Last superpower finds itself more alone

What those 48 months prove is that no nation, no matter how powerful, can impose its will on world affairs for long; no president, no matter how cocksure or anchored in dogma, can stand steady astride the globe.

If you think that's just leftist guff or more viral anti-Americanism, think again. It's part of the growing, notably mainstream, consensus that 9/11 presented the Bush administration with an opportunity it still can't grasp.

Richard Haas, a leading foreign policy analyst and insider in successive U.S. administrations, argues in his book The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course, that his country is overestimating its own strength and stamina.

"The U.S. does not need the world's permission to act," he writes, "but it does need the world's support to succeed."

That's painfully evident in Iraq where the U.S. is bogged in the predicted quagmire and may ultimately leave behind three fragile states, including a southern, Shiite theocracy dominated by fundamentalist Iran. But what's more worrying to Canadian observers, including former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy and Paul Heinbecker, Ottawa's top man at the United Nations until November 2003, is the underlying pattern.

Since the planes sliced into the World Trade Center, Washington has increasingly turned away from integrated international responses in favour of makeshift coalitions it can control. Results are mixed.

Afghanistan and tsunami relief warrant check marks; Iraq and a summer deal with India that increases the risk of nuclear proliferation do not. Whatever the score, Axworthy is correct when he criticizes the method as the ultimate in à la carte internationalism and Heinbecker, who now leads Laurier's Centre for Global Relations, Governance and Policy, is right to worry about a shift from lasting alliances built on shared values to ones glued together by passing interests.

Two factors make those coalitions of convenience more threatening. One is the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes and regime change; the other is that this president, like so many predecessors, came to the White House with the limited international perspective of a U.S. governor.

"The world," Heinbecker muses, "pays an enormous price for the inexperience of American presidents."

That price is particularly high in Canadian dollars. In declaring all-out war on terrorism, George W. Bush, with the quiet acquiescence of Paul Martin's government, also assaulted civil, legal and privacy rights with implications that continue to unfold before the Arar inquiry. And America's international muscle flexing creates foreign policy challenges for a northern neighbour who wants to be seen as reliable in Washington and distinctly independent at home.

Jean Chrétien managed that well by making the border a priority while sending troops to Afghanistan but not to Iraq. Martin's task is to do everything possible to secure the continent, encourage the U.S. to remain constructively engaged abroad and resist pressure to join in unwise foreign adventures.

It's tricky stuff that will test everything from this government's ability to deliver a complex message to managing the trend towards what the military calls the interoperability of Canadian and U.S. forces. Requiring the wisdom to support the U.S. when it's right and the courage to say no when it's wrong, Canada's efforts will be more readily executed if this president, or the next, is persuaded by the post-9/11 experience and the sound advice Haas offers.

Four years less a day after the world rushed to America's side, the last standing superpower finds itself more alone, surprisingly vulnerable and facing defining choices. It can continue, without multinational support, the problematic, ad-hoc strategy of shaping the world to its own likeness and liking. Alternatively, it can either turn inward, as Heinbecker fears, or, as Haas hopes, abandon singular, often destructive, dominance for constructive, inclusive leadership.

Powerful forces push and pull the U.S. in opposite directions and it's not yet clear which way it will bend. But as this anniversary rolls past, the U.S. and its allies have something sobering to consider.

In the aftermath of a horror, a naïve president less cautious than his father and held hostage by advisers with their own agendas let slip an opportunity.

The solidarity found in New York and Afghanistan was squandered in Iraq and today the country finds itself with fewer and more equivocal friends.

The first of those tragedies remains the most shocking, the second is somehow sadder.