At the recent summit on the Kyoto Accord in Bonn, Germany, the United States was not an official Participant. Nonetheless, perhaps per force of habit, a U.S. representative was in attendance, and at one point rose to address the delegates on the Bush administration’s approach to global warming. She was, in no uncertain terms, booed off the stage. It was a small incident, but one that represents a larger trend of resentment toward a recent U.S. foreign policy that seems to follow the “eight hundred pound guerilla” pattern of selectively sleeping wherever it pleases.

Of late, the United States has pulled away from a number of international accords and negotiations which had been previously supported under the Clinton administration. The most high-profile of these recent schisms have been the unilateral U.S. position on creating a missile defense shield, in violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the renunciation of the 1997 Kyoto Treaty on greenhouse gasses. However, the Bush administration has also pulled away from or scuttled a panoply of other agreements. Among these have been the International Criminal Court, supported by 138 nations but dismissed by Bush as “flawed”, the U.N. Conference on Small Arms, designed to reduce illegal trafficking in weapons, and the U.N. Accord to Enforce the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which the administration claimed “would put national security and confidential business information at risk.”

During President Bush’s recent tour of Europe, Senate Majority Leader Dick Gephardt accused the Bush administration of being isolationist. It is difficult to argue that the United States does not involve itself extensively in international affairs. In this light it cannot be called isolationist. It simply involves itself on its own terms, often without feeling the need to consult its neighbors or strategic partners.

If there is a pattern to the continual refusal to participate in international treaties regulating everything from landmines to global warming, it is an apparent hesitance to place any fetters whatsoever on the United States itself. In a world in which the U.S. is the sole remaining superpower, this has remained possible, with no visible repercussions other than grumbling among foreign diplomats. It would be foolish, however, to assume that the U.S. will forever remain capable of maintaining hegemony against a rapidly evolving economic and strategic background.

With the increasing economic strength of areas such as China and previously unheard-of levels of cooperation in new partnerships like the European Union, the U.S. may eventually find itself merely one of several competing monoliths. This will not occur in the next ten years, and perhaps not in the next twenty, but history makes it seem unlikely that the twenty-first century will end with power resting precisely as it did at the beginning. Unilateral foreign policy may have its appeals, and even, on occasion, its merits, yet cumilatively the United States must remain a participant in global affairs by dint of more than simply its military and economic might.