Diplomacy by Vendetta.(global trade relations)

It's a long way from Baghdad to Cancun, but the connection is obvious. In April, with the United States flying high after its low-casualty invasion of Iraq, it would have been hard to imagine poor countries challenging American and European rule over the global economy. By September, when the trade summit came to Cancun, everything had changed. The sight of America tied down like Gulliver in Iraq emboldened Lilliputians everywhere. Other candidates for "regime change," from Pyongyang to Tehran, saw Washington's fulminations as increasingly hollow. In Cancun, a group of 21 developing nations--the G21 for short--led by Brazil, India, South Africa and China, stood up to block the Western agenda.

Washington was not oblivious to the change in perceptions, yet old habits die hard. President George W. Bush's trade representative, Robert Zoellick, left Cancun railing against his developing-world challengers and then went on a vendetta, one that has gone largely unremarked upon in the West. Washington let Costa Rica and Guatemala know that their membership in the G21 would be punished, perhaps by exclusion from the planned Central American Free Trade Area. By mid- October, Washington's unrelenting pressure had forced Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador from the G21. But this tactical U.S. victory won't stop the fallout from Washington's global heavy- handedness: the rise of defensive economic blocs and, more generally, the defiance of American influence.

The Iraq quagmire and the Cancun collapse are both signs of U.S. imperial overreach. Among other signs: the failure to consolidate a regime in Afghanistan or stabilize the Palestinian situation; the boost that U.S.-led invasions are giving to Islamic extremism not only in the Mideast but in South Asia and Southeast Asia, and the unraveling of the Atlantic alliance, the most recent manifestation of which is the brewing steel trade war.

For much of the post-World War II period, the U.S. political elite followed the Roman lesson that "moral vision" is central to imperial management. National Security Memorandum 68, the defining document of the cold war, spoke of a "long twilight struggle" against communism for the loyalties of the peoples of the world. Contrast this to the Bush National Security Strategy, which speaks narrowly of defending the American way of life and arrogates the right to strike against even potential threats in pursuit of American interests.

Can a more sophisticated administration undo the ...