A bigger idea than US force

9/11 six months on: The world

9/11 six months on

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It is still too early to tell if 11 September changed the world. The darkness deepens around what the US's view of the world, and its place in it, will be. The European Union, absorbed in expansion plans and the constitutional debate, is no coherent force in world affairs. Japan is economically weak and remains reluctant to commit itself to an independent role.

If US policy congeals around a pole of strength alone, it will be a tragedy for the world. For one thing is not too early to tell: that is, that the world will not order itself, in the absence of an agreement on order and a mechanism for securing it. It may offer, for some years yet, relative security and wealth for those who already have both, even after 11 September showed how vulnerable modern societies are to terrorism on a grand scale.

In the short term, there will be epic amounts of avoidable mortality – from epidemics, from hunger, from war, from genocidal rulers and invaders, from state and freelance terror. All of these are happening, or threaten to happen, in different parts of the world – the poorer the areas, the more so, above all in sub-Saharan Africa.

The largest challenge we face, the greatest need we have of a Big Idea, is the fashioning of a network of global relationships which permit and legitimise interventions in collapsed or desperate regions even when their rulers may oppose them.

It can be called imperialism. It would, of course, be a benign imperialism: but the word is a powerful taboo, and there are as yet few takers. America, by virtue of its power, is bound to play the leading role. Or is there something else which would be effective?

The basis for a robust practice, which could still fall short of anything which might reasonably be called imperialism, must be self-confidence on the part of those states, like Britain, whose government seeks to engage with poverty, collapse and terror. Leaders like Tony Blair, who have powerfully articulated the need for aid, for commitment to state building, and for military response to genocide or the use of mass terrorism, need to believe what they are saying – and, more importantly, need to be held to account for the pledges they make.

The rhetoric of care, compassion and of opposition to "evil" is everywhere. Fashioning it into programmes is another day's work – and is the work, above all, of a civil society which grasps the selfless and selfish natures of the action proposed.

Selfish, for we further our own security by reducing the miseries of others. Selfless, because it demands we lift our heads from the urgent desires to protect and to distance, to see in others' suffering a common pain.

Left and right tend to combine against robust interventions. The right believes, with Henry Kissinger, that little is justified except that which furthers the national interest. The old left, and the young global movements, see an imperialism in powerful states and financial institutions which is neither new nor benign. The centre left has invented a new internationalism but has yet to have clear aims or a willingness to build the political coalitions to sustain it. But a new world order is still uncertain.

This is an age of wondrous technology and huge wealth, neither of which has yet been put at the service of those dying for them.