The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

spaces, etc. These demand increas- ingly intimate levels of international collaboration to manage. As of now the United Nations, for all its limita- tions and imperfections, is the best available framework for these tasks. Our policy should therefore be to strengthen the organization rather than denigrate it. Much of this is now water over the dam, but the struggle continues between the yin and yang of multilat- eral/unilateral approaches to the prob- lem of the day: dealing with the after- math of the war in Iraq. Unilateralists prefer to bypass the U.N. as irrelevant. Multilateralists stress the urgency of restoring respect for the United Nations by ensuring it an important role in post-hostility reconstruction, which the unilateralists want to keep in American (and preferably the Pentagon’s) hands. This drama tends to be played out between the poles of the State Department and the Defense Department in competition for presidential attention and decision. Not surprisingly, the president seems to lean one way this time, another the next. Confusion reigns. Multilateralists want to give priori- ty to repairing badly damaged rela- tions with a large number of important countries: Russia, France, Germany, Canada, Mexico, Turkey and a num- ber of Arab and Islamic nations promi- nent among them. Unilateralists are suspicious of any- thing that implies sharing influence or decision-making or in any way ham- pering our freedom of action. The concept of an “international commu- nity” seems alien and softheaded to them. We don’t need to worry about Muslim restiveness since we have the power to deal with it by ourselves, and their wrath will ultimately subside when its impotence and pointlessness are realized. The U.S. is not an island, entire unto itself, say the multilateralists. They point to the indispensability of international collaboration in the fight against non-state terrorism. The conflict is not likely to go away; in fact, it threatens to become bitterer and less civil. The petty get- evenness of the playground seems to characterize much of our public and congressional reaction to those who A P R I L 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 55 The struggle between “multilateralists” and “unilateralists” has been with us since we became a nation.