There's not too much that I disagree with in Steven Gan's editorial, Howard's ends . John Howard is a closet racist, and his 'white Australia' stripes are imprinted on his body, hidden from public glare only by his well-tailored suits.

But his words and actions are a dead giveaway.

Australia's prime minister is a bigot from the 1940s school of Australian political thought. He has fully embraced all of former liberal prime minister, Robert Menzies's traits, who had similarly projected deeply rooted racism towards non-whites.

And here's the rub: there are many wealthy Asians who reside in Howard's electorate of Bennelong in Sydney. He kowtows to them, usually during elections, with predictable political platitudes. Worse, these Asians swallow whole his humbug, hypocrisy and cant, donate cash to his party but vote for Howard and his conservative Liberal-National coalition government. By supporting Howard, does it make these rich Asians anti-Asian racists too?

However, two points that Gan raises are pertinent. One is on national sovereignty, but it's too complex and slippery a theoretical concept to explore here. Most politicians use it purely for self-interest purposes, but more importantly, there's a strong difference between the idea of national sovereignty and the realities of territorial sovereignty.

Much of the heated debates about Howard's (and the US') so-called pre-emptive strike would be relevant immediately to the second notion. But of course the likes of Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad seek to opportunistically exploit the second notion for their own self-interests.

It's the second issue that Gan raises that's most interesting: whether the United States, principally, but the West, generally, will allow Third World states to acquire nuclear weapons as a shield against the West's imperialism. Not likely, Gan says.

But that's not entirely correct.

In the hot-cold wars between Pakistan and India since 1947, the US has openly allowed Pakistan, its long-time ally, to build nuclear weapons capability, even if it has known part of the technology came from China and the latter-day evil empire of North Korea. But it has also closed its eyes to India developing the same capability, with help from the former Soviet Union and from India's own research and development (though still using Russian technology).

China, too, has nuclear capability, as do South Africa, North Korea, Cuba, Brazil and Iraq. On the other side, so do South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Even Singapore could develop one.

Fact is, it's not that difficult for many developing nations to acquire nuclear capability. One can easily build a miniature nuclear bomb with devastating consequences and carry it in a day backpack. Besides, as Gan rightly says, "the world is awash with nuclear bombs". Just look inside Ukraine. Which is why Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and Washington, are constantly fretting about that republic. They're afraid nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of the Muslim Chechnyans, who are waging a bloody independence war against Russia.

The latest candidate to acquire nuclear weapons is Yemen, supplied by North Korea. That the US freed a Cambodian-registered boat to sail for Yemen with parts and technology for up to15 Scud missiles — the type used by Iraq on Israel during the 1991 Gulf War — speaks, in essence, of changing geopolitical realities of this massively changed world since Sept 11, 2001 and of Oct 12, 2002.

But allowing Yemen to store Scud missiles and, taking that premise to its logical conclusion, the US would thus also allow Yemen to develop the technological capability to launch the missiles (unless Yemen wants to fire them off the back of bicycles).

This is dangerous policy on two scores. The first is that, inevitably, from this stage, Yemen, always known as a 'rogue state' ruled by a murderous regime, will go on to develop nuclear capability either with the support of one country or another to supply it with that capacity. Who's going to monitor Yemen: the US?

Which raises the second danger. In allowing the Yemeni government these missile capability — ostensibly for self-defence purposes, so it has assured Washington — the US is merely treating Yemen as part of its short to medium term geopolitical calculus in its Middle East policy.

As soon as it has gotten rid of the Saddam Hussein regime, Washington may just pull the rug from under Yemen. That will only further destabilise Yemen and northern Africa, including Egypt.

Till then, and having failed to win over Somalia, Yemen is crucial to US naval and air power for a war against Iraq.

Further, in geo-strategic terms, this is not a region which the US can turn its back on, because of Israel but primarily because of its oil interests.

Which is why the US is keen to see Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chavez, disappear. The US depends on Venezuelan oil, as it does from Mexico and the Middle East.

It's also because the US is vying for Arab oil with Russia, which wants control of Iraq's oil wells, while Japan is eyeing oil wealth in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. But with key allies in place the US wants to wield greater influence on Opec.

Point is, it's hard to realistically produce concrete evidence that racism against Muslims is underpinning US (and indeed Australian) foreign and defence policies. It's far easier to slap the religious/racist tag onto foreign and defence policies of the West, as Southeast Asia has done, than accept the ugly realities that the world since Sept 11 has fundamentally changed — for the worse.

Geopolitical and ideological competition is only starting to hot up, in the post-war world way, and in the post-new world order way, the latter including global terrorists networks, part of which have been nesting in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, southern Thailand, southern Philippines and Indonesia, with plans to kill Westerners being conducted in mosques in Pakistan.

Forget the so-called new world order that George Bush Senior pronounced in 1991. Then, we all became foolishly embalmed by and ensconced in the promises heralded by the baloney surrounding globalisation and the end of history during the 1990s.

It's the new world disorder now. The most stable period was the Cold War. Terrorism was always present throughout history. The problem of borderless terrorism today has been wrought by state-based and inter-state politics and by an unthinking globalisation pushed by its progenitors.

But these gutless Islamic fascists are now willing to kill anyone in the name of their religion, in the name of all Muslims, by any means possible and anywhere.

That includes mass murders of innocent people — of men and women and children. It could also mean they may be prepared to use nuclear weapons. And who's to say they won't acquire them? Are you prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt? Are you willing to be complacent?

This is all that John Howard is saying about his first-strike rhetoric. He's not saying 'let's attack these brown-skinned countries and weed out terrorists'. Neither is it yet doctrine nor policy. No more than is the US'. Let's not loose sight of the facts and the contexts — things that Bunn Nagara writing in The Star last Sunday and Kalinga Seneviratne's piece on malaysiakini on Dec 11 ignored.

Yes, Howard is a racist, but don't read any more into Howard's comments on pre-emptive strikes than what is there, viewed in the context of the new world disorder. What should be said against Howard is to warn him not to get too far ahead of himself and of the geopolitical game by seeking to change the rules just because the US thinks the rules should be changed.

Typical of Australia, and most typical of Howard, who has always been the US' lapdog, he's trying to punch above his weight. And too often he's been puffed out by the weight of his own sheer hubris and hype.