This war escapes traditional political boundaries. Scholars argue "pre-emptive war" undermines the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), the ur-document of the nation-state system. Contemporary transnational terrorists, however, have already exploited the system's weaknesses. Failed states (e.g., Somalia) can't police themselves and thus cede sovereignty to terrorists; terror is their bane. Rogue states (e.g., Syria) support and promote terrorists; terror is their business.

Saddam isn't bin Laden, but cash, despotism and militant hatred of America are their common grease. The terror clans believe they can move in this borderless lubricant, and thus survive. In order to defeat them, America has to "move the war." "Transnational" (borderless) terror organizations use national borders as a defense, as they turn airplanes into ICBMs and acquire nuclear weapons for even more devastating attacks. The ambush at Qaim moved the war across a border, because that's how it had to be fought.

Atlantic: You state that "a world dominated by the Chinese, by a Franco-German-dominated European Union aligned with Russia, or by the United Nations … would be infinitely worse than the world we have now." Why is that the case? Can you give examples of why each of these would be worse?

RDK: Let's go down the list here. Let's use the Iraq crisis as an example. Or let's use the Balkans in the 1990s. In these cases, removing a terrible oppressive dictator was the primary aim—and remember, Saddam Hussein is responsible, directly or indirectly, for killing two to four times as many people as Slobodan Milosevic. The Europeans claimed that they could handle the whole problem in the Balkans at the end of the Cold War. They wound up calling upon us. It took the United States to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I think a world operated by the French, the Germans, and the Russians would have a kind of realpolitik that is more of the seventeenth century than the twentieth century. It would be so cold-blooded, and yet it would be dressed up with self-righteous moral statements, like the "world community" and "every country is sovereign." The result would be that some horrible dictators would flourish. And remember, Russia is not really a democracy. Germany has never really exhibited much wisdom in foreign affairs. If you look at how the French have operated in sub-Saharan Africa, how they operated supporting the Serbs in the Balkans, you will see that despite all the statements, their actual operations on the ground in many parts of the world have been, by any moral standards, worse than ours. And the problem I have with the United Nations is that it can only make decisions on broad consensus. And it's like any bureaucracy: the more people that are involved, the more mediocre and diluted the decisions are. Tough decisions tend to be made by small groups of people willing to take risks. The European Union and the UN Security Council certainly aren't designed that way. If you look back, the UN Security Council didn't give its stamp of approval for Bosnia, for Kosovo, for almost anything in the post-World War II world, except for the Korean War and the first Gulf War.

Beijing also is moving beyond stealthy spying and overt crackdowns. The government has grown savvier in its use of the Internet, fostering dialogue, getting a read on what the population is concerned about -- or at least talking about -- and inserting itself into the dialogue process to try to shape the discourse and draw out dissenters. In addition to government efforts to help develop more Chinese language material on the Internet and to create several government media and information outlets, state media regularly have cited information from Internet chat rooms -- both good and bad comments.