Bahrain ? East is East and West inalterably West, Rudyard Kipling maintained. But the international gathering held on this Persian Gulf island last weekend suggested that today East is increasingly West, the West is less and the twain do meet in a Middle East that is up for grabs.

This contemporary East is dominated by China and India. West means Britain, France and the United States. And the Middle East is a battle zone of ideas, religions, oil and a cultural use of tribal violence that is now projected onto the global stage.

But increased interdependence – whether forged by trade or by mutual bloodshed – does not a unified globe make. Disconnects and divergences were on display from the moment the two-day conference on security and terrorism in the Gulf began.

Lavishly robed Arab leaders listened with disciplined courtesy as a trim, intense American woman perhaps half the age of some in the audience crisply framed the need for “robust information sharing” and the adoption of “best practices standards” in cargo screening, financial controls and other tools of law enforcement to defeat “transnational terrorism.”

Speaking was Frances Fragos Townsend, White House adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism. Listening were princes, sheiks, assistant emirs and various nabobs from the Arab side of the Gulf.

Many of them wore gold-braided headdresses or elaborately wrapped turbans and wispy beards that denote authority – unquestionable, undemocratic authority – in the traditional societies they rule in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere.

Looks of puzzlement spread across some faces as Townsend urged the autocrats to embrace “the ideology of reform” that will make “freedom, democracy and human rights … the future of the Gulf region.” That is, a future that would sideline most of this audience.

When Arabs spoke, most of them focused instead on what America should do: Help jail or eliminate the violent extremists of the al-Qaida network. Grant more visas for their citizens to study in the U.S. Pressure Israel to grant concessions to the Palestinians. “American ears are not open to what we are saying,” a Saudi general protested.

These complaints triggered the brisk articulation and the dramatically earnest entreaties that have won Townsend the respect and the ear of President Bush, whom she briefs almost daily.

Bush recognizes that a post-9-11 drop in visas for Arab students and others is “a national security problem” that requires increased resources, Townsend said. Homeland Security staffers are being posted to Saudi Arabia to speed visa processing, she offered.

And she noted that the audience had missed the emphasis she placed on Palestine – including her view that Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority is “the best hope for peace” in upcoming Palestinian elections. “This is not typical” of a U.S. speech on terrorism, she accurately added. Her listeners agreed. For them, she had just inadvertently blurted out the heart of the problem.

France’s defense minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, astonishingly did the same thing. She told the Arabs not to let the Gulf be “an exclusive preserve of the United States” and waved off an Arab official’s suggestion that NATO play a greater military role in the region.

The European Union is forming a “battle group” of 1,500 troops that can be deployed within 15 days for “crisis stabilization,” she trumpeted. Alliot-Marie also pushed bilateral security accords that would increase French arms sales to the Gulf as an answer to terrorism, in contrast to Townsend’s call for reform.

“In a crisis we won’t need 1,500 troops, we will need tens of thousands,” responded a Qatari sheik. “You seem to want the Europeans to cooperate with everyone except the Americans,” added a British participant.

British Defense Minister John Reid’s subtle and effective speech defies easy summation here. He alone gave no appearance of lecturing his audience – even while advancing the case for greater British influence through the Arab League and London’s traditional clients in the region. “Regional Arab involvement is part of the solution” in Iraq, he asserted against much contrary evidence.

The special envoys from China and India who addressed the gathering underlined their nations’ separate bids to become manufacturing, financial and information powers on a par with the developed nations of North America and Europe. If a surplus of American-style optimism about the future exists anywhere on the globe today, it is in these emerging Asian powers.

Margaret Thatcher, a Kipling admirer no doubt, was given to talking on occasion about this being “a crazy old world.” Had she come to Bahrain, she might have concluded that it is a crazy new world we inhabit.