This week President Bush wiped out eight years of effort on a protocol to enforce the 1972 treaty. At a negotiating session in Geneva, the American delegate rejected a draft text that all others had accepted.

The Bush administration could have called for further negotiations to improve the draft protocol. But the U.S. negotiator, Donald A. Mahley, said the administration did not think it could be fixed. That effectively killed the project.

The protocol called for limited international inspection of sites suspected of involvement in biological weaponry. The Bush administration made two arguments against it: that the system would not be effective, and that it would give foreigners too much access to U.S. bio-defense installations and pharmaceutical plants.

The second argument sent a dangerous signal to the rest of the world — that despite American ratification of the 1972 treaty there are still people in the U.S. Defense Department working on ideas for biological warfare. That can only encourage others to think about new biological weapons.

Administration officials told correspondents that they were looking for other ways to strengthen the 1972 treaty. One idea they mentioned was to toughen export controls on the sale of sophisticated germ-producing equipment. But experts dismissed that notion as laughable, because toxins arise in nature and can be produced without sophisticated equipment.

In any event, there is no sign that the Bush administration is actually working on alternatives in a serious way. The attempt to make sure that the biological genie stays in the bottle is essentially dead for now. Without U.S. participation, nothing meaningful can happen.

That he is working on a better way of accomplishing the objective after denouncing an international agreement has become a familiar claim from Mr. Bush. He took exactly that line after rejecting the Kyoto agreement on global warming.

"Our nation will come up with a strategy," Mr. Bush said on the global warming issue last week. "We're in the process of developing one. I can't be any more sincere than I have been in saying that we need to reduce greenhouse gases, and we'll work on a plan to do so."

But in fact alternative ways of dealing with global warming are not under active study at the higher reaches of the Bush administration. Reports from Washington say there is no pressure from the top for urgent action.

Mr. Bush's position against the biological warfare protocol was familiar in another respect. Once again, under his presidency, the United States was all alone on a global issue. So it was, also, last week on an effort to negotiate limits on small-arms sales that feed civil wars and terrorism. On the Kyoto treaty, The New York Timesheadline nicely summed it up: "178 Nations Reach a Climate Accord; U.S. Only Looks On."

Underlying Mr. Bush's response on these matters there is a failure of vision. He takes a parochial view, driven by ideology and a narrow sense of where American interests lie. But in today's close-knit world our interests cannot be so easily separated from global needs.

Thus on global warming Mr. Bush says that he cannot accept controls that might burden the American economy. But it is the very nature of the problem that it cannot be solved unless the most productive economies reorder their use of energy and their emission of greenhouse gasses. An economy free of measures to reduce warming effects will not give us much joy, decades from now, if New York and Boston are under water.

On biological weapons, similarly, parochial interests of low-level Defense Department and pharmaceutical company officials were allowed to make the running. (Nor, to be fair, did President Clinton provide high-level leadership on the issue.) On sales of small arms, the Bush administration simply bowed to the National Rifle Association. There was no broader vision of our interests in a world less beset by AK-47's and their ilk.

"Where there is no vision," the Bible says, "the people perish." Perhaps literally. 

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

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