Within the next decade the United States will find itself handling terrorist attacks and other violations of its sovereignty very differently than it does today. Having exhausted other approaches, we will find ourselves with no choice but to respond to attacks against U.S. citizens, particularly those on U.S. soil, with overwhelming force. If we do so with forethought and as part of a broader policy, we can change for the better how the world polices itself. If not, and if we continue to respond in an ad hoc manner to security challenges, often promising ourselves and others more than we deliver, we will find ourselves locked into an ever tighter spiral of attack and response, expending ever more blood and treasure in places we can neither master nor change.

As time passes and the preemption plank of the Bush Doctrine generates more problems than it can solve, “new” strategic approaches are being bandied about. Some proposals, arguing for both more realism and less unilateralism, urge the building of a new great power concert. Another proposal, laid out by Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay in the last issue of this magazine, argues for a Concert of Democracies to do for international security what the United Nations has not done and cannot do. What all such proposals have in common is their appeal to multilateralism and their advice that the United States limit its decision-making autonomy by accepting more or less binding obligations to others. But one need only look at the recent record of international crisis decision-making—take NATO when it was smaller than it is now, confronted by the crisis in Bosnia, for instance—to see that there is nothing timely or effective about international military operations.