Only a few years ago, security fences along national borders and increased border controls were globally out of fashion. The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989 by ecstatic East Germans in the non-violent upheaval that heralded the collapse of communism. The security fences that tore Europe in two for 44 years collapsed at the same time as communism crumbled.

A new era of globalism powered by worldwide economic growth and the Information Technology revolution followed. New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman heralded the arrival of a supposed "flat earth."

The European Community consolidated itself into the European Union and early in the 21st century its Copenhagen Expansion boosted its size from 350 million people in 15 nations to 450 million in 25 nations.

Internal security barriers within the EU were torn down and the customs, security and immigration checks on its external perimeter became a joke. France took them more seriously than most other EU nations, but control was theoretical when anyone could walk into neighboring Spain or Italy from North Africa, or even to Greece, and then simply drive or take a train into France from its fellow EU members.

The mega-terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were the dramatic event that started to reverse this global trend. The United States moved fast to start tightening up its security checks and entry procedures. But over the past five years, the huge, virtually unlimited flows of North African and South Asian Muslim immigrants into the EU and of Latin American, overwhelmingly Mexican, illegal immigrants, into the United States. have continued unabated.

Islamist extremist terrorists appear to have been much more successful in taking advantage of the EU's lax security policies to penetrate major Western nations and organize terrorist cells there than have been in the United States.

This is in large part because the scale of U.S. domestic security surveillance and the amount of manpower resources available has been vastly greater in the United States than in the very small and still vastly undermanned European national domestic security services. Also, Islamist terrorists have shown a healthy respect for the toughness and alertness of Mexico's own federal security forces as well as those of the United States.

When the United States led coalition forces into Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein in March 2003, Pentagon and White House planners did not take the concept of border security seriously at all. No thought was given to it.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz publicly dismissed then-U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki's prescient warning that hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops would be needed to maintain security in Iraq after Saddam's fall. Today, there are only 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and around 220,000 Iraqi army and security forces of doubtful reliability.

Together, they have failed to even make significant inroads on the Sunni Muslim insurgency in southern Iraq. The nation's land borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran remain largely open, despite occasional U.S. large-scale military operations to interdict them.

It was tough old Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, always ready to break or outrage liberal taboos and Conventional Wisdoms, who put security fences and defensible borders back on the global strategic map.

Israeli hardline right wingers and liberal supporters of the Palestinians alike derided his concept of a security fence or barrier to cut the Gaza Strip and the Palestine Authority-controlled areas of the West Bank off from Israel in order to stop the regular attacks of Palestinian suicide bombers from Hamas and Islamic Jihad that killed more than a thousand Israeli civilians, a large proportion of them women and children, in the Second Palestinian Intifada.

The fence appeared to armchair strategists as a defensive move, not manly, an admission of defeat and a departure from Israel's traditionally aggressive, reactive strategy against terror attacks. But it worked.

Successful suicide bomber attacks fell from dozens a year to single figures. Hundreds of civilian lives per year were saved. The Indian Army was so impressed by the success of the Israeli fence that it built a similar, far longer one, along the Line of Control separating Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir from the much smaller part of the state held by Pakistan since 1947-1948.

Soon the Indians were reporting that Islamist guerrilla incursions across the Line of Control had fallen by 80 percent. Now Saudi Arabia is building a similar fence to try and get its illegal immigration of 400,000 people a year from poverty-stricken neighboring Yemen under control.

Bush's new border fence is part of this new global pattern. it remains to be seen how many more nations, including, perhaps, some that will criticize his new barrier, will follow his example.

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