'New' US global role pits unilateralism against cooperation

"As the US tries to figure out how to act as the world's sole superpower, it will find we can't be isolationist about these issues, but in fact we'll have to get more involved in international affairs," Davenport says. "The US should be proactive on these issues to realistically fashion results more to its liking."

Traditionally the US and the international community have worked out many differences through diplomatic channels or great-power venues like the UN Security Council. But such paths aren't accepted by an influential part of the Bush administration for sending the message that the US will not accept damaging limits to its sovereignty, says Dartmouth's Wolforth.

But one result of confrontation may be a burning of bridges the US would like to use in the future. "In international relations, goodwill matters. And one of the first rules is you don't pick fights where you risk winning little but losing a lot," says James Lindsay, an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "We seem to be burning up goodwill at a rapid rate."

More productive for the US, says Hoover's Davenport, would be a focus on building multilateral responses and even sympathetic NGOs to "engage the new building multilateral responses and even sympathetic NGOs to "engage the new diplomacy as it promotes more of the initiatives it's going to come up with."

He notes, for example, that for all the accusations of "unilateralism" lobbed at the US, other international powers like China, Russia, Japan, and India have either not signed or not ratified the ICC.

Yet, he says, the US gets portrayed as "rebuffing the world."

Instead of letting that happen, he says, the US should consider banding together with like-thinking countries to develop "a less ambitious but perfectly effective" alternative to the ICC.

The US will have to think more in terms of shifting alliances depending on the issue at hand, he says.

Part of that process will be recognizing that the powers behind the "new" diplomatic endeavors – especially the European Union and large international NGOs – have a different perspective on national sovereignty from the US.

But as Wolforth argues in a recent Foreign Affairs magazine article, one key to US effectiveness in the world will be actively pursuing multilateral diplomacy and resisting a temptation to "go it alone" just because America's unique military and economic might would allow it to do so.

As Brookings' Mr. Lindsay says, "It's preferable to have a sense of the end state you want to create, not just the end you want to avoid."

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