WorldView: Rousseau put it well: "The strongest is never strong enough to be always master, unless he transforms strength into right and obedience into duty," writes Paul Gillespie
Two major shifts were under way this week in United States policy towards Iraq and Israel. The White House is signalling acceptance of a proposal by the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, that Iraq should be governed by a broad coalition selected by the UN as a caretaker transitional regime before elections are held to a constituent assembly. And President Bush endorsed Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza and hold on to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
The two shifts send different messages about the US attitude to strength and right and reflect changing political currents in the Bush administration. After the Shia uprising coinciding with the first anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein, it became clear that the timetable for transferring sovereignty on June 30th cannot be met legitimately under US auspices alone.
Only a UN involvement would satisfy Iraqi demands for a democratic transition. It will come through a new Security Council resolution addressing both the politics and security aspects of how Iraq should be governed.
Thus, if the US is to continue as master there, it has to broaden the political basis for its military presence. Whether this will be accepted as right after all the disastrous shortcomings of the occupation is very much an open question.
But it is striking that the Bush administration, which for so long dismissed or sidelined the UN on Iraq, has now to rely on it for political cover and legitimacy in an election year.
Mr Bush's other shift of policy this week went in the opposite direction. By endorsing the Sharon plan so enthusiastically he conceded unilaterally to Israel major points of negotiation involved in the UN-sponsored road map towards a settlement. The "quartet", consisting of the UN, the US, Russia and the European Union and tasked with the negotiations, has thereby been marginalised, notwithstanding Bush's statement that an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is compatible with it and that he still favours a two-state settlement.
The status of Israeli settlements, the denial of a Palestinian right of return to Israel and undertakings about continuing Israeli military access to Gaza are all central issues in a multilateral settlement. By taking them out in this way, Bush has undermined Palestinian negotiating points and opted for a partisan involvement rather than mediating role.
It exemplifies a characteristic feature of this administration - think locally and act globally - since it is more geared to US electoral politics than to any necessity to transform strength into right in the Middle East.
Those politicians such as Tony Blair and Brian Cowen who are favourably disposed to the Bush administration, or convinced of the need to maintain good relations with it, have been embarrassed by the Sharon deal, not least by its unilateralism. In response they have stressed the need for a multilateral approach, in which nothing is settled until everything is.
Blair has seized on the Iraq resolution issue as a way of reasserting himself; the EU foreign ministers gathered in Tullamore this weekend will do likewise.
This is a sensible approach. But does it not merely reveal, in the words of the leading US neo-conservative, Robert Kagan, that "multilateralism is a weapon of the weak" not the strong? Seasoned commentators detect considerable manoeuvring in the Bush administration on these issues between this group, the selective multilateralists of the State Department and the third influential current, conservative realist nationalists such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice.
The Sharon deal was brokered by Rice and closely influenced by Elliot Abrams, a long-standing pro-Israeli neo-conservative hawk who is in charge of Middle East policy in her National Security office in the White House. In contrast the turn to the UN on Iraq reflects more the influence of the State Department and conservative realists within the administration, not to mention Bush's electoral strategists. Pentagon neo-conservatives believe Ahmed Chalabi, their favourite in the Iraq Governing Council, will be the loser, since Brahimi has open contempt for him.
It is important to see the Middle East region as a whole when looking at these major policy changes. State leaderships there and in Europe are perplexed by the apparently incoherent US approach. Why tack to the UN on one issue and away from it on the other? Is this best explained by such internal administration factionalism, electoral advantage or by some as yet invisible and unitary strategy?
It is a mistake to assume it is unitary. Rather do these contradictory aspects cohere under the wings of more long-standing US approaches to world politics in which its ideological hegemony is still assured, based as it is on real interests and military strength.
European leaders still say they share fundamental values with the US, even if they disagree on major tactical and some strategic issues. But confronted with these contradictions more of them (and their citizens) are wondering whether this is true.
Such erratic US postures are testing their tolerance to the limits in the areas of softer power where they are more equal as well as in the multilateral ones where they have such an advantage.
More far-seeing US international relations theorists, such as John Ikenberry and Joseph Nye, believe the Bush administration is squandering resources of legitimacy built up over decades in which its mastery was tempered by rights the US had itself established.
Ikenberry says Rousseau's advice has been ignored by the neo-conservatives, who "too easily confuse force with power and power with authority". He goes on to say "they endanger America by stripping us of our legitimacy as the pre-eminent global power and the authority that flows from such a status".
He quotes Machiavelli, too - that it "is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with", as representing neo-conservative beliefs. But those who have to rely on fear have already lost the battle - if Rousseau is right.