Starry-eyed internationalists argue that such bodies enjoy intrinsic legitimacy because they represent a post-national, selfless, principles-based sort of decision-making (no laughter at the back, there).
Needless to say, American defence contractors are all for helping allies.The information umbrellaSo long as the internationalists run its foreign policy, America is likely to share at least the less sensitive sorts of equipment.
A victory for Mr Bush and the internationalists could easily backfire.
But for deep-dyed internationalists like this newspaper, the game's true beauty lies in its long reach, from east to west and north to south.
Traditional Republican internationalists, who had less to say on either count, offered little intellectual alternative.
How could anyone want to blur the outlines of an unspeakable phenomenon whose precise definition has, in recent years, been of keen concern to liberal internationalists and humanitarian law buffs?
Recent YouGov polling suggests that most British voters fall into one of three categories: optimistic internationalists, pragmatic moderates and pessimistic nationalists (in ascending order of hostility to the EU).
Now would be a good time for the internationalists to prove to America that they are serious and for Mr Bush to prove that he means what he says.
Instead, his administration wasted time on an internal argument between the unilateralists at the Pentagon and the vice-president's office, and the internationalists at the State Department.
In the two prisoner cases, the "internationalists" outnumbered the "nationalists".These were not the only examples.
"Be radical!" said an editorial in an Iowa newspaper he ran as a young man; "we need atheists, free-lovers, anarchists, free traders, communists, single taxers, internationalists, royalists, socialists, anti-Christians "If the elder Gallup was an ironic purveyor of cultural homogeneity, his son is an equally ironic party to the crime of which modern market researchers are thought guilty.
