Whether all this really leaves America with no alternative to unilateralism may be open to doubt.
The other feature of this week's announcements is their curious mixture of unilateralism and co-operation.
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This does not appear to be the sort of abrupt American unilateralism that many people fear.
American "unilateralism, " as its critics call it, has not produced anything like perfect leadership.
Few Britons are fond of Mr Bush, owing to his perceived unilateralism and cowboy swagger.
As his second term ticks down, even Mr Bush has begun to see the limits of unilateralism.
Still, if this was unilateralism, it was of a most unusual kind: co-operative unilateralism, you might call it.
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The administration's unilateralism will have a profound effect on future presidents, argues Goldsmith.
On the face of it, this is a better basis for American-Russian relations than either past arms negotiations or go-it-alone unilateralism.
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As the party lost one, two, three, four successive general elections from 1979 on, so it ditched unpopular commitments: unilateralism, anti-Europeanism, tax-and-spend.
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The deconstruction of the Bush Doctrine began by reasonably criticizing its unilateralism in not reaching out to other partners in the international arena.
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Most in Europe are instinctively America's friends and, after the unilateralism of the Bush years, they want to have something to love about America again.
Multilateralism is hard, but it's preferable to unilateralism in these circumstances.
But unilateralism from any quarter may be both worrying and destabilising.
One big worry is that America is increasingly tempted by unilateralism.
Nevertheless, Labour modernisation continued apace, with the party making peace with the UK's membership of the European Union, the market economy, ditching unilateralism and moving away from firm commitments on re-nationalisation.
To Mr Peres, who believes there is still hope of talking peace with Mr Arafat, who knew, and approved, of his negotiations with Mr Korei, unilateralism is a counsel of despair.
But even while he was still a Republican Senator, Hagel exhibited a sort of ecumenical internationalism that favored coalition warfare and collective security over the kind of unilateralism embraced by some neo-conservatives.
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And asked which man would better handle relations with other countries, Bush -- charged by his critics with alienating the world community through unilateralism -- beat his Democratic challenger by a 52 percent to 44 percent margin.
Some may defend the policy as an instance of robust unilateralism, but the failure of the administration's multilateral and regional initiatives was not a price that had to be paid to defend America's interests: on the contrary, those failures directly harm the American economy.
He is frankly partisan, a multilateralist who sees the unilateralism of Mr Bush's presidency as a sorry interruption in history's inexorable progress towards a more consensual world in which going it alone can no longer answer pressing problems such as nuclear proliferation and climate change.
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