It will not be enough to become nostalgic for the old multilateral world, since it will not be enough for America.
At the weekend meetings in Istanbul of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the move toward a more multilateral world was in full swing.
As well as slashing industrial tariffs, it brought services and agriculture under multilateral world trade rules for the first time and expanded the system's coverage to such areas as intellectual property and health standards.
It will all depend on where it goes from here.If this really has been a major turning point for the multilateral World Trade Organisation-based framework, that is extraordinarily serious news for us.
After neoconservatism, I pledged a mix of realism and liberal internationalism, in which military force would be used much more sparingly, and American power would be placed in the service of a stable, rule-based, multilateral world order.
The French president said recently that he sought a multilateral world in which the United Nations set the laws by which all nations abide -- code words for limiting American power.
The claim that, unlike Obama, these Republican candidates will never apologise for America is not just flawed in fact, but would make America less respected, less safe and less able to pursue its interests in a multilateral world.
"They give us the chance to test the way the different services and different nations work together, something that is vital in a multilateral world," he added.
What this means in practice is attempting to maintain a "multilateral" world order driven by rules-based co-operation between powerful states.
The United States and Europe can and must take a leadership role in defining the principles and structures of this new multipolar, multilateral world.
