WASHINGTON: Five months after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, President George W. Bush appears more determined than ever to forge a new world order based on unrivalled US military power.

But a growing number of voices, here and abroad, are expressing concern that his administration has not only failed to think through the implications but may also, by the very aggressiveness with which it pursues its “war on terrorism”, be planting the seeds of its own undoing.

That Bush’s aim is US hegemony, at least with respect to Eurasia, appears increasingly accepted abroad, if not quite yet at home. It was, after all, the explicit premise of a strategy paper drafted in 1992 by the current Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s national-security adviser, I. Lewis Libby.

While the paper was substantially toned down after it was leaked to the press ten years ago, there is no evidence that either Wolfowitz or Libby or their bosses, whose influence within the administration has risen sharply over the last three months, have changed their views.

“We all have to start using the ‘H’ word - hegemony - now to describe US policy,” says Michael Klare, a national-security expert at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

Since Sept 11, the administration has given notice in a number of ways that foreign nations should adjust to a world in which Washington will simply not suffer constraints on its power or freedom of action.

Its withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, widely seen as the cornerstone of nuclear arms control, was only a first step, albeit near-nirvana for the staunch unilateralists on the far right and neo-conservative wings of the Republican Party.

Step two came with the announcement that Washington was ready to deploy, or was already deploying, Special Operations Forces (SOF) units far and wide — to the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen — to help local forces fight or capture suspected Al Qaeda associates or even local bandits.

Steps three and four came two weeks ago with the release of Bush’s proposed 2003 budget and his State of the Union address in which he re-defined the war on terrorism to include the newly-coined “axis of evil” — Iraq, Iran, and North Korea — states alleged to have ties with terrorists and to be building weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Bush’s budget called for a virtual freeze on all federal spending in order to finance a whopping 14 per cent increase in defence spending which, at $331 billion this year, was already greater than the combined defence budgets of the next nine most militarily powerful nations. He also made clear that next year’s increase would be just the first.

Similarly, Bush’s declarations about pre-emptive defence against the new “axis of evil” as the next stage in the war against terror confirmed what had already become clear: in the admiring words of Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, ”to seek support for more war - far wider, larger and more risky.”

The anti-terrorism war has become an open-ended struggle, presumably justifying — with virtually no public debate to date - military intervention from the Philippines to Somalia, the threat of imminent war from Baghdad to Pyongyang, and record increases in the defence budget that has thrown the federal treasury into deficit. And this is just the beginning, according to the administration.

But the question which is beginning to percolate up into policy circles in Washington is whether this strategy is even remotely sustainable, driven, as it is now, primarily by the lingering trauma of Sept 11, the virtually effortless ouster of the Taliban government, and Bush’s stratospheric standing in the public-opinion polls.

For most of the past two decades, those same polls have consistently shown that the public rejects by a substantial margin the notion that Washington should act as the “world’s policeman” or even as the “first among equals” in international affairs. In that respect, Bush’s policy and the current mood represent a serious aberration.

Remarkably, such views are being expressed less by Democrats, who by and large remain unwilling to take on the president in foreign policy at the moment, than by moderate Republicans who this week began publicly questioning where the administration is taking the country.

Similarly, voices are being raised about the costs of Bush’s grand strategy, particularly given evidence of continued weakness in the economy and the projected deficits which increased defence spending will create. “There really is a question of imperial overstretch here,” says Klare. “I don’t think they’ve thought through how much this is really going to cost to maintain.” —Dawn/InterPress Service.