THREE AND A HALF YEARS AGO, after the bright, sunny, deadly New York morning that was 11 September 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 world's largest economy and, even more important, its sole global 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 America's 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 11th was America's 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 and the magnitude of what is assumed to be a failure in Iraq. And 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, i.e., 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 cooperative, more measured, more subtle, more sophisticated. I speak, of course, of the view of many Canadians, but in this you are far from alone.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 11th, and thus in the conventional wisdoms of today and of the past three and a half 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 American policy, 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:* the nature of the current failure;* the assumed superiority of multilateralism;* the true history of American foreign policy since 1945; and* thus, the proper role, in understanding today's situation, to be assigned to change or novelty, and the proper role of continuity.Let me take these one by one.I THE NATURE OF THE CURRENT FAILUREIn disputing the nature of the current failure, I am not seeking to dispute whether or not America has indeed failed in Iraq. …