After the terrorist attack on New York's Twin Towers, people knew the world would never be the same again, even if they had no idea what would change.

This week, it will have been one year since the attack…a good time to take stock, perhaps, and to reflect on some of the more significant ways in which global reality has changed, and on how those changes might affect us in the future.

A convenient place to start might be the very first telephone call from a world leader to George Bush on September 11. It wasn't from Tony Blair, who President Bush calls his closest ally, or from the Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, who was physically closest.

It was from Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, who declared his country's support for the war on terrorism.

Prior to the attacks, President Putin seemed not to know quite where to take his country - he had been working to improve ties with China, with India, with Iran and with North Korea. In what was obviously an off-the-top-of-his-head decision, though, he abandoned all that in favour of a wholehearted embrace of the United States…whether his foreign and defence advisers liked it or not. He made Russian intelligence and airspace available to the US, agreed to a US presence in Central Asia and in the outlaw-riddled Pankisi Gorge area of Georgia, accepted the country's withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and agreed to a new, cooperative relationship with NATO.

In return, he has gained much for his country - a new, closer, more trusted relationship with the United States and the rest of the West, for example. US acquiescence to the Treaty of Moscow, as another example, by which the number of strategic nuclear warheads in the US and Russia will be reduced significantly by the year 2010.

The NATO-Russia Council is also a result, as is the promise of fully-fledged membership for Russia in the Group of Eight, beginning in 2006. What President Putin may see as the jewel in that crown, though, is support for his campaign in Chechnya, characterised as brutal suppression before September 11, a proper action against terrorism after September 11.

Condoleezza Rice, the US Security adviser, may have had Russia's situation in the back of her mind when she said, recently, that September 11 had “started shifting the tectonic plates in international politics”. She compares the last year with the period after World War II, when a similar ground-swell of fundamental change took place.

It has certainly altered the way the United States views the rest of the world - it has become more aggressive, more suspicious, tougher and less obviously apt to try to buy its way to way to acceptance.

Some months ago, President Bush announced a programme to try to ensure that US foreign aid goes to the purposes for which it was intended, and to penalise nations which misuse aid.

The knee-jerk reaction of some in Europe was to denounce this new policy as imperialist and unfair, but that is just flummery, as Nero Wolfe would say. If that policy had been in put in place in the early days of the Cold War, the world might have been a different place. There would have been fewer despots, and less armed conflict.

The poor, whose circumstances have hardly changed in some places despite a torrent of aid over the course of many years, might be healthier and better off. If the new policy is made to work, it might help to change political landscapes around the globe, and it might help stop the process by which large nations allow themselves - and the truth - to be held to ransom in the name of political correctness.

September 11 dramatically altered the relationship between the United States and Europe. It may be that the United States misinterpreted the initial outpouring of European sympathy as an expression of political support, instead of what it was - an expression of human support. One way or another, the Atlantic Ocean got much wider than it used to be over the last year.

Robert Kagan, who is an international affairs columnist for the Washington Post and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published an excellent examination of the new relationship and its causes in Policy Review in June. It can be read at www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html.

If I can summarise it in a crude way, September 11 convinced the Europeans that Americans are a bunch of dangerous cowboys, and the Americans that the Europeans are a bunch of dangerous sissies. Frankly, it is easy to have sympathy for both views.

However, the new divide may well have serious repercussions for American determination to make pre-emptive strikes, such as the action against Iraq they keep talking about, an important plank in their foreign policy platform. Toward the end of his article, Kagan offers this advice: The United States should “pay its respects to multilateralism and the rule of law and try to build some international political capital for those moments when multilateralism is impossible and unilateral action unavoidable. It could, in short, take more care to show what the founders called a ‘decent respect for the opinion of mankind'”.

The American relationship with China has also changed - China has lost, in the sense that its flirtation with Russia as a partner in a common front against the US, has ended. The US has begun to be involved politically and militarily near China's western borders in Central Asia, threatening not only China's security, but also its efforts to create the Asian counterweight to NATO - the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

China has gained, in the sense that it is no longer under the constant gaze of the Western news media as an enemy of democracy, and it may well have found a low-cost opportunity to cooperate with the US in sharing intelligence on terrorist organisations.

Five nations that once were almost completely out of sight and out of mind in world affairs have bubbled up to the surface. These are the so-called ‘five Stans' - Kazakhstan, Krygystan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Two of them, Uzbekistan and Krygystan, now have US bases on their soil. In two of the others, the US has negotiated limited landing rights if they need them. This has altered the balance of power in that region very considerably. The big loser is China, which was interested in expanding its oil and gas interests there. This is an area to watch in the future.

Pakistan has become a nation much, much more significant in world affairs than it was. It is geographically significant, yes, but some of the change's heavy lifting has been done by General Pervez Musharraf, whose gutsy support for the war on terrorism has turned many into admirers. As the head of his nation, he holds together a very odd coalition of opposites and misfits - the political equivalent of one of Rube Goldberg's finest assemblages. Nonetheless, his grasp on it has been quite extraordinary.

Here's his situation: India has a nuclear warhead pointed at the back of his neck at all times. Second, his intelligence services backed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, sympathised with Osama bin Laden and are now being asked to help the US. Third, Pakistan is home to dozens of radical little groups hell-bent on causing trouble in and over Kashmir, exciting India's nuclear propensities. Fourth, his country is home to dozens of radical Muslim groups hell-bent on war with the West. Fifth, much of his population, especially in the tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan, would be perfectly prepared to throw their lot in with anyone hell-bent on war with the West if anything occurred that annoyed them sufficiently. Sixth, his country is now the temporary home of hundreds of heavily-armed Western intelligence agents, FBI agents and American Special Forces units looking to waste anything in a turban that shows above the parapet. General Musharref has been adroitly manoeuvring his way through that little lot for a year, and his performance has to have put him out in front in the Time Magazine Man of the Year stakes. There is no question that, as long as he can stay alive, his involvement will benefit him, his country, the region and the fight against terrorism.

One cannot write a piece like this one without mentioning the Middle East. The jury is still very much out, here, and it will be some time before we can do more than guess at a verdict. Mine is that the differences between Israel and Palestine are a lynchpin in the search for a solution to terrorism.

I believe that fact has become obvious to the US and other nations, and I believe that the search for peace in that region suddenly got deadly serious some weeks ago. As I said in a previous column, I believe that this new purpose will lead to a specific Israel/Palestine solution and, perhaps, to the beginnings of a solution to the more general problem of Middle East frustration.

Finally, things have changed within the United States. One might say selfishly that the biggest change is that travel has become much more of a pain in the neck than it has ever been.

To be serious, the biggest change is surely this: In the name of the war against terrorism, the country that was democracy's cradle may suddenly have begun to offend against its own precepts in a new and troubling way. The arrest and detention, without charge or proper legal representation, of hundreds of people of Middle Eastern origin after September 11, in particular, cannot easily be defended.

There are also other areas of the US reaction to terrorism that perhaps can be defended, such as the indefinite detention of combatants in a type of war not envisaged by the Geneva Convention, but that nonetheless make people of conscience uncomfortable and impatient for resolution. The debate over these matters, which is surely coming, will be difficult, and may alter not only the principles of the conduct of war, but also the face of what we know as democracy.