Abstract -The paper analyzes the American President Bush’s prevention doctrine and the potential effect of the American intervention in Iraq on the relations between Europe and the United States. The hegemonic theory of international politics and the evolutionary world politics model are adopted to understand the present phase of change of world politics.

The Iraq war uncovers important aspects of the current phase of world politics. In this paper, attention is called especially on the American quest for a change in the leadership strategy of the global system, and the impact of this choice on the American coalition. The Bush’s doctrine of prevention is recognized as the attempt of the American government to introduce a new political principle of world politics. The content of the principle is that (a) military intervention to change the domestic regime of the state that seriously puts at risk the structure of government of the world political system is politically legitimate action, and (b) the decision to act is the responsibility of the state in the leading role of the world political system in case it cannot be made in a multilateral institutional context

Hegemonic theory of world politics is the overall theoretical framework of analysis of the present paper. At the same time, the evolutionary world politics model is adopted to understand change in world politics. The sections in the first part of the paper analyze the prevention doctrine and the issue of external military intervention to change domestic regimes. In the second part of the paper, a set of concepts for the analysis of the government structure of the world political system is presented. They stand within the framework of the hegemonic theory and the evolutionary world politics model. In the last part of the paper, the potential effect of the United States attempt on the United Nations and transatlantic relations are analyzed.

Given for granted that the Iraqi government aimed at building over-sized military force, available knowledge does not sustain the argument that this behavior was preparation to aggression of other states. At the same time, it is worth to remind that IR scientific knowledge gives two contrasting information on the context of the intervention in Iraq. On one side, political science research data demonstrate that dictators are used to build up armed forces to make the domestic regime stronger rather than to prepare the country for external military aggression. On the other side, as democratic peace theory demonstrates, dictators are less predictable and controlled by domestic institutions than democratic leaders are. They can easily divert military strength from domestic targets to external aggression. As research findings demonstrate, states that perpetrate systematic repression internally are more likely to exhibit aggression and violence internationally (see, for example, Caprioli and Trumbore, 2003). Indeed, the Iraqi regime is example of this proposition as it waged war twice, on Iran and Kuwait, in the recent past.

However, the Bush’s preventive doctrine maintains something different from the international law doctrine of preventive war. It doesn't care for the explicit preparation of war against a foreign country. According to Bush’s preventive doctrine, it is necessary and legitimate to destroy the military capabilities, and change the government of the state that seriously and recklessly puts at risk the vital functions of the structure of government of the world political system [i]. In the view of Ronald Reagan and successive American Presidents, these states are armed with weapons of mass destruction, are ruled by aggressive and unpredictable leaders, and set up links with terrorist organizations that want to overturn the structure of government of the world system. For all these attributes, the rogue states are much more dangerous than Cold War revolutionary states which, at the exception of Soviet Union, opposed the international political order largely by means of mobilizing social movements and acting through conventional violence.

Active opposition to states that refuse to obey to the world political rules and institutions that give to the United States the principal role of government has been normal policy of the American governments of the current world system. Bush reacted to Saddam’s policy by waging a war but had also other means at his disposal to choose from as effective as, or more effective than war. Bush’s preference for war can be explained by the expected efficacy of this action against Saddam, but that preference is better explained by the expected utility of this action to the world strategy of government of the United States. After two American-led operations that, in the past few years, caused the change of the local regime – i.e. the American-led NATO intervention in Kosovo that caused the fall of the Milosevic’s regime, and the American-led UN intervention in Afghanistan that caused the fall of the Taliban regime - Bush wanted the United Nations to legitimate also the US-led multilateral action of war to eliminate the regime of Saddam Hussein to promote the principle that all regimes recklessly defiant to the world political structure must be evicted. Bush was unable to get multilateral legitimation, as in the Kosovo and Afghanistan case, but decided to go ahead with the substitute solution of the support of an ad hoc coalition that he sold as the needed political legitimation of his action. Was it hazardous move? Will it backfire on the American leadership of the world political system? Or, is Bush’s resolve to act a decision that takes into account recent changes in world politics and anticipates critical problems of the incoming phase of world politics?

In almost two hundred years, since 1815 through 2003, change of regime and rulers by external military intervention has been carried out 40 times (Table 1). The figure is drawn from the research by Tanisha Fazal (2001) on the period 1815 through 1992, and the analysis of the author of this paper on the years 1993-2003. To these years belong the recent cases of the intervention of NATO in Kosovo/Serbia in 2000 which caused the fall of the Milosevic regime, the intervention of the United Nations forces in Afghanistan under the American command in 2001 which caused the fall of the taliban regime, and the war in Iraq in 2003. Twenty cases occurred in the 48 years following World War Two; twenty in the former 131 years. It is obvious that the use of military intervention to change the regime of a foreign country is frequent in contemporary international system. It is also apparent that the two great powers committed the highest number of military interventions (51%) of the contemporary international system (Soviet Union intervened in Bulgaria 1947; Hungary 1948; Romania 1948; Hungary 1956; Afghanistan 1978; the United States in Guatemala 1954; Grenada 1983; Panama 1989; Serbia 2000; Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003). On this knowledge, one comes to the conclusion that in the contemporary international system safeguarding domestic regimes and constitutional sovereignty of the states from external intervention can hardly be counted as a strong norm of international law and a well protected political rule because the numerous cases of intervention that changed domestic regimes did not provoke the appropriate reaction of the institutions of the international political system. On the contrary, in the contemporary international system, the global leader, i.e. the United States, committed intervention and allowed other states carrying on military intervention to change the regime of foreign countries.

Table 1

Unlike many past cases, the American intervention in Iraq and the American-led UN intervention in Afghanistan were decided to react to alleged threats to international security and stability. Unlike all other cases and the intervention in Afghanistan, which was decided as reaction to the Taliban coalition with Al-Quada responsible for the 9/11 attack, intervention in Iraq was not decided in reaction to a precedent event but only on the political reason of the need of preventively acting for the sake of strengthening the present structure of government of the world political system.

In the recent past, different forms of intervention have been practiced in world politics and different attitudes have been expressed on the acceptability and legitimacy of intervention. Here, it is suggested that these attitudes signal the emergence of policy innovation in the practice of intervention. It is also maintained that the Bush doctrine of armed intervention against rogue regimes is an attempt to forward this innovation. Three different reasons for intervention in contemporary world politics are put under observation here.

First, intervention for humanitarian purposes, i.e. for containing civil wars and violent clashes between rival civil and ethnic groups, and restraining the action of governments responsible for humanitarian crises. Consent on this form of intervention has been spreading in the recent past. International law experts agreed rather quickly on the new doctrine of intervention for humanitarian purposes. Military intervention for humanitarian purposes is now legitimate international action on condition that it is multilateral action.

Second, concern for international actions to contain the external, beside the internal, consequences of the policies of inefficient and reckless governments has been expressed in recent past. Corruption, poverty and repression that result from the action and inaction of inefficient and irresponsible governments provoke problems like mass migration and transnational crime that destabilize other countries and the whole system of international relations. Countries like Colombia (drug and crime), Albania (crime), Somalia, Serbia of the times of Milosevic, and Liberia in recent past months, are some cases in point. Undoubtedly, this view of the risk of international destabilization derives from the concept of interdependence among the states of the contemporary globalized world. Stopping domestic humanitarian crises and preventing the external diffusion of related problems made groups of countries and international organizations, in different parts of the world like Europe (the Balkans) and Africa (Liberia is the most recent example), decide for actions of different nature such as economic assistance programs, technical support programs (as, for instance, assistance to local police), and also military operations in the countries of repressive, inefficient and corrupt regimes. These actions are arranged by means of bilateral and multilateral agreements that sometimes include the government of the target state. All these actions are forms of intervention in the domestic affairs of the target state that de facto or jure, occasionally or systematically, contractually or compulsorily reduce the authority of the government of the target state. Although in the past, protectorates and other forms of external assistance and interference were used by states, the nature and number of these forms of interventions are specific of the contemporary world politics.

Third, the rise of global terrorism that culminated in the 9/11 attack on the United States put on the agenda of the world political system the issue of military reaction to terrorist movements and regimes (like the Afghan Taliban regime) which deliberately put under risk international security and threaten the stability of the structure of government of the world political system.

Opposite to large consent on intervention for humanitarian purposes and increasing consent on actions to prevent the spread of problems from inefficient states to the international system, consent on carrying out military actions of prevention on the state that puts at serious risk the stability of the world political system is small and hesitant. The United States want that this consent be wider and stronger than it is and allow legitimate actions against rogue states. After declaring for many years the American resolve to act on rogue states, the United States of George W. Bush jr. decided to act on Iraq and wage a war against Saddam Hussein because Iraq, in their view, fits to the image of the country that is legitimate target of preventive war because doesn't accept the structure of government of the world political system and wants to change it by unconventional means, including terrorism and mass destruction. Preventive intervention, in other words, is justified by the direct and inverse relation existing between the stability of the regime of that state, and the stability of the structure of government of the international system. Setting end to the former is necessary to safeguarding the stability of the latter, which – according to the United States - is a public good of the world political system and assure the security of the states.

It is worth to note that the doctrine of preventive intervention is applied because the leading power of the world decides so. In fact, the American doctrine of prevention implies that, whatever the rogue state domestic characteristics (like dictatorship, repression and inefficiency) and external behavior (like sponsoring terrorism, conspicuous flouting of international law and developing weapons of mass destruction), the decisive condition for preventive intervention is the rulers of the rogue states menace the stability of the world political system because irresponsibly, deceitfully and violently obstruct the dominant state of the system.

The success of the American resolve to make a principle and practice of the world political system this form of prevention depends on some conditions which include the consent of the most important states, the support of the countries that follow the United States as allies, and the inclusion of this principle in the mechanisms of the world structure of government like the procedures of the United Nations. In other words, it depends on the inclusion of this principle in the government strategy of the world political system that a large and powerful coalition of countries agrees on.

According to the hegemonic theory of international politics [ii]., the world is ruled by a structure of government in which one state has the principal role of authority and government. That state enters in this role – which is named in different ways such as global power, world power, global leader, hegemonic power, and so on - after a general war in which it drove the victorious coalition. The governments of that coalition share the same strategy/program of government of the system, which is put into action by the world power in the phase after the war. The hegemonic structure of government persists as long as the global leader has the consent of a good number of the most important states, i.e. the states that have resources to influence the most important economic regimes and public policies of the system. In addition, the role of the global leader is stable as long as it fairly respects the rules, institutions and procedures of the world system.

On knowledge of the hegemonic school, other relevant aspects of the structure of the world political system are reminded here. Unlike the structure of government of the state, the structure of government of the world system is not founded upon a constitutional pact and derived laws that correct the inequality of the subjects of the political system and define their participation in the policy-making process. The international system is not governed under the rule of law. However, de facto power – i.e. power founded on the unequal distribution of (military, economic and political) resources among the states – is conditioned by international law norms and the norms and procedures of international organizations, above all the United Nations, and international economic regimes.

To be more precise, the structure of government of the world political system consists of roles, institutions and procedures with which authoritative decisions on measures and policies are made and put into action to govern the world system. Recognizing that the world system is governed through a structure of roles, institutions and procedures means recognizing the world political system does not conform to the communitarian view of international relations [iii]. This view perceives the world as a community of peers (the nation-states) abiding to law norms and destitute of actors with authoritative role. Let’s add here two remarks that are obvious but make clear what can stay ahead in the evolutionary change of the world political institutions. First, the structure of government of the world system has a very low level of institutional differentiation and no meaningful judicial institutions (let alone police institutions) to take care of the international legal order as state political systems have in the tradition of liberal constitutionalism. This means that the role of guardian of the international order, that the hegemonic power has in world politics, is fated to last up to the moment in which the world system has a strong diversified institutional structure in which judicial institutions are fully operational and independent from the states. This moment is hardly seen today despite Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, the existence of the International Court of Justice and similar organizations, and the introduction of the International Criminal Court. Second, the hegemonic nature of the structure of government of the world system will last until a pact on the foundation and autonomy of the supreme political authority is introduced in the world institutional structure. This pact has to define the organization and distribution of powers of the world government structure, and to allocate financial resources to the government institution to make them able to produce effective policies. At present and for a long time in the future, instead, the global power is the greatest contributor of financial resources to the world system programs and policies. For this reason, it heavily influences the use of the resources of international organizations and economic regimes.

However, it is worth reminding that the term hegemonic structure of government is adopted to point to the fact that the leading role of government in the international system - up to a substantial change of the world political system - comes by, and is exercised on the basis of, the consent of the states, which is not universal and uncritical consent. In particular, in the contemporary international system, the consent of the followers and the legitimacy of the authority of the global leader depend to a great extent on the exercise of hegemony within multilateralism, i.e. within the framework of institutions like the United Nations and significant international regimes. Framing actions within multilateralism brings consent and additional resources to the global leader and prevents the exhaustion of its resources. Consent risks to exhaust, instead, when the global leader neglects multilateralism and violates the procedures of the world political institutions.

Bush collected quite a large coalition of states around his preventive doctrine to wage war in Iraq. Some of them intervened in the war; others in post-war operations. Some are old followers of the United States while others want to qualify themselves as new followers of the hegemonic power in the post-bipolar system. Some, like Spain and Italy, are important states in the organization of the system, but other important states opposed intervention because they oppose making military intervention to change the domestic regime of rogue states a rule of the system. The legitimacy of this principle was object of dispute in the time before the war when an American-led group of countries turned to pressuring on Saddam Hussein to make him leave his country. The dispute was also inside the United Nations because the United States wanted this institution to legitimate the choice of the global leader as in other occasions.

When the state governments signed the UN Charter, they also defined the condition in which military intervention and war are legal acts. This condition – at the exception of self-defense - is the positive vote of the Security Council to respond to security threats against a state, member and non-member of the Organization. This condition does not apply to threats set to the structure of government of the system. For this reason, Bush looked in vain for the approval of the Security Council on the intervention in Iraq without uncontroversial demonstration of the violation of the Council deliberations on the country disarmament.

The United Nations are the most important formal institution of government of the international system. The Organization development, which is part of the evolutionary trend of the world political institutions, favored the growth of civilization of international relations, i.e. the use of non-violent means and practices to manage conflict relations. It is an institution founded upon rules and procedures - altogether named as multilateralism - through which international crises and conflicts can be managed without leaving the solution to the coercive action of single states. These rules and procedures are fundamental to the structure of government of the current world system. The change of the structure of government of the system entails the change of the rules and procedures of the United Nations, and might also causes the disappearance and substitution of this Organization. On the other hand, the United Nations and their rules and procedures to continue to be functional have to sufficiently correspond to the state of the political and social relations that exist among the states, and to the structure of government of the world political system. Therefore, the reform of the United Nations will be made when great changes radically transform these relations and the world structure, and eventually make the United States leave the role of global leader.

However, it is not untrue that the Iraqi crisis is an opportunity the United States are using to cause change in the United Nations, but informally (or de facto) and without any explicit revision of the Charter. This attempt is not new at all. The American governments frequently attempted to reinforce their global role by imposing informal change to the UN procedures. To the Bush government, the war in Iraq is an instrument to change the structure of government of the world system by introducing the principle of intervention against destabilizing domestic regimes and the practice of the post-facto or delayed legitimization of the global leader action by the United Nations. In fact, this is the effect of the October 15^th, Security Council resolution on the post-war Iraq normalization, which authorized the American-led multinational force in Iraq. So, the question stands: will the United States get the consent of a large coalition of important states, including the “old” European allies, on changing the world government strategy?

Europe is divided on the matter of the political legitimacy of the doctrine of prevention because, generally speaking, European governments stick to the legal concept of preventive war. According to this concept, recourse to armed intervention is illegitimate when urgency to protect a country from an explicit threat of aggression is missing. In the last years, although a common rapid intervention force to use also against aggressive regimes has been created by the European governments, they have not been enthusiastic about the rogue states doctrine because don't perceive the threat of irresponsible dictatorial governments in the same way as the American government does. In addition to that, a related issue divides the United States from Europe. This is the issue of the best strategy to cope with inefficient governments and countries in serious conditions of economic backwardness, political repression and social unrest. The American government prefers the strategy of bilateral agreements and measures focused on single problems. For instance, eradication of drug traffic through strengthening the local police and army, as in the case of Colombia, or improving economic conditions by changing trade agreements, as in the case of Mexico. The Europeans, instead, prefer multilateral agreements and regional programs of economic cooperation accompanied by the political conditionality clause. The current debate on prevention demonstrates that, in general, the Europeans are not ready to abandon their preferred strategy. Even to cope with irresponsible dictators and rogues states, they prefer the maintenance of the existing economic, political and social regimes until cooperation programs (as, for instance, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership project of free trade in the Mediterranean area) bring economic development and, subsequently, relaxation of political and social tensions to a group of countries. To the Americans, instead, when the situation doesn't allow waiting for the cooperation programs to defuse regional instability and make rogue governments harmless, turning to military intervention is immediately necessary. Regarding regional security cooperation, in particular, Europe is currently living in a regional security partnership, which is managed by multilateral security institutions and offices founded on the concept of cooperative and comprehensive security (Adler and Barnett, 1998; Attinà, 2001). Accordingly, regional security agreements are the preferential road to security problem solving, and the Europeans believe that the European security model is to export to other regions. The United States, instead, considers regional security arrangements as subsidiary to their world role interests. Incidentally, it is worth to note that to account for all the differences between Europe and the United States, the difference of role in the government structure of the world political system is to take into greater consideration than it usually is.

The current phase of world politics and transatlantic relations are now shortly analyzed according to the theory of the cycles of world leadership. In fact, this model of world politics, which belongs to the school of the hegemonic theory, fits well into the objective of the present analysis because takes into account, at the same time, the relations between the hegemonic power and the allies, and the evolution of the government structure of the world political system.

The American political scientist George Modelski, who developed the theory of the long cycles of world leadership, studied the past half-millennium of global politics and uncovered the pattern of selection and succession of the global leader. That pattern is a hundred-year long and four-phase cyclical process. Modelski names the four phases as the agenda-setting, coalition-building, macrodecision and execution phase. Each phase has specific functions in the evolution of the world political institutions and is characterized by specific behaviors and interactions (Modelski, 1999 and 2001). In the agenda-setting phase, the power of the global leader declines; its strategy for controlling world problems with the consent of the allies is increasingly opposed; new problems and priorities come up as potential objects of the global agenda; alignments and alliances are object of growing dissatisfaction; new powerful countries aspire to influence world affairs and change the world political institutions. In the coalition-building phase, global concentration further decreases and mounting opposition of single states and groups of countries seriously challenges the global leader; new sets of issues cause the reorganization of traditional coalitions and establishment of new alignments. The macrodecision phase is a generation-long period of global warfare in which two major coalitions contrast each other with the objective of advancing competing agendas and strategies of global organization. Once macrodecision ends with the victory of one coalition, and the following execution phase starts, the coalition leader bears the global leadership role and sets up his strategies and programs of world government. During this phase, coalitions and alliances are reorganized to strengthen the post-war order.

Table 2

Modelski’s analysis covers the past millennium in order to make clear the effects of the evolutionary mechanisms of global politics that set the stage of the long term change of the world system. However, Table 2 presents only the five long cycles of global power competition and succession of global leaders of the last five centuries. During these centuries, Portugal (1516-1609), the Dutch Republic (1609-1714), Great Britain (1714-1815 and 1815-1945) and the United States (1945-…) exercised the global leadership. Selected in the global warfare phase, each of them was gifted with the attributes (lead economy, open or democratic society, organization for global reach, and responsiveness to global problems) that fit to the role of global leader for a cycle of global politics, but Great Britain for two.

Around 1973, the execution of the American program of world leadership reached its end point. At this time, the next phase of agenda setting started with conflict in the existing coalitions and expectations of change of the world system. In fact, in the 1970s and 1980s tensions became stronger also in transatlantic relations and the European governments decided to differentiate themselves from the United States on a range of important international issues like that of the change of Pan-European relations and Euro-Arab relations. In these as well as in other contentious issues, the European allies engaged themselves in goals and actions autonomous from the United States. In Europe, they acted as a single actor in the framework of the Helsinki Process and, later, opposed the American confrontation policy with the Soviet Union with regard to the substantial issue of the Siberian gas duct and the symbolic issue of the Moscow Olympic games. In the Middle East, the unproductive Euro-Arab dialogue was followed by the establishment of special relations with the PLO and, later, the EU common policy towards the Middle East. It is worth reminding also that the European Community governments launched their project of common foreign policy in 1969 and issued the declaration on the European identity in world affairs in 1973.

At present, global politics is in the gray area between the agenda-setting and coalition-building phases. Only in a future time, we will be able to understand and describe the change from one phase to the other. However, it is true that at this moment, governments have to make important choices in circumstances as complex as those of increasing pressure to align with countries that support the same agenda of world political problems and oppose different coalitions with competing agendas. These circumstances imply that the United States and Europe agree (or disagree) on how much they stick to the same vision of the world political system and global agenda, and are ready to share commitment to solve global problems within the existing structure of government. These circumstances are the scenario of the Bush proposal to reform the program of the global leadership of the United States with the prevention doctrine.

In this gray area of both delegitimation of the agenda and strategy of the leader and increasing power deconcentration and re-alignment, new poles of political and economic power must be taken into consideration to understand the change, but also social and cultural issues must be taken into account. Coalition-building will be conditioned by political and culture factors like adhesion to and rejection of the principles of democracy, but this factor will be decisive also to the maintenance of the existing coalitions. As Modelski and Thompson (1999) remark, the American alliance, formed after World War Two, is forced to deal with tensions and pressures to change. Such reconfiguration concerns the countries of the nucleus of the alliance, that is United States and the states of the European Union, but involves also other countries as result of the enlargement of NATO, EU, the G7 (admission of Russia) and OCDE (Mexico, South Korea). “.. we might imagine the French state serving as a focus for issue-coalitions contesting the merits of policies sponsored by the United States, and as a source of alternative proposals or policy agendas. In the EU/NATO context, such an oppositional stance might find favor, for example, in Germany.... In the global/UN context, it might attract support from governments in Africa or the Middle East, for example, or from others responsive to arguments about “Anglo-Saxon” dominance” (Modelski and Thompson, 1999, 132).

Over the phase of deconcentration and coalition-building, political contest in the United Nations and other international organizations will be inevitable and frequent but will keep using parliamentary procedures and qualified majority decisions. As it moves toward the condition of democratic community, the global political organization should produce a sort of stabilized system of conflict management through stable alignments that result in something like a system of party competition. Non-governmental movements will try to participate in the formation of global policies, but decisions on global issues will be made primarily within intergovernmental and multilateral contexts. Solution of political disputes will be facilitated as far as international organizations are involved in the negotiation. On the contrary, it will become difficult if the traditional method of power conflict and multipolarity will prevail as expected by the interpretations inspired by Waltz (1979) and Huntington (1996).

The reconfiguration of the alliance of the global leader will be accompanied by antagonist alignments from which the opposite coalition will be formed and the challenger of the actual global power will emerge. After 1500, Atlantic Europe has been the active zone of the world system; but, from around 1850, the Pacific - from China and Japan to the Eastern part of the United States - has been taking the characters of the active zone. In this part of the world, the most populated countries and the greatest cities and strongest centers of the productive power are placed. Therefore, the challenger to the present global power should come out from this zone. By reason of the great industrial potentialities of the country and the existing causes of conflict over territorial issues (like Taiwan and the control of the Southern China Sea islands) and power politics in the western Pacific, China is the most probable candidate to this role. However, there are not enough reasons to force this hypothesis for the present time except the same circumstances of the past leadership transition, i.e. the competition between the active zone great powers and the ascending maritime, industrial and commercial global power (i.e. China today and the United States in the past).

In the analysis of the formation of the antagonist coalition, it is worth remarking also that all the dissatisfied actors can join in a wide alignment. It would include the countries that oppose the status quo in the Asia-Pacific, the countries and actors dissatisfied with the current economic globalization process, those that fear the consequences of the current democratization process, and those that incline toward cultural clash and fundamentalism. “Such a counter coalition could increasingly comprise global public or even secret organizations focused on aspects of global politics, such as antiforeign movements or groups attacking the American position in world affairs. A confrontation between such forces involving East Asia, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East could conceivably spark a larger conflict and a wider conflagration, especially if and when linked to a major power challenger” (Modelski and Thompson, 1999, 134).

Further research is needed to assess the impact of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Iraqi war on transatlantic relations as well as the change of the agenda and government structure of the world system. At this stage, we take note of clashes between the United States and Europe as voiced by governments, like the French, and also the European Commission that from time to time expresses concern on differences on issues like the International Criminal Court, the ban on anti-personnel land mines, actions against biological weapons, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (see more in Monteleone, 2003). However, transatlantic cooperation keeps on being meaningful. For example, cooperation on the issue of the fight against terrorism is particularly important [iv]. Cooperation is strong in Afghanistan, where EU commitment to reconstruction represents more than 50% of total pledges for the 2002-2006 period, and in other areas and on issues not directly related to terrorism and confrontation with reckless countries like South-Western Asia, where the European Union joined the United States in working towards the reduction of the tension between India and Pakistan; and the Middle East, where the European Union takes part in the “Quartet” negotiation of the Peace Process. Cooperation has been strengthened also in the Balkans, where the European Union has taken a more active role with the full backing and support of the United States. Although recurring clashes occur in this phase, the pattern of cooperation, which has been improved by the New Transatlantic Agenda negotiations over the last ten years, might become stronger and make out a viable understanding on the issue of the new principles and procedures of the government structure of the world system.

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