Wake up and Smell the Multilateralism
Philip Stephens, Financial Times | September 12, 2008
The unipolar moment after the Cold War passed as quickly as it emerged. ++ The new US president will suddenly see some decisions also being made in Beijing, Moscow, and Europe. ++ A league of democracies would be nonsense in the current geopolitical mess. ++ A "for-or-against"-the-US view would bring some definition to new poles but it would be more flexible than Bush depicted. ++ America's mistake was to disdain multilateralism and to overreach itself. ++ Europe's was to assume the rules-based system is a model to the world.
