How the USA lost its unquestioned place as defender of world peace

Now the Clinton years are derided as a time of irresolution, half-baked humanitarian interventions and limp responses to terrorism. Washington turned its back on Afghanistan and Africa; and it walked away from the UN, closing its chequebook instead of sending the president to make speeches like Bush did in the days after September 11 and again before Christmas - speeches that might have demanded a response.

And when Clinton did intervene on the side of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, he did so with such reluctance that it won him little kudos in the Islamic world. When he ran from Somalia because a handful of US servicemen died there in 1994, Osama bin Laden laughed in his face. And humanitarian intervention in Rwanda was too little and too late.

The difference a decade makes shows in the Iraq wars. At this point in the 1990-91 crisis - only weeks from when fighting might start - Bush senior had built a global coalition of committed support and participation for a diplomatic and military machine that went out and won a war. Now, almost 18 months after the September 11 attacks, Bush junior has shifted his focus from terrorists to his father's old enemy Saddam, and is labouring to get men and machines to the Gulf with no international consensus to back him.

Hindsight is easy, of course. But Michael Ignatieff's take on the missed opportunities of the '90s is pertinent, all the more so because this human-rights professor from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government is a liberal who supports the war on terrorism and who is on the verge of supporting war against Iraq.

He says: "At the end of the Cold War there was a historic opportunity similar to 1945 - but we missed it. Look at the incredible number of instruments devised between 1945 and 1951." And he reels them off, starting with the UN Charter, the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO), the Geneva Convention, before concluding:

"The whole order of the next 50 years was created in about four years.

"But we came out of the collapse of the USSR [and the end of the Cold War] with a shallow triumphalism that said no revision was needed. US presidents thought they could have imperial domination on the cheap, ruling the world without putting in place any new imperial architecture - the new military alliances, new legal institutions and the new international development organisations needed for a post-colonial, post-Soviet world.

"It was a failure of the historic imagination, an inability to grasp that the crises emerging in so many overlapping zones of the world - from Egypt to Afghanistan - eventually would become a security threat at home.

"Set against the marker of 1945-51, we failed abysmally in the '90s. The whole postwar international order was set up by my parents' generation, but the Clinton and Blair generations just coped. They didn't invent; there's no legacy."

September 11 was the cement of unity - but only briefly. NATO went on an immediate war footing while an editorial in Le Monde declared: "We are all New Yorkers." But now the trans-Atlantic hostility is palpable - Washington says Europe is soft on terrorism; the Europeans say US arrogance makes consultation and common purpose difficult.

The attacks on New York and Washington accentuated America's new isolationism and gave it a new urgency. But they didn't start it. Treaties have been falling like ninepins since Bush's presidential victory; during the 2000 campaign Condoleezza Rice was disparaging about "an illusory international community"; and the Bush team wore as a badge of honour its contempt for Clinton the internationalist.

In office for two years now, they have sculpted the Bush doctrine as a blunt instrument. The US will make decisions on the basis of its own interests, not some international greater good; if others disagree, too bad, and when necessary, Washington will use its unprecedented power to get its way.