Analysis: Can the old world order survive this much collateral damage?

The credibility and future of the United Nations, Nato and the Commonwealth are threatened by deep divisions and public arguments

This truly is the season of "collateral damage". As everyone knows, that weasel phrase was coined by the Pentagon to hide the ghastly realities of war, of the killing of innocent civilians and the destruction of their means of living. But even before war with Iraq has started, it threatens to do massive collateral damage of another kind – to the international diplomatic and security structures of the modern world.

The Iraqi crisis is poisoning transatlantic relations and relations within Europe. The United Nations and the North Atlantic alliance, not to mention what passes for a common EU foreign policy: all could see their credibility undermined, perhaps fatally if the present divisions persist. The next few days and weeks could be decisive for all three.

One might even add as a footnote to this list the crisis in the Commonwealth over the recommended readmission of Zimbabwe, though even the most enthusiastic backers of the Commonwealth would not pretend that its well-being is crucial to the happy progress of human affairs.

This is, in short, a Henry Kissinger moment, and the great man yesterday duly obliged. The road to Iraqi disarmament, he told The Washington Post, was the most serious crisis for Nato since the alliance was born in 1949.

"If the US yields to the threat of a French veto, or if Iraq, encouraged by the action of our allies, evades the shrinking non-military options still available, the result will be a catastrophe for the Atlantic alliance and the international order."

In Mr Kissinger's opinion, "the credibility of American power in the war on terrorism [will] be gravely, perhaps irreparably, impaired". And in the most apocalyptic view of current developments, the main multilateral institutions created since 1945 are at risk of being sidelined for good.

This judgement might be excessive. Nato, the European Union and the UN have had fraught moments in the past: Suez, for example, when America intervened to brake the Europeans (Britain and France) just as the Europeans (the French and German governments, and public opinion across the continent) are trying to do to Washington now.

The deployment of intermediate nuclear weapons in Europe and the row over the Soviet gas pipeline to Europe in the early 1980s generated immense strains on the alliance. As for the UN, on most big issues it was paralysed for the first four decades by the criss-cross vetoes of the two superpowers. Predictions of Nato's demise, or slide into irrelevance, have been a constant of the past decade.

This crisis is different. It is a moment of truth, waiting since the Soviet Union vanished and removed the common threat that bound together America and Europe.

The true end, if not the calendar end, of the 20th century was Christmas Day 1991, when the hammer and sickle was hauled down from the Kremlin and replaced by the red, white and blue flag of the Russian Federation. The ideological scourges of fascism, Nazism and Communism, which had made the century the bloodiest in human history, had finally been extinguished.

Then there was a drifting interregnum, of small wars, economic good times and titillating scandals – which did not stop Hubert Védrine, the former French foreign minister, from coining the term "hyperpower" to describe the overwhelming relative might of America. But under Bill Clinton, it seemed an emollient hyperpower.

The 21st century began not on 1 January 2001 but on the brilliant early autumn morning of 11 September 2001. That day's attacks in New York and Washington not only defined the new enemy: international terrorists who might strike not with commercial jets loaded with aviation fuel but with biological or even nuclear weapons. The attitude of the wounded and angry hyperpower was transformed overnight. That day revealed not America's weakness but America's might.

Scholars theorised on "asymmetrical warfare", pitting shadowy terrorist groups against the US armed forces. The true asymmetry, at the root of the strains between America and its allies, is in their respective military power. This has definitively exposed the fiction that Nato and the UN are parliaments of equals. More plainly than ever, the decisions that matter are made in Washington.

Of course, personalities have played their part. Europe liked Clinton; he was in some ways an honorary European. Not so Messrs Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, with their blunt language and – in the case of Rumsfeld – unconcealed scorn.

Their vision of a Hobbesian world where the law of the jungle prevails, their readiness to use the power at their disposal, appals what Donald Rumsfeld calls "old Europe". And he is right. It is an old Europe; prosperous and peaceful, scarred by memories of the 20th-century horrors that blossomed on its soil, wedded to the status quo, instinctively believing that change must be for the worse, and fearful that a strike against Iraq will cause more problems than it solves.

It is a Europe with a very different approach to the Palestine-Israel conflict, a Europe that simply does not see itself threatened by Saddam Hussein (or for that matter the terrorists). Here too, the glue of a common foe that held fractious partners together against the Soviet Union is not there.

The question is: how far will the arguments extend? "Throughout my lifetime there have been differences," Mr Rumsfeld said yesterday. "Nato will not disintegrate." But the alliance may slide into irrelevance. The row over defensive planning to help Turkey, a vital US ally, in the event of war with Baghdad infuriates Washington. But it can simply provide the Patriots and more in a bilateral deal, bypassing Nato completely. What is more, it talks openly of a reduction in troop levels in Europe, which would symbolise its growing disdain for the continent.

The second area of collateral damage is within Europe. The 2003 Iraq crisis has once again proved that, when push comes to shove Britain will – as De Gaulle proclaimed – always choose le grand large ("the open sea", aka the US), despite Tony Blair's efforts to have it both ways. In any case, a common European foreign policy, given the differing histories and interests of Europe's main players, was always Utopian.

The real novelty is the division within the rest of Europe. France and Germany have always considered themselves the engine of European integration. Given that 18 European countries (including Italy, Spain and Poland as well as Britain – four of the six most populous present and future EU nations) have expressed support for the American stance, that notion is questionable.

France is the main butt of US anger – and not surprisingly, for it is at the centre of the third, and the greatest, institutional challenge exposed by the Iraq crisis: the future of the UN itself. The world body's finest hour was the coalition assembled under its aegis by the first President Bush to drive President Saddam from Kuwait.

How different now. "It's the UN that's really on the line," says Professor Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's best foreign policy specialists.

"Transatlantic relations will be noisy and contentious. But they'll be like the workings of a democracy, where disputes ultimately are secondary to what bind the parties together.

"Iraq is now shaping up for the UN's credibility as the 1930s Manchurian crisis did for the League of Nations. The odd thing is that those who profess to love the UN the most (ie the French) are undermining it, while those that don't greatly like it (the US), are trying to give it teeth. If it fails, no one would lose more than the French."

If that happened, the UN might go the way of the League of Nations, and one fragile underpinning of the post-1945 world order would go with it.

The institutions

UN SECURITY COUNCIL

Date of birth: 1945

Why it was created: Founded as the United Nations' enforcement arm to maintain international peace and security after the Second World War.

Dominant nations: US, Britain, France, Russia and China are the five permanent veto-wielding members of the exclusive club.

Relevance today? After the euphoria at the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Security Council has been consigned to virtual irrelevance since the late 1990s, when the US and Britain took military action in Kosovo without an explicit UN mandate. The Council's strength is its unity – now in tatters.

NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANISATION

Date of birth: 1949

Why it was created: For collective safety and to "promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area". An attack on one member "shall be considered an attack against them all".

Dominant nations (out of 19): America

Relevance today? Collapse of the Berlin Wall spelt the beginning of the end as Nato tried to reinvent itself through the kinder, gentler Partnership for Peace, and expanded to Russia's borders. The failure collectively to back America in a crisis could deal a fatal blow to the US-dominated alliance if the superpower proceeds unilaterally.

COMMONWEALTH

Date of birth: 1931

Why it was created: The 1949 London Declaration launched the Commonwealth in its modern-day form, after earlier incarnations that followed the death of the British Empire. Members swear allegiance to the Queen as the head of the Commonwealth.

Dominant nations (out of 54): UK

Relevance today? It has occasionally shown its teeth by expelling or suspending members.Has been divided on racial lines since suspension of Zimbabwe last year. Its readmission is likely to lead to a lengthy spell of embarrassed silence.