Under George Bush, the United States' instincts may be unilateralist but they are certainly not isolationist.
ECONOMIST: Gains in Afghanistan, losses in the battle of ideas
EU's recalcitrance over bananas and hormone-treated beef, and by America's growing disenchantment with curbs on its unilateralist instincts.
Rumsfeld and his team of neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon favor an activist and often unilateralist approach to advancing America's interests abroad.
Celebrity campaigner Bianca Jagger on Tuesday said she could not understand to Tony Blair, who she said was a pro-European now backing a unilateralist American president.
But the popular response to the unilateralist thesis enunciated by such senior figures as Haim Ramon and Shlomo Ben-Ami was too strong for Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the party's chairman, to withstand.
He told reporters he wants to dispel the notion held by some allies that he is a "unilateralist" bent on going his own way without consulting or appreciating the views of other nations.
An Iraqi war might thus put America back into its unilateralist box, which would not help it in the wider war against terror, and might complicate several of its other foreign-policy objectives, such as winning Russian co-operation for missile defences.
As Afghanistan has shown, it can (and often should) be unilateralist in military matters, but it needs a more co-operative, even consensual approach for other purposes, including diplomacy, intelligence-gathering, financial tracking and above all in the battle for hearts, minds and ideas.
But if early signs are anything to go by, a new policy is emerging which, if not exactly hawkish in the pugnacious sense, is more unilateralist than outsiders are accustomed to, stepping away from multilateral and regional entanglements that are deemed marginal to America's own security needs.
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