ABSTRACT
Multilateralism is not synonymous with the LIO, thus if the latter disappears, there is no logical reason why the former must also vanish. Certainly, multilateralism is under strain. Indeed, one would probably have to go back to the inter-war era of the twentieth century to encounter such a pervasive sense of despondency regarding this institution. Americans have never been thoroughgoing realists. For so many of them, realism was a mid-twentieth-century European import that fitted only partially and uncomfortably into the country’s strategic culture. Not only did liberalism apparently pre-dispose America to multilateralism; it also pre-disposed it toward a form of multilateralism that found anchor geographically in what was regularly referred to as the “West”, the principal institutional manifestation of which became, after 1949, the “democratic alliance”. NATO both symbolised and enabled the “multilateral moment” in world affairs. It did so mostly because it fostered the shaping of a collective identity in the West.
