MULTILATERALISM….I don’t agree with everything Fareed Zakaria writes, but he’s consistently interesting and usually worth listening to. To me, he’s what Tom Friedman could be if he spent more time actually thinking and less time bouncing off the walls.
At any rate, I agree with Nick Confessore that this Zakaria op-ed in the Washington Post is pretty good. If there’s any single thing that I find most perplexing about the Bush administration’s foreign policy, it’s their inability to see that although multilateralism is indeed messy and hard, it’s also vitally necessary. I can understand an instinctive preference for going it alone, but the people surrounding Bush aren’t stupid and it’s hard to see how they can miss the primary foreign policy lesson of the past century: with firm allies, we win; without them, we don’t.
Nick also has some good thoughts about this, so be sure to read his post too.
