The world's two major diplomatic powers, the United States and the European Union, are turning inward - and that is likely to mean a less ambitious foreign policy from the US, and less focus from the Europeans on global issues.

But exhaustion after Iraq and the unexpected domestic focus wrought by hurricane Katrina may also mean more cooperation from the US. A go-it-alone penchant on a host of international issues could be replaced by a broader tendency to "give diplomacy a chance," experts say.

"After Vietnam, we saw the opening to China and the era of arms-control agreements with the former Soviet Union because there was no support for an aggressive foreign policy," says Lawrence Korb, a former Reagan administration defense official now here at the Center for American Progress.

"In a similar way, because of continuing problems in Iraq and now the attention and money demanded at home after Katrina, the Bush administration is going to take a much more patient approach to solving the world's problems," Mr. Korb says. "No more axis of evil, no more grand transformation of the Middle East."

This week's breakthrough in a long standoff over North Korea's nuclear program, which includes US concessions that the Bush administration had said it would never accept, is a stark example of a new diplomatic stance.

Most modern two-term presidencies have turned, in the second four years, to the global stage to secure their legacies, historians note. But an inverted picture - an international focus giving way to a domestic emphasis - is likely to be true for President Bush, some analysts say. They note Katrina's unprecedented price tag and the wide range of disaster preparedness and response flaws that the storm exposed.

At the same time, Europe - which, as Mr. Bush made clear in the early weeks of his second term, was to be the chief partner with the US in a new era emphasizing diplomacy over force - is in the throes of an inward-gazing session of its own.

Just this week, Germany threw the EU deeper into a domestic preoccupation with a hung election that leaves the EU's economic and increasingly diplomatic engine without clear leadership and direction. That adds to the roadblock that French and Dutch voters laid down on the path to a more unified European foreign policy earlier this year when they voted down a proposed EU constitution.

The domestic focus of the West's two great political powers is worrisome for some observers, if for no other reason than that it may prompt some countries to turn elsewhere for political and economic ties. Or worse, some experts add, may be a tendency for some countries to use the moment to cast aspersions on democracy's effectiveness - or to test the West's watch over such priorities as democratic and human rights.

"Certainly there are actors on the international scene who want to see Europe weak and who are pleased to see Bush paralyzed on another front," says Dominique Moïsi, special adviser to the French Institute for International Relations in Paris. "If you are sitting in Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran, you can say, 'Democracy is showing itself to be a fragile system, and that is good for us.' "

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