, and as such can only promote the illusion of efficacy.

Liberals are perpetually projecting their own ideal self-image — that of the "reasonable man" — onto the world as a whole. Suicide bombers and wars against infidels don't quite fit the picture. No matter. Liberals are willing to wait for terrorists and dictators recover their "inner reasonable man."

Libertarians and religious conservatives come much closer to the mark when they project either a life of endemic competition, or the image of a world beset by selfish and sinful impulses, onto the international arena. None of this means that international cooperation is impossible, but in the absence of an overarching world authority, cooperation flows from the realities of power on the ground, not the reverse.

Is this picture too dark? To a degree, yes. Shared history or shared cultural assumptions make it possible to extend genuine trust and cooperation well beyond the formal boundaries of nation-states. That is the point of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Huntington is a foreign policy "realist," who looks at the international arena as a Hobbesian "state of nature" writ large. Yet Huntington's players are civilizations, not nations. Shared cultural assumptions, Huntington believes, make informal social contracts based on trust and genuine international collaboration achievable. Yet just as surely, says Huntington, deep cultural differences make such trust and cooperation unlikely, thus forcing civilizational players back onto temporary and hardheaded calculations of military and economic interest as the only solution to conflict. Of course, Francis Fukuyama believes that something approaching a true worldwide "social contract" might someday be achieved, but only after the globe itself is converted to liberal democracy. In the meantime, we shall have to reckon with Huntington's civilizational state of nature.

Huntington also helps to explain why a "social contract" foreign policy governed by hopes for cooperation and negotiation is particularly misguided in the case of the current war on terror. The difficulty of clearly identifying our adversaries in this war is a big part of the problem. For starters, the terrorists themselves are subgovernmental entities that interact with and, to a degree, depend upon, diverse Muslim governments. As if that weren't confusing enough, Huntington points out that Muslim civilization, unlike many others, lacks a "core state," engagement and cooperation with which could facilitate control of civilizational conflict.

So the Byzantine and ever-shifting relationships between terrorist organizations and Muslim governments (many of which are jockeying for relative preeminence within the Arab or Muslim world) are forever threatening to destabilize temporary agreements with any given country or group. In a sense, the unstable wars and alliances between ethnic groups and competing warlords in Afghanistan is recapitulated, at the civilizational level, in the unstable relations between Muslim states and diverse sub-national terrorist organizations.

Muslim social organization has always alternated between periods of extreme decentralization and eras of empire. Yet even Muslim empires ruled more by playing off and balancing local rivalries than through a powerful central bureaucracy. (I discuss the problem of Muslim social organization in my extended review of Bernard Lewis's best-selling, What Went Wrong.)

So we have a double problem on our hands in our dealings with Muslim society. In the first place, the huge gulf in our cultural assumptions makes the trust required for international cooperation extremely difficult to sustain. Agreement in such circumstances almost necessarily flows from hardheaded calculations of interest, with military force and the willingness to use it taking pride of place in the reckoning.

And even when agreements can be achieved with elements of the Muslim world, it's a near certainty that others will do what they can to subvert them, just as radical Palestinian terrorists and associated states conspire to step up suicide attacks when Israeli agreements with "moderates" look near. In short, nothing short of American willingness to conquer Iraq will bring this nasty neighborhood to heel. Until that happens, the "rogues" will keep on running their game — subverting even the best and most well intentioned agreements and alliances.

In a sense, however, the deeper problem is what flows from all this for our domestic politics. The amorphousness of the war — it's ambiguous and shifting object and enemy — will create continual pauses — periods in which we seem not to be at war. During those lulls, the "reasonable man" illusions and calls for negotiation will resurface, just as they have in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the country will risk dividing internally over the war. World War II moved in slow motion compared to our conquest of Afghanistan, but once the war was declared, the matter was settled and the country united. Opposition from the Democrats nearly prevented us from booting Saddam out of Kuwait, yet once our troops were deployed, the country as a whole was on board.

This war is different. Without a clear declaration, or even a well-defined and stable enemy, there will be repeated lulls in the fighting, and therefore repeated opportunities for domestic debates between "state of nature" hawks and "social contract" doves. For now, the problem is at least partially submerged. The country is still united behind the president, and for many, differences over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem not to be about the war on terror. Yet the debate over the Powell mission threatens to become the characteristic debate of this very open-ended war against terror.

In effect, there are two competing domestic foreign-policy dynamics, each of which spring from the decentralized and ambiguous nature of our foe. Unpredictable terrorist attacks and evident political chaos in the Muslim world work in favor of "state of nature" hawks. The attacks reveal the chaos and vulnerability lurking beneath the orderly surface of a well-oiled world. The reality of terrorism cannot help but play in favor of the hawks, however much the Democrats try to spin the attacks as a lesson in the limits of unilateralism.

Yet the continuous gaps and pauses in the fighting, the need to continually determine and redetermine just who our enemy is and what our actual war objectives are, will provide continual and irresistible opportunities for "social contract" doves to demand negotiated solutions.

There is no way to know how it will all ultimately play out. For now, the country seems determined to follow the president into Iraq, and the political future of the war will hinge, in great part, on the success or failure of that campaign. But Samuel Huntington believes that we have entered into an era of decades long civilizational conflict, and the war on terror seems to answer to his description. A continual alternation between military action and renewed internal political debate may be the way of the future — something like what Israel experiences now. War, and arguments about war, may become the interminable fare of American political life. That may permanently marginalize the sixties Left, but the debate between "state of nature" hawks and mainstream Democratic "social contract" doves could go on for a very long time indeed.

- Mr. Kurtz is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.