George W Bush appears to be on a near-vertical global learning curve. And it is not just him. In the past two weeks the world has been changing astonishingly quickly beneath our feet and commentators are running to keep up. It may turn out to be a temporary phenomenon, just erratic after-shocks before global business returns to normal. But a hurricane wind of change is in the air.<BR><BR> The prospect opens up that a whole logjam of territorial and ideological conflicts have been jolted into unblocking some rivers of progress - if this ends well, if the US stays fully engaged. All of us who stand watching and waiting for war, hearts in mouths, fearing cataclysm but hoping for success, need to be alert and ready to change. This is a time to park ideological shoes outside and be prepared to reassess all kinds of old id&eacute;es fixes, of right and left. (The shoes will still be there if the world disappointingly backslides behind old battlelines.) Start with the Bush phenomenon. This political pygmy fought a poisonous election campaign, a caricature of everything the outside world despises about greedy America. Once in power he was tearing up the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty to impose NMD as a symbol of a US isolated under its exclusive umbrella - and to hell with the rest of the world. <BR><BR>World trade negotiations were one-sided, not a penny of US debt relief was paid as he pushed through $1.3 trillion tax cuts despite the need for health and schools. Drilling in Alaskan wildlife refuges, the oil man denying global warming and denouncing Kyoto: belching America didn't give a damn, that was the Bush global message. He didn't need to know the names of faraway countries because they didn't count.  But now suddenly they do. One after another the nations of the world joining a grand coalition have shown him how interconnected things are. Foreign peoples are now needed and their needs are interwoven with US interests in security, prosperity, trade and terrorism: no country, even the US, is an island after all. Globalisation works both ways.  Did we misunderestimate the man, to use his own misword? Probably not, but it hardly matters what is or isn't in his head, who pulls his strings, does the diplomacy or writes the speeches. What matters now is what he says and does. On the old Nixon-in-China principle, this man might direct the world towards peace better than some liberal president always fearful of redneck US opinion. So an open mind is required by all after his speech last week and the background briefings since. Astonishing things have been said and done. Short of the fall of the iron curtain, few world leaders have ever about-faced so fast.  One great jolt came when Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defence, mused last week that it would now be necessary for the US to construct an acceptable post-Kyoto strategy: that presumably is a message carried back from Europe, where Green parties share government. All over the world the quid pro quos are coming home to roost: America has had to change. Nothing is set in stone any more, everything is fluid. <BR><BR>Before September 11 there was a European way, largely social democratic, and an American way, largely conservative. British anti-Europeans clung to the US, the left looked to Europe and Tony Blair's bridge across the Atlantic looked like an irritating third way fudge. But those of us who saw the world that way have had to shift: in extremis, the cultural and political dividers between Europe and the US are second-order issues when compared to the Taliban and Bin Laden.  No doubt the day will come again when those issues loom large - but not now. As for the Eurosceptics, they have to swallow their old distaste in admiration for the coherence of Europe of which we are an integral part. In another remarkable global jolt there is Vladimir Putin offering airspace, airports and military aid in a joint Russian/US/EU anti-Taliban enterprise.  One more after-shock is the changed attitude to Israel. Bush said in his early days he would not bother with the peace process, but no more: Israel's best friends now look set to enforce it. Luckily it is a far-right Israeli government that will have to face the global reality of its situation, even if it did greet Jack Straw's mere mention of a Palestinian state as "obscene" and "pornographic". <BR><BR>But the message of Iran's return to the international fold and all those other Arab states offering positive support has to mean an imposed peace between Israel and Palestine sooner rather than later. It is the absolute sine qua non for calming Islamic fury against the west. Only an Israel residing strictly within its borders can secure long-term security from this new world coalition. <BR><BR>Until now the bloodied Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism could look the soft Americans in the eye and shame them. Now the Americans are bloodied too. As they send their men in to die fighting terrorism they have the moral right to tell the Israelis and the Palestinians that peace is the only game in town, for everyone's safety. Meanwhile Arab autocracies fester dangerously while propped up by the west, but they will not be democratised until the Israel/Palestine tragedy is cauterised.  Will the Afghan war be worth it? The government grumbles about the usual Phil Space articles with whizz-bang boys' comic maps of imaginary fighters zapping phantom Bin Laden hideouts, while the real war plans are secret to virtually all. Laptop brigadiers can only demand that it is quick, proportionate and does not knock down dominos of violence elsewhere. We cannot assess the odds of removing the Taliban, denying terrorists the water they swim in and keeping this coalition together afterwards to ease other long-standing grievances. But official language suggests the US knows that carpet-bombing atrocities would end the fragile coalition.  Pacifists are up in arms, an ever-necessary warning to war leaders not to make matters worse - but alternative plans to bomb the Taliban with food lack a certain conviction. Recent military interventions by the democratic world to impose freedoms have mainly had good outcomes, creating something better for proportionate casualties. Though each war provoked peace protests at the time, most Sierra Leoneans, Kuwaitis, Serbians and Kosovans are better off. So are the peoples of Croatia, East Timor and Argentina. Bosnia and Rwanda were lessons in favour of fighting, where mere peacekeeping permitted shameful massacres.  This time the Taliban are indisputably the vilest regime on earth, as well as lethally dangerous: the only unknown is the outcome. For now, old fixed attitudes towards the US and many other nations need to be suspended, waiting to see if many parts of the world really are undergoing fundamental recalibrations of old positions.