This latest Iran offer has me wondering about the much-vaunted Bush unilateralism. Yes, he ditched the Kyoto treaty. But it was going nowhere in the U.S. anyway. He ditched the ABM treaty, but it was out of date and the fall-out from getting out of the treaty has been nil. Then, there was the ICC, which I suppose you can argue about. But look around the world, and you don’t see the sort of U.S. contempt for alliances and relations with other countries alleged by Bush’s harshest critics. We have been pursuing multi-party talks with North Korea, interminably. We were willing to go along with the EU-3 on Iran negotiations, and now are willing to talk ourselves. We’ve poured enormous effort into our alliances with Japan and India, and those relationships are on the best footing ever. Meanwhile, we are on pretty good terms with China.

Bush has worked as closely with Tony Blair as possible. France has been difficult, of course, but France has been difficult even during the most multilaterally-minded Democratic administrations. Being difficult is built into France’s national DNA.

The unilateralism charge has mostly to do with Iraq, which, of course, is a big deal. But, even there, it’s important to remember that we got repeated U.N. resolutions even after the war in our supposedly most hubristic phase, and prior to the war we thought we were dealing with allies who were acting in bad faith. We thought that the best way to get them to go along was to go ahead into Iraq and create a success. Then, other countries would have to accept it, and get over their opposition. It didn’t work out that way, obviously, but it wasn’t a crazy theory and it had allies in mind (remember: we counted on having their troops after the war).

I’m not saying there is nothing to the unilateralist critique of the Bush administration (I’ve made aspects of it myself in the past), but it shouldn’t be exaggerated.