Robert, your focus is theoretical; mine operational. That is not a contradiction. One employs the methods and ground-level emphasis on experience—emblemized by the likes of Machiavelli and Hobbes—in order to achieve the principled goals of Kant. Ronald Reagan, a successful Wilsonian unlike Wilson himself, deployed Pershing missiles in western Germany in the winter of 1983-84—an act indefensible by any universal value system. Yet, it greatly affected the leadership succession in the Soviet Union that brought Gorbachev to power and ended the Cold War.

Kant's limitation regarding foreign policy is this: He cares about the goodness or badness of a rule, while politics is often about the goodness or badness of a specific act in a specific circumstance, since the same rule might produce good results in one circumstance and bad results in another. To wit, you imply that since Islamic militants in places like Kashmir and Chinese Turkestan might have legitimate grievances, we should get on the right side of history and not offend them. I have reported from Chinese Turkestan. While the Uighur Turks see the Chinese as the enemy, they themselves exhibit no sign of coalescing into a stable state. Ask a Uighur who he is, and he will reply, "I am a Turfanlik, or a Kashgarlik." Their identity tends to be local. All indications are that encouraging Uighur separatism would be a recipe for anarchy and far greater foreign policy problems with China than we have ever known.

Likewise, the Chechens also have legitimate grievances. But they have also been a fount of terrorism and drug-smuggling: reasons why even the Clinton administration was somewhat cool to their cause. It may be both wrong in some abstract sense, as well as being on the wrong side of history, for us to encourage Egypt's tough measures against Islamic extremists. However, given that any probable scenario regarding the toppling of Mubarak—which is what these extremists want—would produce a regime far worse in the human rights department, it would be imprudent of us to undermine Mubarak the way we did the shah.

Thus, I am not concerned with being on the right side of history. That tends to be an obsession of Marxists and other utopians. Rather, I am concerned with the United States maneuvering in a wily enough fashion to preserve its power for enough decades, so that interlocking global institutions can mature in the meantime, leading to the world governance—not government—that I know you and I both support. And world order of some moderate, virtuous kind can only be fostered by the organizing principle of a great power, driven by its own self-interest. Patriotism will have to survive long enough in our country to support a foreign policy that will ultimately make such patriotism obsolete.

Our self-interest requires, for example, that we support a dictator in Pakistan and a democracy movement in Iran. That is neither cynical nor contradictory, since Pakistan's current regime holds out the best hope for liberalization there. Foreign policy is not theology. A statesman succeeds or fails depending upon how he gauges and manipulates local realities. Before our air campaign in 1995 against the Bosnian Serbs could be successful, arming Croatians thugs against Serbs to adjust the power balance on the ground was necessary, even as it was not emphasized in the media.

I admit to pre-Sept. 11 thinking. In February 1998, I wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that the future belongs to spy services since human intelligence—the ability, for instance, to penetrate foreign terrorist networks—will be increasingly important to our national security in the 21^st century because of the very cosmic issues that you intelligently raised in the first round.

An imperial reality now dominates our foreign policy, even if imperialism has been delegitimized in public discourse. As with all great powers in the past, we will be resented for the very fact of our power, no matter how we use it. The terrorists of Sept. 11 would not have called off their plan had we supported some of the legitimate grievances of Islamic separatist groups or forced Israel to concede an extra few miles of the West Bank or even been on the right side of history. Terrorism now tends to be nihilistic rather than oriented toward specific, achievable goals, such as the terrorism of the Irish Republican Army. As you rightly note, Robert, such terrorists will be increasingly empowered by technology: the subject, in fact, of my article in the current National Interest.

I did not write that I would have a cosmic plan. Rather, I wrote that I would deal with your cosmic concerns at the end of the third round. And I believe that I have. Brilliant plans are commonplace: Engineering even a moderately successful foreign policy through a vast bureaucracy is harder. But as overwhelming as the challenges seem, our policy-makers in the various national security agencies will avoid tragedy by deliberately cultivating a sense of it: just as the Founding Fathers did in the Federalist Papers, when they worried about everything that could wrong in the young republic so that much of it did not.

Nevertheless, I look forward to hearing about your plan, which, knowing you, should at the very least be quite stimulating.