Three years ago last Saturday, after the bright, sunny, deadly New York morning that was September 11^th 2001, almost everyone agreed that the world had changed forever: nothing would be the same again.

What was really meant, for all the entirely genuine talk of unity and global fellow-feeling, was that the United States had changed. The idea was that the experience of the first attack on its mainland since my countrymen burned the Capitol in 1814, or more relevantly the first on American soil since Pearl Harbor in 1941, would alter the way in which Americans saw and approached the world. But, since America is the worlds largest economy and, even more important, its sole global power, a change to America would also change the world.

Even then, for all the recollection of unity that is now assumed, people were instantly divided into those who thought this change to Americas approach would be a good, salutary one for the world and those who thought it would be disastrous. And those in that second category overlapped considerably with those who believed that in some sense September 11^th was Americas fault: that its own policies had brought about the mega-terrorism that we all saw on that day.

Now, in the effort to focus criticism on the later issue of Iraq, many people have sought to argue that pretty much everyone supported America on the day after September 11^th and it was its later actions, its unilateral, bull-headed, policies, that divided the world. But that is not really true. The divide has widened, yes. But it was already there in the autumn of 2001.

Now, for sure, the divide has taken on new forms. It is a divide over the meaning of the word "failure" and the magnitude of what is assumed to be a failure in Iraq. And, right now, especially in the run-up to the presidential election, it is a divide over whether, in response to that perceived failure, the United States will change its ways and return to the two phrases that are highly favoured by its more sympathetic critics: multilateralism and the use of "soft power", ie persuasion rather than compulsion.

Such approaches are considered to have been the American tradition since the glorious days of Harry Truman and Dean Acheson in the 1940s, when the United Nations and other multilateral institutions were created, bringing about what is generally considered to be an obviously superior way of doing things: more collective, more co-operative, more measured, more subtle, more sophisticated. I speak, of course, of the view of many Canadians but in this you are far from alone.

And, in the very short term, it is a debate over whether that return to multilateralism and softer techniques can and will more readily take place under a re-elected Bush administration that might be tired of war, or a Kerry administration that might be softer and more internationalist. Naturally, outside America almost everyone favours the latter.

Moving to the less sympathetic band of critics, the divide is also over whether failure in Iraq can or will lead to American withdrawal from such overseas entanglements, whether that will be a good or a bad thing, or whether, alternatively, such failure might lead on to new adventures, new disastrous military efforts, either in the Middle East or elsewhere.

My belief is that contained in this brief picture of the debate since September 11^th, and thus in the conventional wisdoms of today and of the past three years, are a whole barrage of falsehoods. Or, to put it more mildly and subtly, a lot of confusions and muddles and misleading claims. And I believe that such muddles and confusions are leading to a widespread delusion about what American policy might be like after November 2^nd, especially under a Kerry administration, and to a failure to think clearly about what role the rest of the rich world is playing and can be expected to play.

I am going to argue that the confusions lie in four areas:

1.     The nature of the current failure

2.     The assumed superiority of multilateralism

3.     The true history of American foreign policy since 1945

4.     And thus, the proper role, in understanding todays situation, to be assigned to change or novelty, and the proper role of continuity.

Let me take these one by one.

1.     The nature of the current failure

In disputing the nature of the current failure, I am not seeking to dispute whether or not America has indeed failed in Iraq. That is a fruitless debate, for the only sensible answer is that it all depends on what happens in the next few months and years. The situation is plainly pretty bad, and much worse than senior American policymakers expected when George Bush made his appallingly ill-judged "Mission Accomplished" speech in May 2003. But Mr Bush was perfectly within his rights to say, in his speech to the Republican National Convention in New York in September 2004, that in 1946 plenty of people thought that the occupation of Germany had "failed". That is true. Too often, pundits of all sorts take a very short-term view of these things. Even so, the fact that people were wrong in 1946 does not, alas, make it certain that they are wrong about Iraq in 2004. They might be, but we can yet know.

Rather, my argument is that whether or not the word "failure" is definitive or premature, the situation it describes is not limited to Iraq and it ought not to be attached solely or even principally to the United States. It is not, in other words, simply to be understood as a failure of "unilateralism". Iraq is an especially spectacular and worrying case of a much wider phenomenon.

That phenomenon is the failure to succeed in pacifying or, often, even stabilising, failed states or states riven by conflict, and the failure to succeed in building a new state to replace the old one. The crucial point is that this is a shared failure, not just an American one.

But Iraq, I hear you mutter quickly, wasn a failed state. It was the American-led coalition that toppled the state and made the mistake of dismantling the whole Baathist apparatus of the state, leaving nothing behind in its place.

That is true but short-sighted. For the failure of policy in Iraq is not just a matter of the past 18 months. Todays failure has to be placed alongside the previous failure, during the 12 years after 1991. Saddams Iraq was a state that chose to live through conflict, first with Iran during the 1980s and then with Kuwait in 1990, and to amplify its own strategic position through programmes to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The 1990-91 multilateral policy for dealing with this destabilising state was war, which succeeded in its limited objective of liberating Kuwait. The 1991-2002 policy was one of multilaterally agreed-upon containment, using sanctions, weapons inspections and bombing raids. That left the state weakened, the population much worse off, but the outside world still convinced that Saddams regime needed special treatment. The international divide in early 2003 was, after all, over whether further containment was appropriate or whether there should be military action. It was not over whether Iraq should simply be left alone.

A multilateral failure (or at least, lack of known success) was thus followed by a unilateral failure.

Iraq, though, extreme as it is, is not a unique case. Rather obviously, there is also Afghanistan, where elections were held in October for a central government that will not, unfortunately, be in a position to control the country. Those elections passed off peacefully and successfully. Still, Afghanistan continues to be a violent and unstable country. That, it should be noted, is a multilateral failure: NATO is providing the current main security force and the reconstruction effort involves a large number of countries. That effort has so far been inadequate.

Then, not far away from Iraq there is Sudan. Everyone agrees that terrible things have been happening to the people of Darfur but no one is willing or able to do much about it. The same has applied to the Congo for years, and still does.

Then, in Europe, there are both Bosnia and Kosovo. In neither place does the outside worlds effort quite deserve to be rewarded with the word failure, but alas nor does it deserve the word success.

The list could, no doubt, go on. Two common threads connect together all these failures or semi-failures. One is the sheer difficulty for any outside force of building a stable, legitimate, accepted state, with the rule of law and some sort of a democracy. The other, more or less regardless of that difficulty, is the reluctance of outsiders to will the means even if they claim to will the ends.

That is, by common consent, a large part of the American problem in Iraq: the fact that war-lite was followed by occupation-lite, which probably needed 300,000 or more troops if security was really to be imposed, rather than the 140,000 that have been used.

But it is also a considerable part of the international problem in Afghanistan. Cheques have been written, but security has not been provided. Yes, America complicated matters by keeping control of offensive operations in large areas of the country for a long time. Yes, many peacekeepers did a good job, and among their number were Canadians. But the job has been highly limited. And NATO has now failed to send even the level of forces and equipment that it pledged to, let alone anything like enough to have a chance of imposing security.

In Iraq, the failure has been chiefly of unilateral will. In Afghanistan, as in Sudan, the Congo and arguably also Bosnia and Kosovo, it has been of multilateral will.

Which brings me to the second area of confusion.

2.     The assumed superiority of multilateralism.

I am fully in favour of multilateral solutions to problems. But I think one must have ones eyes fully open to the fact that multilateralism is no panacea, and does not even have a particularly good record.

I have already argued that Afghanistan, Sudan, the Congo, Bosnia and Kosovo are not exactly triumphs for multilateralism.

Nor, though, has multilateralism had a particularly triumphant history. In the 1990s its failures were numerous. Afghanistan, Sudan and the Congo could all have been dealt with during that decade if multilateralism were truly a powerful force, but of course they weren . The genocide in Rwanda occurred despite the presence of, and warnings from, a UN detachment. The wars in the Balkans went on for years under our multilateral noses. Indeed the massacre at Srebrenica took place essentially while Dutch UN peacekeepers were watching. Somalia was a debacle. HIV/AIDS spread and killed millions before it managed to stir up much multilateral attention. And there was the prolonged pain of the multilateral solutions for Iraq.

Yes, there has been some progress. Some countries look better in 2004 than they did in 1990, thanks to multilateral efforts, under UN auspices: Cambodia, Sierra Leone, East Timor. The Balkans too are improving, albeit slowly. International war crimes trials are now being held. But the list is sadly not long. It is certainly not long enough to win any argument with American unilateralists.

Multilateralism has, in my view, had just one clear, unalloyed triumph. That is in the economic field, notably of trade liberalisation under the GATT and now the World Trade Organisation. The liberalisation the WTO now champions, and for which the WTOs existence provides essential confidence for all existing and potential members, has been responsible in the past quarter century for the greatest amount of progress in raising living standards and reducing poverty in all of human history. Not even the Bush administration or its neo-cons challenge that.

3.     The true history of American foreign policy since 1945

What, though, of the cold war? Wasn that a triumph for multilateralism? Wasn that, as many have said during the past three years, a triumph for the US-led policy of building multilateral institutions and working through them to preserve peace and foster prosperity? Wasn that the policy established so far-sightedly by Truman, Acheson and others in the 1940s, breaking with a long unilateral tradition in American foreign policy.

Well, as we Evelyn Waugh-reading Brits tend to say, "Up to a point, Lord Copper". Which, as anyone who has read Waughs "Scoop" will be aware, is an English way of saying "No, thats nonsense".

Certainly, multilateral institutions such as the GATT, the IMF and the World Bank played an important role in stabilising the world economy at critical moments, and have provided the confidence to convince countries to risk liberalisation. The United Nations itself may well have helped to make conflict between the major powers less likely, by providing a forum in which issues could be aired and, through the veto-system in the Security Council, giving some confidence to those powers.

But the true history of multilateralism is that during the Cold War the reflexive vetoing of the Soviet Union and the USA meant that it didn stand a chance. Neither international law nor the Security Council itself played any real role in military conflicts of virtually any sort between Korea and the 1991 Gulf war. They only began to have a chance to do so in the 1990s, once the Cold War was over. But that record, as weve seen, is not impressive either.

And Americas approach cannot accurately be described as having been multilateralist during the Cold War either.  Kennedys attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 was hardly a multilateralist venture. Nor, on any reckoning, was the Vietnam war, nor the associated military campaign in Cambodia. Nor was Ronald Reagans invasion of mighty Grenada (though it was less destructive than Hurricane Ivan), nor were any of the American interventions in central America during the 1980s. Nixon and Kissinger did not sit down with their allies to discuss whether to open diplomatic relations with China in 1973.

Nor, in reality, was multilateralism given a central or driving role in the true innovation of Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, which was the policy of containment. Plenty of allies went along with it, of course. But they weren consulted in advance, and it was in no sense a collectively-determined policy. It was one set by and led by the United States, and supported by a coalition of the willing. The big difference between containment and the invasion of Iraq was that more were willing, during the cold war.

But it was still, I would say, a policy of selective multilateralism: of the determination by America of its own goals, and then the use of allies and even of multilateral institutions only when they seemed the best means by which to achieve those goals. If unilateral means were better, or smaller coalitions, or proxy forces, seemed more appropriate, then those were used instead.

That was even true of the now-sainted Bill Clinton in the 1990s. He was multilateralist when he wanted to be, as (eventually) in the Balkans, but also operated on his own or in alliance with Britain on other occasions, as in Operation Desert Fox in Iraq in 1998. The NATO bombing of Kosovo took place without approval from the UN Security Council because two permanent members, China and Russia, were expected to veto it.

4.     The roles of change and of continuity

My message thus far is fairly clear: plus ca change, plus cest la meme chose.

In terms of American policy since September 11^th, there has been more continuity with foreign policy since 1945 than there has been change. It was self-centred, and only selectively multilateralist then, and it is now.

In terms of the respective records of multilateral solutions versus unilateral ones, neither can claim a clear superiority. The record is poor, either way.

And, although the September 11^th attacks were thought by some to herald a new internationalism, a new sense that dangers in one part of the world could readily develop into dangers for all, a new possibility of worldwide co-operation in what George Bushs father called a "New World Order", they haven yet altered one of the basic facts about international intervention, indeed of international policy as a whole: that nations sometimes will the ends, but they generally do not will the means.

So has nothing changed at all? And is it all then hopeless? Twice no. There are, I would argue, two big tasks that need to be tackled in order to avoid it being hopeless.

The genuine change in American foreign policy after September 11^th was, I would suggest, essentially that a policy characterised by patience was replaced by one characterised by impatience.

Containment was a deliberate choice of a patient option over the idea, widely debated in the 1940s and 1950s, of confronting the Soviet Union. After the fall of the USSR, the patience consisted of a mixture of complacency and the feeling (as in the Balkans) that intervention might well not help and would be highly risky.

September 11^th changed that, a change to which we can all bear witness. The Bush administration concluded that it could not afford to be patient. Further terrorist attacks could occur at any time. A future attack might involve devastatingly powerful weapons, purchased on the international black market. Against such a threat, it seemed prudent to Bush to make explicit an option previously only implicit in American policy, namely the option of taking pre-emptive military action. The long-term American policy of supporting some Arab dictators, notably in Saudi Arabia, and pursuing a balance of power strategy towards others in the region, notably Iran and Iraq, suddenly looked unsustainable. And, in purely selfish political terms, a policy of patience in the face of such threats could not be expected to be rewarded at the 2004 presidential election.

In that election, much of the outside world saw the choice between George Bush and John Kerry as being somehow decisive in determining whether those post-9/11 policies of impatience will be continued, or whether they will come to an end.

My feeling is that that belief is wrong. Whoever was elected on November 2^nd the principal policy goals would have remained essentially the same: stabilising and in the longer-term transforming the Middle East, broadly defined, as well as the dangerous area of central Asia, stretching from Iran through to Pakistan; thwarting the international trade in WMD materials; blocking and if necessary pre-empting terrorist attacks.

The real question was what means can and should now be used to achieve those goals, following the debacle in Iraq, and which candidate was going to be in the best position to deploy those means.

Whatever non-Americans may have believed, that was far from clear. To illustrate the point, I will just refer you to the writing of a fellow journalist who has been consistently anti-American throughout his career, namely John Pilger, an Australian writer. A few weeks ago in the British political weekly, the New Statesman, he surprised many of his loyally anti-Bush readers by arguing that actually he hoped Bush would be re-elected. The reason he gave was that he thinks Bush might actually be the lesser evil. Democrats have been behind most of the American-led wars of the past half century, he argued, and Kerry would be no exception. Hed just clothe it in seductive words.

There, at least, is a continuity of a sort.

Whatever the result, the basic direction of policy was destined to remain unchanged. The impatience of the policy may become slightly less, as time passes since 2001 and given the huge problems encountered in Iraq. But I doubt if it will disappear altogether. For the fear of another 9/11 will remain very much alive.

Which brings me to the first of the two big tasks that need to be tackled.

What very much has to be done, by either new administration, is to undertake the task of convincing more allies of the case for that impatience. Eventually, though not immediately, allies consented to and supported containment. They do not yet support impatience. And, just as important, they remain sceptical about quite what is the long-term purpose of that impatience. That continued scepticism about the long-term purpose is surely one of the greatest failures of the Bush administration.

The neo-conservatives are much derided now, both in America and especially outside. They were hopelessly over-optimistic about what would happen in Iraq and the surrounding region. But they were surely right about the long-term aim of bringing about a transformation of the Middle East, just as Dean Acheson was right about the long-term aspirations of containment, and Ronald Reagan was during the 1980s. What either Bush 2 or Kerry 1 will need to do is to put some sort of plausible and workable long-term framework on those aspirations and goals, and find ways to persuade allies to support them.

That does not necessarily mean working principally through multilateral institutions. It does, though, mean building a much larger alliance than the USA has at present, both inside the Middle East and more widely.

The second big task that is going to have to be tackled is a collective one, not simply a task for the United States. It is the task of persuading domestic public opinion to support the deployment of much greater means for the achievement of foreign-policy ends. That will be necessary if the long-term tasks in the Middle East and in Central Asia are to be achieved. But it will also be necessary if other terrorist fires are to be extinguished, and other humanitarian crises are to be resolved.

In the past 15 years or more, almost all rich countries have cut back the means at the disposal of their diplomatic services, their information services, their overseas aid ministries and their military forces. Canada is an especially stark case of this trend, with aid budgets slashed to the meagre levels close to 0.2% of GDP that is popularly associated with your neighbours down south. In many ways, Canada has benefited in recent years from a misleadingly good reputation as an international force for good, even as (until the past two years) you have been getting less generous and less internationally minded.

This is despite the mantra, pushed by groups like the CIIA and magazines like The Economist, that says that we are all getting steadily more inter-dependent, that butterflies flapping their wings across the globe can cause hurricanes near to home, that terrorists can climb on planes, use e-mail and set off their dirty bombs using mobile phones.

The mantra has the merit of being true. During the 1990s, though, it looked more worrying than dangerous.

In the past three years, there has been a modest increase in the deployment of such resources, in recognition of the increased dangers. Much of the money has gone on domestic security: Americas Homeland Security spending has been a spectacular example, but it is true elsewhere too. Britains MI5 Security Service, for example, is expanding its staffing by 50% (from roughly 2,000 to 3,000). America has increased its military spending dramatically, from $350 billion a year to $500 billion, and its overseas aid spending modestly, from a low base, to around a tenth of that sum spent on defence. Others, though, have done little. My own countrys spending on aid has increased, but defence and diplomatic budgets are again being trimmed. The BBCs request for £28m to launch an Arabic language TV service to compete with Al-Jazeera was turned down by the Treasury, at least for now.

We all have to campaign for this to change, in all the rich countries. Neither state-building, nor peacekeeping, nor humanitarian intervention, nor even the winning of hearts and minds is ever going to be easy. There will always be many failures to place alongside the few successes. But if the world is to improve that ratio of failure to success, following our experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere, then an unavoidable prerequisite will be more resources, of money, equipment and manpower.

It is too easy to lay all the blame on American failures, on American unilateralism, on American bungling. Such criticisms are often fair. But they miss the bigger point. It is that we all have a role to play.

Thank you for listening so patiently.