REFERENCES:

(4) ìTape, Probably bin Ladenís, Offers ëTruceí To Europe: Leaders Dismiss Any Negotiations,î by Richard Bernstein, New York Times, 16 April, p. A3.

(5) ìEUís New Rules Will Shake Up Market for Bioengineered Foods,î by Scott Miller, Wall Street Journal, 16 April, p. A1.

The first story covers bin Ladenís remarkably frank offer to Europe of a cease fire if they agree to his demands for civilizational apartheid between Europe and the Islamic Middle East. For now, all the right responses are being heard from Europe, as this offer makes painfully clear al Qaedaís divide-and-conquer tactics that include the Madrid 3/11 bombings and likely many more to come.

Bin Ladenís offer is almost too good to be true for those who worry about the Western alliance coming undone over a host of diverging rule sets, one of the most contentious being the growing rift over genetically-modified organisms. And yet, when strong divergence exists first on technology, inevitably that divergence in rules spreads to economics, then politics, and ultimately to issues of security.

How we need to look at the world is as follows: there will always be a great number of overlapping rule set clashes operating across the system as a whole, like a security rule-set clash over how to deal with terrorism, or how to deal with technology, or how to deal with politically-bankrupt states, or how to deal with immigration flows, and so on. Nothing exists in a vacuum in globalization, and all rule-set clashes reverberate against one another.

Europeís general take on globalization right now is ìslow downîóalmost at all costs. The U.S. take is a mix of slow down (OMYGOD! Outsourcing is killing us!) and speed it up (the Bush White Houseís ìbig bangî strategy for the Middle East). People here need to understand that if there comes a time when the balance of forces in this country favors the slow-down approach, globalization may well not just slow down, but actually contract, given the inherent tendencies elsewhere to heavily favor that slow-down strategy. Weíre not just the engine of global growth, but the engine for globalizationís progressive advance around the world.