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One step many firms appear to be taking is factoring regional politics into their planning, says Richard Ingram, deputy executive director of Overseas Security Advisory Council, an arm of the State Department that provides information to US enterprises with interests abroad.

OSAC now has some 2,300 constituents, a significant increase over the past five years that is only partly attributable to Sept. 11, 2001. The organization has also worked to reach more firms.

But companies appear not to be moving to become any less international, in terms of travel or bases of operation.

"I don't think I've seen the private sector withdraw or curtail their activities one bit," Mr. Ingram says. "They obviously take additional steps to protect their assets, but we don't see a significant flight."

Much is at stake. "When you get started in a country, there's enormous investment, not just in terms of money but in terms of developing relationships and trust and transferring not just technology, but ways of doing business," says Rob Shellow, chairman and managing director of Professional Security Consultants International, a consortium of 30 independent security firms based in Bethesda, Md.

"The whole culture of the corporation has to be learned by other people offshore," Mr. Shellow adds. "That's a very valuable asset, not easily replaced."

So firms have worked to blend in. "I have watched some of the companies that we've worked with devise tactics for staying in [troubled countries], essentially reducing their footprint or their image in a country, developing joint ventures where the in-country national head of the division is more prominent than the US company," says Shellow.

"[But] it's getting exceedingly difficult to try to put up smoke and mirrors and hide behind them, because the target may not just be 'American' or 'British,"' it may be 'modern,' or 'Western' or 'non-whatever you are,' " adds Shellow. "That makes it very difficult to defend."

Adding "hardened" on-site security is a short-term fix, experts say. To find their way forward, firms now must perform a new kind of internal risk analysis. They must adapt to new scrutiny, new danger - and a broadening spectrum of relationships.

"There's no easy answer," says Ms. Waddock. "It's a matter of working through an ethical logic that says, 'OK, how do we want to treat all of our different stakeholders? We've got customers; we've got employees; we've got communities where [other] businesses benefit from having us there. We're giving loans to people; we're supporting business. Who's hurt if we pull out - and what happens if we stay? Which is the greater risk?' "

Historically, deals have often been struck with terms so favorable to multinationals that they simply override almost any risk, including that of war. In 1926, for example, Firestone inked a 99-year lease agreement with Liberia for 1 million acres of land, for a rubber-tree plantation, at 6 cents per acre. (The deal was reportedly renegotiated by Liberia in the 1970s.)

Today, however, overseas corporate actions that are perceived as too self-serving are likely to bring to bear the considerable force of socially responsible investors. And actions that have a positive and immediate effect on local populations - fostering entrepreneurship, for example - can win US firms' local support, and even a degree of protection. Done right, corporate incursions are "a source of new jobs and real wealth in a community," says Waddock, "as opposed to financial wealth that gets shipped back to the home country of whatever multinational."

Meetings of the World Trade Organization may still trigger mass protests over exploitation. But even liberal lions like John Kenneth Galbraith have acknowledged that multinationals are not always the rapacious replacements for colonial nations that many observers felt they were destined to become.

"It has become clear that corporate power ... is not the expression of a new imperialism," Mr. Galbraith wrote in his 1996 book "The Good Society." In the wake of multinational missteps from Africa to Asia to the US, he wrote, concern about corporate omnipotence "has given way, in the frequent case, to fear of its ineptitude."

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