In this issue (pages 18-19), we publish a map, showing US interventions overseas since 1945 and entitled, rather provocatively, "The original rogue state". It is not an exhaustive catalogue. It does not show some of the more recent examples such as Somalia, the Balkans and Iraq; it subsumes Cambodia and Laos into Vietnam; it has no room for El Salvador or Cyprus. A similar map, published to show Soviet interventions up to 1989, would have highlighted many of the same areas (Angola and Afghanistan, for example) but, where Latin America features heavily on our map, the Soviet version would focus more on eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

Almost any New Statesman reader would prefer to live in a world where America, rather than the Soviet Union, won the cold war. We may think that, if the latter had won, Moscow, Leningrad (as it is no longer called) and Minsk would have been the victims of terrorist attacks, not New York and Washington. The truth is that a Soviet-dominated world would have been so tightly controlled as to make terrorism extremely difficult and, as the control would have extended to the media, much less rewarding in its psychological and propaganda effects.

But that is not the point: any dominant or imperial power, however benign or enlightened, will be resented. The British scrawled "Yanks go home" on walls even as US soldiers helped to win the Second World War and, later, to protect western Europe from Soviet invasion. We, with all our education, leisure and access to information, do not normally pay much attention to the nuances of international affairs. Why should we expect Colombian peasants or Middle Eastern nomads or Afghan tribesmen to do so? They are poor, sometimes to the point of starvation, and people keep bombing and shooting them. The superiority of freedom, democracy and the American way of life may, to them, be mere abstractions. You do not need to be a relativist to see that.

US power is not, by its nature, vicious or oppressive. But as our map suggests, it becomes very ruthless when crossed, employing assassination, torture and mass terror. For the most part, it uses local proxies to do its dirty work. Nothing new in that; so did the western colonial powers. And, again like the old colonial powers, particularly the British, America is utterly convinced of its righteousness. The mission to spread the values of modern, liberal, democratic civilisation is not very different from the Victorian mission to spread Christian civilisation.

But this is precisely the danger, as America goes to war in such confidence of its moral superiority. The American belief - supported by the Francis Fukuyama "end of history" thesis - is that liberal democracy and market-based economies have nothing left to prove, that they have shown beyond question that they can deliver. This is profoundly wrong: the case has not even been made to the majority of Britons and Americans, who do not think it worth voting in elections, and liberal democracy has certainly not delivered to millions in the inner cities. How much greater is the case that must be made to the impoverished, often embittered, billions of the wider world. America has been relativist about its democratic values when it has suited its national interests; it should not be surprised if those with empty stomachs and dying children do not immediately see that a world ruled by Bushes and Blairs would be superior to one ruled by the likes of Bin Laden.

In his speech to the Welsh Assembly on Tuesday, Tony Blair enjoined us never to forget "those answering machine messages . . . how mothers told children they were about to die . . . the guts of the firefighters and police who died trying to save others". Indeed we should not forget; and, given the political and media barrage on the subject, we are not likely to. But only occasionally does anyone remind us that (using the latest estimates) the 3,000 who died in New York were less than half the number of children who die from diarrhoea (caused by the lack of a clean water supply) somewhere in the world every day.

We are not the first to live in an age of terror. In the 1790s, Europe trembled over events in France, very much as we tremble now. But as Mark Twain later observed, there had been two "Reigns of Terror": one brought "the horror of swift death" but the other brought "lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak". One "inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million". One brief terror, Twain wrote, "we have all been . . . diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over"; the other we had never learnt to see "in its vastness or pity as it deserves".

America, eloquently supported by Tony Blair, is now fighting the battle against one terror and, however questionable the methods, we must hope for its success. But it is on success in the battle against the second terror that the survival of our civilisation and its values ultimately depends.

The Press do their duty

Reassuringly, the world is returning to normal. The Dean of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, has upbraided his 400 undergraduates for excessive drunkenness and "unmannerly behaviour". As the culprits included women, this was an opportunity for tabloid papers to do what they do best: lavish picture spreads of nubile youth in states of orgiastic undress, with titillating reports of inebriated girls eating Mars Bars out of men's pants, and assurances to readers that such debauchery is deeply deplorable but must be publicised as " a warning" to parents. The Daily Mail performs its duty with magnificent solemnity, asking if "these young women consider the risk of liver damage, breast cancer and heart disease" and reduced fertility. Journalists are well placed to warn. Down the generations, they have thought of little else. In the heyday of Fleet Street, an evening in El Vino's rarely went by without intense debate on such matters. We must hope that the students of St Catharine's pay heed.

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