The cartoon version of US international policy poses a choice between unilateralism versus multilateralism, the 'wild cowboy' versus the 'co-operative diplomat'. This depiction is clearly false. Everything the US does in the world is done multilaterally.

That emphatically includes the Bush administration's most important policies and even those which are the most 'military' in character.

The global war against terrorist organisations is being conducted through an elaborate, often hidden, network of multilateral cooperation among scores of governments. A large number of players are interacting o­n intelligence, law enforcement, military action, air transportation, shipping, financial controls and more.

Ongoing military operations in Afghanistan involve many countries and were multilateral even at the height of US military activity, as the US relied heavily o­n relationships with Pakistan, Russia, three Central Asian governments and a variety of Afghan factions.

The real differences in the multilateral strategies of the Bush administration and other states, have to do with five contrasting ways of conceiving and operating multilateral action:

1) The Bush administration prefers an inductive method that draws o­n ideas from many sources and adapts them to specific conditions. For instance, the painstakingly crafted individual agreements drawn up for handling war crimes in Sierra Leone, blending local and foreign judicial traditions, is preferred to the o­ne-size-fits-all approach taken in designing the International Criminal Court (ICC). The former is designed to solve real problems and get real results o­n a case by case basis. The latter, unfortunately, aims at more rarefied ambitions.

2) The administration prefers international institutions that judge performance and stress accountability rather than those that maintain a detached neutrality in order to preserve a friendly consensus. Too often, for example, institutions that are charged with preventing the proliferation
of WMD seemed to choose courtesy over candour. The history of IAEA inspections in Iraq, going back to the 1970s, is exemplary.

3) The administration prefers multilateral strategies that rely o­n the sovereign accountability of states instead of strategies that limit sovereignty in order to link states together in a common enterprise, but which thereby dissipate responsibility. For example as the EU attempts to develop a 'common foreign and security policy', it can hardly avoid a lowest common denominator approach.

4) The administration takes a view of international law that emphasises democratic accountability, plainly linking the authority of international officials to constitutional sources of political authority that are essentially national in character. Other nations contemplate and encourage much broader delegation of sovereign powers, where o­nly the initial delegation need occur through democratic process, so that international officials can have greater freedom of action. Hence the US believes that the ICC as a permanent yet essentially stateless entity, might grow ever more distant from the democratic sources of legitimacy that are an essential source for its claimed right to administer global justice.

5) The administration prefers functional institutions that produce concrete results instead of symbolic measures that might rally support for an ideal, but at the cost of not doing much to further its attainment. Sometimes, as in the case of the Kyoto Accords, well meaning but dysfunctional efforts can be worse than useless if they complicate attempts to develop a more
effective and sustainable solution.

We simply cannot afford such indulgences in a world that in some ways is more threatening today than it was during the Cold War.