Bilateralism

A foreign policy strategy in which a sovereign state chooses to pursue its international interests and goals in concert with one other sovereign state. The vast majority of diplomatic relations take place at the bilateral level—nations open embassies in other countries; they exchange ambassadors and consular officials; they host state visits of other states' leaders and dignitaries; and they sign binding agreements pertaining to economic, environmental, and military cooperation.

Because only two nations are involved in bilateral negotiations, compromise and consensus are generally arrived at more readily than in a multilateral environment, and diplomats enjoy greater flexibility because they generally have to juggle fewer competing agendas. This is not to say, however, that bilateral agreements are necessarily easy to craft. The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA), for example, took nearly two years of round-the-clock discussions before it came to fruition in 1989.

While they may have the advantage of expediency, and though the international community typically [Page 72]favors bilateral actions over unilateral ones, bilateral negotiations and agreements often generate foreign ire and precipitate complaints of illegitimacy. The ongoing war on terrorism represents an important example. The majority of forces deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 are either American or British, and the two nations (and their respective leaders, U.S. president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair) have cooperated almost exclusively with one another in planning and implementing the sustained military campaign. States such as France and Germany publicly voiced their opposition to this bilateral arrangement, arguing that the terrorism was a global problem demanding a multilateral response (for example, United Nations intervention).

An awesome mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb explosion rises over Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific in 1946. A coral island in the Marshall Islands, Bikini was chosen to be the site of atomic bomb testing because of its relative isolation. The United States moved the people on the island before the testing. Allowed to return in 1968, they were relocated again in 1978 because of continued high levels of radioactivity in the island's soil. The people of Bikini receive financial compensation from the United States and hope to one day be able to return for good.

Corbis.

Though bilateralism continues to be the norm of international diplomacy, the history of the 20th century provides two very significant critiques of its effectiveness. In the aftermath of World War I, world leaders and thinkers suggested strongly that bilateralism, and specifically a series of “entangling alliances,” was ultimately responsible for the outbreak of war. Following World War II, bilateralism also was held partially responsible for the rise of inflation and escalating tariffs. In each case, much of the world responded by embracing (if only temporarily) a new sense of multilateralism as embodied in such institutions as the League of Nations (post–World War I) and the United Nations (post–World War II).

United States bilateralism has a rich history. The United States and Canada, for example, not only established a recent free trade agreement (later subsumed by the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA), but they continue to cooperate bilaterally on issues pertaining to continental defense (for example, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD), environmental protection (issues such as acid rain and water quality), border management, and energy.

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