It is the basic survival skills for a nation to correctly judge and determine the source and nature of a threat as well as its urgency in the present international politics.

The judgment of threats by any big power, either correct or erroneous, can decide the progress of history. As the setup of the current world politics is led primarily by the West, the judgment of Western powers, especially the United States and Europe, on the threat constitutes an issue of the strategic nature in the present era.

Unfortunately, the major Western powers have failed to reach a common understanding of what is the biggest threat confronting the contemporary world. The United States has been vacillating on this issue. It has designated terrorism as the main threat after the Sept. 11 attack in 2001. But the United States cannot tell what threat is terrorism and where it has come from.

Without any methods to make the correct judgment on threats, how can the correct choice of strategy be made. On this issue, it can be said that the United States and the whole Western world have ideological confusion and are losing their direction in strategy.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US president security advisor and an ace US strategist, has acquired the most profound insight and far-sightedness on the strategy in the West. He enunciated this issue in his address to the American Atlantic Council not long ago. We got to a common view upon the birth of the Atlantic Council, he said, and we need such a consensus today. The Atlantic Charter signed by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill embodies the spirit of the Atlantic cooperation and unity. But President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair today have obviously not given the United States and Europe such a faith.

In the view of Brzezinski, the biggest challenge facing the West is the rise of extremism, which often occurs in the company of terrorism, and this is much tougher to deal with than any time in history.

The question is that the West today has doubts about its own civilization as well as its internal survival conditions. In an article of May 18 entitled "Stark Choice of Civilization in the West", the "Financial Times" maintained that six major ideas that led the West onto the road of success, namely Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, individualism and liberalism, have all run into crisis. It is possible for the Western civilization, which has been led into a crossroad, to get disintegrated now, and the West is losing its confidence and strategic direction.

By People's Daily Online