Editorial: Return US to civilised behaviour

In the early hours of tomorrow, New Zealand time, Americans go to an election that could hardly be more fateful for people everywhere. The contest for the presidency has been about the peace and order of the world as much as the security of the United States. Foreign policy has been to the fore in the campaign in a way that has not been evident since the Vietnam War, and foreign opinion seems to have been of greater interest in the debate than perhaps ever before.

The shock of September 11, 2001, brought the declaration that the US would use its unchallenged military might in the modern world to take "pre-emptive" action anywhere it suspected organisations antagonistic to the US might be capable of threatening its security. It would ensure that its armed forces remained stronger than any possible coalition of other countries and it reserved the right to intervene anywhere, if it thought it necessary, without international endorsement and on its own intelligence.

The doctrine of pre-emption was declared after the attack on Afghanistan, which removed the Taleban from power and destroyed the base, but not the leadership, of al Qaeda. The US had found immediate and unequivocal support worldwide for that response to the prime suspect of September 11, without need of a formal challenge to the conventions of international behaviour. But when it then turned its sights on Iraq it found many of its usual allies in Europe and elsewhere extremely concerned at the implications. If the US could invade other countries to wreak "regime change" whenever and wherever it chose, what moral authority survives to enforce the respect of all countries for the self-determination of others?

The world has functioned fairly well for centuries on the principle that nations do not interfere in one another's internal affairs, with exceptions when the United Nations has sanctioned intervention against real and immediate genocide. Iraq was not in the category. Iraq was ruled by a dictator who had committed internal atrocities in the past and was suspected of having refused to surrender all material he once possessed to create weapons of mass destruction. Those concerns were not urgent causes for war early in 2002 when President Bush made Iraq enemy No 1 in his "axis of evil", or a year later when he unleashed his overwhelming power.

Senator John Kerry, challenging him for the presidency, has promised to bring the US back into the fold of civilised international behaviour, although he does not renounce the doctrine of pre-emption. He, too, reserves the right of the US to act unilaterally when it feels it necessary. But he campaigns on the principle that the US should never go to war because it wants to go to war, but because it needs to go to war. Senator Kerry represents the restraint that has characterised America through most of its period of international ascendancy.

Mr Bush has spurned world councils on several other fronts. The International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol to control greenhouse gas emissions, even the Doha round of negotiations under the World Trade Organisation, have all lacked either American participation or constructive leadership. The world economy, too, is coming under the cloud of Mr Bush's weak budgetary control. But in economics Mr Kerry is an unknown quantity and his voting record on fiscal questions is not encouraging.

Whoever wins this election has to bring the world together, to make the best of the mess left in Iraq and, more important, to take some positive steps to tackle the tensions in the Islamic world that give rise to terrorism and, as Mr Kerry has emphasised, to get a grip at last on the fissionable material disappearing from the former Soviet Union. There is urgent international work to be done. May tomorrow's election produce a decisive result that contributes to it.