But what happens when, as now, the U.S. not only lacks interest in things multilateral, it positively scorns them? Canada, like other countries, is left frustrated and even annoyed, except that, as the junior cousin in the relationship, it can't come right out and say how peeved it feels.

Just after George W. Bush won the U.S. election, but before he took office, lots of foreign-policy observers wondered whether his administration would make good on vague mutterings during the campaign about the perils of multilateralism.

Surely, soothing voices contended, the new administration would learn the virtues of working with others through treaties and multilateral agencies. Experience on the job would be the great teacher.

No such luck. What we have now in Washington are not only military hawks but diplomatic unilateralists who reflect a mixture of Republican muscularity, American triumphalism and deep-seated U.S. exceptionalism.

The list of treaties or international agreements threatened, rescinded or scorned by the Bush administration grows every month.

Just recently in Bonn, the U.S. reiterated its rejection of the revamped Kyoto protocol on global warming. That protocol was weakened in negotiations to allow countries such as Canada to sign on, but the Bush administration had already signaled its refusal to have anything to do with Kyoto. Instead, it promises its own policies in due course.

Earlier this month, the U.S. insisted on diluting a United Nations agreement on small-arms trafficking, ostensibly being concerned, among other worries, about the impact on Americans' cherished ownership of guns.

Last week, the Bush administration rejected proposed new enforcement measures for the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, arguing that its provisions were too weak to stop states from developing germ weapons but too intrusive to protect secrets of U.S. biotechnology firms.

To this list can be added the Bush administration's refusal to send to the Senate for ratification the treaty establishing an international criminal court and both the 1996 nuclear test ban treaty and the 1993 nuclear reduction treaty with Russia.

The granddaddy of U.S. unilateralism, of course, is the looming abrogation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed with the former Soviet Union and designed to limit anti-missile defenses.

The Bush administration is hell-bent to develop and deploy a multi-phased, hugely expensive system of missile defenses. in the face of opposition from friends around the world. No ally, including Canada, likes the American idea, but all have been cowed into silence since they understand that nothing they can say will dissuade the Americans.

Among the multiple dangers of missile defense is the ominous extension of these systems into space. According to briefings recently for U.S. journalists, and reported in The New York Times, the Pentagon wants to develop systems based in space as part of an overall missile defense shield. This would undoubtedly break treaties prohibiting the militarization of space.

This was the fear voiced last week by Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley. Mr. Manley is no dummy and has undoubtedly been as fully briefed as any Canadian minister on the short- and long-term implications of U.S. strategic thinking. His dilemma, like that of other ministers in friendly countries, is how to prevent, or even slow down, this unilateral, destabilizing American policy.

Classic international-relations theory suggests that two kinds of states distrust multilateralism: rogue states, which feel that the international system is holding them back or is systematically hostile to their ambitions, and the undisputed superpowers, or hegemons, that do not want their capacity hindered for unilateral action in their own interests.

The United States is the world's pre-eminent power and, as such, it might be argued that it is merely following the textbook rules for how hegemons behave in the international system. The U.S. also has a strong sense of its own exceptionalism and predestination, which sometimes makes it insensitive to others' opinions.

What's disturbing, however, is that the United States built much of the postwar world's architecture. The U.S. is obviously not abandoning allies. It's not withdrawing from the world.

But it clearly views multilateralism much more skeptically than before, preferring to define the terms of its own participation in the world community without much regard for how other countries might like it to proceed.

Copyright © 2001 Globe Interactive, a division of Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.

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