Of all the gripes about President Bush’s handling of the final diplomacy leading up to this phase of the Iraq war, none is more disingenuous than the assertion being made by the left that the problem was the administration’s hostility to multilateralism. Exhibit A in this line of argument is the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Exhibit B is the International Criminal Court. Mr. Bush spurned the former and withdrew America’s signature from the latter. Critics of the president are also trying to blame the refusal of the Security Council to back an American-led attack on Mr. Bush’s withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

That the ABM treaty is a completely outmoded mechanism is illuminated by nothing so much as the North Korean situation that the left is arguing demands Mr. Bush’s attention. And the fact is that neither the Kyoto Protocol nor the treaty relating to the International Criminal Court could have gained ratification in the Senate, not even in the days when the upper house was controlled by the Democrats. At one point, the Senate made it clear in an almost unanimous vote that it was not prepared to go forward with the Kyoto treaty as then configured. It did not adequately address non-American sources of pollution and it was calculated to hamstring the American economy.

No doubt one of the reasons Vice President Gore was denied the presidency was because of his overly credulous view of the Kyoto Protocol. In the matter of the International Criminal Court, President Clinton signed the treaty, but not even he was willing to submit it to the Senate. He stated publicly it was flawed, and when Mr. Bush acceded, his spokesman said the new administration agreed with Mr. Clinton. The willingness of a number of key Democrats to countenance an agreement to bind America to the decisions of an International Criminal Court was no doubt one of the reasons voters revoked their control of the Senate.

The hard fact is that just because the Europeans want us to sign these treaties tilting the playing field in their direction doesn’t mean the American people want to go along. On the contrary, our sense is that the American people know when they’re getting snookered, and Congress, for all its faults, can figure out what the voters want. By the same lights, the idea of a multilateral approach to the Iraq war never had any logic. The diplomacy we’ve just come through exposed the flaw with the system — and has put the administration in a far stronger position than if it had gone into this war having to wrangle with the Security Council over battlefield strategy and war aims.