LONDON — Will senior members of the Bush administration ever set foot on British territory again? I ask this question in all seriousness, and it could well apply to future American administrations too.

Last week an attempt was made to arrest John Bolton, while the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security was speaking about his memoirs before a large audience at the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts, which is held at the end of May.

Guardian columnist George Monbiot was physically restrained from laying hands on Mr. Bolton by security guards. But the police did not intervene, made no comment, and appeared to be keeping their heads below the parapet. Oddly enough, the event is sponsored by the Guardian.

Mr. Bolton dismissed Mr. Monbiot’s actions as “comic.” But Mr. Monbiot had announced in advance his intention to attempt a citizen’s arrest of Mr. Bolton under the Serious and Organized Crime and Police Act of 2005. He accused Mr. Bolton of a “crime against humanity,” namely preparing a war of aggression under the definition established by the 1946 Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. Prior to this, Mr. Monbiot had consulted an international lawyer, Philippe Sands, who claims that he advised against the arrest.

The director of the festival, Peter Florence, acting on legal advice that such an arrest would be unlawful, ensured that Mr. Monbiot was unable to carry out his threat — which represents a real threat to the principles of free speech on which the festival depends. A few days afterward I was speaking at the festival as well, along with the historian Michael Burleigh, and conversation at Hay still was dominated by the incident.

So is the case closed? Last February, leaked documents revealed that in 2005 a general from Israel had escaped arrest at London’s Heathrow airport only because the police feared a gunfight with El Al security guards.

A warrant had been issued for the arrest of Major-General Doron Almog on charges of war crimes, not dissimilar to those alleged against Mr. Bolton, who was accused of ordering the demolition of houses in Gaza. The police plan, which was to detain Mr. Almog during a routine visit at the invitation of the Anglo-Jewish community, was thwarted only because the military attaché at Israel’s embassy in London tipped off the general just before he alighted. Though no arrest was made, the incident has had its own effect: senior officials from Israel now think twice before setting foot on British soil.

Most famously, between 1998 and 2000 the former president of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, was charged with murder, kidnapping, and torture under a warrant issued by a Spanish judge. He was kept under what amounted to house arrest in Britain, before being released on medical grounds. This landmark case established the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” whereby certain — essentially political — crimes are justiciable anywhere on earth. Although America has never recognized the authority of the International Court, in any country where that authority is recognized U.S. officials could be arrested.

So we have already reached a reductio ad absurdum: it is in one’s interest to be deceptive in the hope of confusing the issue. On the European side both the police and the judiciary are corrupted by the imperative to arrest their allies on trumped-up charges of political crimes in remote places, while American officials are forced to be secretive, especially retired ones who may no longer enjoy immunity.

I just spent an evening at the London School of Economics for a lecture by Columbia Law Professor and Presidential Adviser Philip Bobbitt about his new book “Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century.” I was shocked to hear how he was misrepresented in the London Times as an advocate of torture, which he is not. Such stories acquire a life of their own on the Internet.

At a dinner after his lecture Mr. Bobbitt, a lifelong Democrat and liberal, who has bravely concluded that the “wars against terror” (his preferred terminology) are not only necessary but also must be fought with much greater energy than the Bush administration has done, was ambushed from both the left and the right.

The academic and journalistic elite in Britain now has a settled view that the invasions, not only of Iraq but also of Afghanistan, were mistakes, prompted by the Bush administration’s overreaction to September 11. They also regard it as a fact that the “war on terror” is at best a misnomer, at worst a disaster.

One eminent guest at the dinner was Sir Michael Howard, who was a professor at Yale and Oxford and the dean of the British historical profession. He not only thinks that declaring war on Al Qaeda was “a terrible and irrevocable error,” but that a “league of democracies” to fight terrorism would be another fatal conceit. In his view, the democracies do not have enough in common to act together. For example if NATO were to expand its operations to become a global player, they would just be another coalition of the unwilling. This view was shared by the assembled academics, along with the assumption that Obama-McCain was no contest.

The Atlantic alliance depends on a certain amount of give-and-take on both sides. What is worrying about both John Bolton’s “arrest” and Philip Bobbitt’s ambush is that they are straws in the wind, symptomatic of a wider disenchantment with America.

A change of president will not make as much difference as many Americans hope and believe. The choice between Senators Obama and McCain should be made on their merits.

Barack Obama may think that land and sea obey him — “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” he announced in his victory speech on Tuesday — but he does not have the power to make the world love America.

Mr. Johnson is the editor of Standpoint magazine.