Jonas Bernstein

About the Author: Jonas Bernstein is a staff writer for Insight, a conservative weekly magazine of news and analysis.

While it may be true that, as Victor Hugo said, an invasion by an idea is more inexorable than an invasion by an army, it is also true that an idea is taken more seriously when backed by superior firepower. The image of dazed Iraqis crawling out of their battlefield bunkers to surrender to anything remotely American—even, according to one report, a pilotless aircraft—has given George Bush's idea of a new world order a certain vigor it previously lacked.

Just how far the U.S. president is willing and able to reorder the world will become easier to assess once the smoke from the...