ANOTHER BOOK ABOUT the war on terror, or terrorism, or whatever it is (if anything at all) that threatens the peace of the 21st century. But here is a book with so singular a claim that the publisher has put it and nothing else on the dustjacket: “Almost every widely held idea we currently entertain about 21st-century terrorism and its relationship to the wars against terror is wrong and must be thoroughly rethought.” And spectacular endorsements by, among others, Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair commend it as far above the common herd: “It may be written by an academic,” Blair says, “but it is actually required reading for political leaders” (though perhaps only Kissinger could say “it is as readable as it is profound”).

Leaving aside Mr Blair's curious notion that academics and politicians live in different, not necessarily even parallel, worlds, Philip Bobbitt cannot be so neatly pigeon-holed. He is professor of jurisprudence at Columbia University, senior fellow in international security and law at the University of Texas, and formerly at King's College, London. But he was a practitioner too: White House and State Department adviser in both Republican and Democrat administrations, director of intelligence, and again of strategic planning, at the National Security Council. Yet the compelling reason to invest time and intellectual effort in examining the book's alarming claim is that Terror and Consent is the sequel to Professor Bobbitt's remarkable The Shield of Achilles (2002).

The Shield was completed before 9/11, but the attack on the twin towers occurred during its editing, allowing Bobbitt to write a postscript - a sad, weary, but hopeful “QED”. His thesis was that the nature of the state is changing, from nation state to market state. The purpose of the nation state was maximising the welfare of its members, while that of the market state is maximising their opportunity. Broadly speaking, the wars of the 20th century were about the governance of the nation state as it evolved from the “state nation” of the previous century: were nation states, and the system in which they acted, to be communist, fascist or democratic? Then, the threats were easily identifiable, and the remedy apparent. But the threats to the market state are not nearly so perceptible, for they are not principally territorial. Vulnerability lies essentially in the market state's very means of maximising opportunity: privatisation, decentralisation, internationalisation etc.

The final words of The Shield ran thus: “Now it happens that we are living in one of those relatively rare periods in which the future is unlikely to be very much like the past. Indeed, the three certainties that I just mentioned about national security - that it is national (not international), that it is public (not private), and that it seeks victory (and not stalemate) - these three lessons of the past are all about to be turned upside down by the new age of indeterminacy into which we are plunging.” Bearing in mind that The Shield was written in the final decade of the last century, this was surely prescient.

In Terror and Consent, Bobbitt argues afresh that 21st-century wars will be similar to those of the last century only in that they will be about governance of the emerging new type of state: will the market states be “states of consent” or “states of terror”? The source of these wars is not Islam, “but rather a fundamental change in the nature of the State and its evolving relationship to the new methods, purposes, and technologies of warfare”. War in the 21st century will develop along three axes: pre-empting and mitigating attacks by global, networked terrorists; preventing the proliferation of WMDs; and protecting civilians worldwide against gross natural and non-natural assaults on their material welfare and human rights.

This is familiar enough, but the interrelationship of the axes, Bobbitt argues, is not well understood, nor the consequences of failure for the market state's legitimacy. It is why “we are fighting terror not just terrorists”, and it “has important implications for the force structure and training of the armed forces of the democracies”.

How well are we doing? In a gentle but nevertheless powerful chapter entitled The Illusion of an American Strategic Doctrine, Bobbitt concludes that the Bush “doctrine” of proscription (“states that threaten the US either directly via WMD or indirectly through terrorists render themselves vulnerable to American intervention”) and prescription (“advance democracy in the world and notably the Middle East”) are “not entirely in synch with one another”. It is shocking, he says, that so long after 9/11 the US Government has generated no consensus on the general nature of the struggle we face. It is equally shocking, he might have added, that neither has the British Government, which is ironic since Bobbitt believes that Blair is the one politician who seems to understand: “Blair has for several years attempted to put into place the foundation for a new legal and strategic doctrine for the democracies”. But “... we [the United States, the United Kingdom and our allies] may not even be able to avoid falling out among ourselves, with deadly consequences”.

And the answer? The space of a review could not do justice to Professor Bobbitt's measured, civilised and pragmatic doctrine. Of course, if his premises are wrong, no logic will guarantee the right conclusions, but as Bobbitt himself says, “all life is an experiment. Every important decision is taken with inadequate knowledge by imperfect men and women whom the future will confound. Yet we act nevertheless”.

This reviewer is convinced by the analysis and remedy. But just as Pascal advocated that a person ought to “wager” as though God exists, because so living he has potentially everything to gain and nothing to lose, I would wager as if Professor Bobbitt is right.

Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt
Allen Lane, £25; 688pp Buy the book here

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