In the words of George W. Bush, conducting foreign policy is "hard work." As the immensely ambitious strategic vision of the Bush Administration enters its fifth year, numerous indications of strategic fatigue are in evidence. There is talk of troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, even though the insurgencies are not subsiding in either country. The vigor for prosecuting the Global War on Terror is slowing, and, more importantly, the zeal for instigating regime change in other countries--North Korea, Iran, Syria and perhaps Venezuela--has visibly waned. The much scorned, traditional diplomatic processes shepherded by the State Department have returned. Congress is slightly less supine. Changes are evident in both substance and style as Condoleezza Rice demonstrates a newfound preference not to get out too far in front of the creaky wheels of multinational institutions that were the bane of administration activists. The administration's bark is minimized, and much of the bite seems gone.

Has superpower fatigue set in? Clearly so, to judge by the administration's own dwindling energy and its sober acknowledgment that changing the face of the world is a lot tougher than it had hoped. Of course, some degree of wear and tear is normal five years into any administration, regardless of policies. But fatigue emerges in direct proportion to the ambitiousness of the undertaking. From its early days, this administration adopted a strategic vision and peremptory posture whose implementation would prove exhausting under the best of circumstances. Administration documents and statements have regularly indicated that "we are at the beginning" of "a long war" fought globally in well over one hundred countries, probably "lasting for decades", until "victory over terrorism" is achieved. Even more, this all ties in with "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The task is Sisyphean, the enemy generalized, the goals unclear, the scope open-ended.

The taxing character of U.S. foreign policy betrays signs of morphing into "imperial overreach." And there should be no doubt that we are talking about empire here, albeit in a new form. Neoconservatives embrace the term openly, while the ultra-nationalists, headed by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, do not disavow the concept. The extent of U.S. global reach--the overseas military installations and complex base-rights agreements that often dominate our relations with small nations, the peripatetic military-command representatives who overshadow ambassadors, a broad variety of active military presences, a worldwide intelligence and strike capability--is well documented. The U.S. global "footprint"--a revealing word regularly employed by the Pentagon without irony--is massive and backed by the world's most powerful military machine in history. While different in structure and intent than the British, French or even Roman imperial presence, current U.S. ambition for projection of power is sweeping. And pursuit of this goal generates ever newer challenges that quickly contribute to strategic fatigue.

Most empires ultimately founder on economic grounds. But the short-term economic cost of the administration's policies, while high, has not yet become unbearable. Still, there are a number of longer-term indicators that do raise worries about American economic capacities on into this century: massive domestic debt, an ever greater trade imbalance, the extraordinary and broadening gap in domestic wealth between rich and poor that has no parallel in other industrial nations, the growing outsourcing of jobs, and the rise of economic competitors who are hungry for a place in the sun. But it is the immediate political cost of the expansion of empire that is fatiguing, even before the economic cost fully bites in.

"Superpowerdom" imposes the psychological burden of being on the firing line all the time, everywhere--and almost alone. The unprecedented unilateral character of U.S. exercise of global power was of course a conscious choice, reflecting a strong desire to liberate Washington from wearying, nit-picking and encumbering consultations with other world players. It bespeaks a desire to simplify the decision-making process and to clear the decks for action. Ad hoc allies were to serve primarily as diplomatic window-dressing and hopefully to pick up some of the bills. But the broader backlash to U.S. unilateralism and its resultant isolation and loneliness it has imposed on Washington were not entirely anticipated.

The administration's foreign policy has been conducted on at least three levels, all of which had an impact on its global reception: strategic, tactical and stylistic. The strategic level could be summed up by the Pentagon's use of the term "full spectrum dominance." Although it specifically refers to desired military capabilities, the choice of words leaves little doubt about its political implications as well. The United States is the globally pre-eminent power, resolved to prevent the emergence of any peer. The task is the indefinite extension and projection of U.S. power to shape the world with little resistance. Entirely predictably, ambitious regional great-power centers--the European Union, China, Russia, India and Brazil to name a few--instinctively objected to this open bid for American hegemony. And their distaste at the strategic level complicates policy acceptance at the tactical level, since U.S. tactics, however well conceived in any given situation, nonetheless contribute directly to an unwanted American strategic project. Thus the removal of Saddam Hussein, or even the Taliban, whatever the merits of each case, could not be viewed in isolation but only as key building blocks in a grand U.S. strategic agenda. Similarly, as distasteful and worrying as Tehran's regional and nuclear ambitions might be, neither Russia nor China (nor even Europe) are entirely willing to see Washington crush Iran's independent global posture in a way that leaves the United States entirely free to do its bidding in the Gulf.

Finally, at the level of style, the American dispensation with diplomatic finesse in the lead-up to Iraq and the Global War on Terror alienated many allies in nearly all continents. Washington was willing to make occasional nods to formal multilateralism as long as events closely followed the American script, as with the "coalition" in Iraq. But in the end the gratuitous alienation of many U.S. allies has exacted a measurable and ongoing political cost on U.S. capabilities, now dramatically acknowledged with Condoleezza Rice's new look at the State Department.

But as unpalatable as the uncompromising manner was to so many, it was surpassed by a much more distressing phenomenon: the emergence of a unipolar world. The world is quite unaccustomed to the phenomenon of unipolarity and is still trying to cope with its many implications: in politics, economics, energy, war and the fate of international institutions. And, more importantly, the world is now busily engaged in the process of chipping away at that unipolarity wherever it can.

The reality is that no serious player on the international scene can embrace a unipolar world. All states value options. It may well be that if there has to be any sole superpower, most might prefer it to be the United States--at least that appeared to be the case up to five years ago. But what matters is that few accept the status quo. There is genuine global concern with the overwhelming character of American power, against which, it is implied, serious resistance is futile. Major states prefer the more complicated, traditional balances among powers that limit the exercise of excessive power by any state. A multipolar world multiplies the power of smaller states, enabling them to form ad hoc coalitions capable of deterring the actions of the dominant power when need be.

There would have been diminished temptation for the Bush Administration to embrace unilateralism as a policy except that the emergence of a unipolar world made unilateralism an option. Our unrivalled power beginning in 1991 was heady brew, liberating the ideological forces of neoconservatism that could, for the first time, credibly speak of imposing an American agenda on the world order.

Yet it is an old political science cliché that a unipolar system over time invariably engenders its own counterweight. Nature abhors a sole superpower; other powers eventually bandwagon against it. So our present strategic fatigue may stem less from the immediate commitments in which we are embroiled and rather more from an unceasing necessity to maintain that sole superpower status against all comers--because that is what the very nature of unipolarity requires.

This exhaustion is perhaps most sapping at the domestic level: Americans are dying in meaningful numbers abroad; there is a lurking fear that the world is not safer, and maybe more dangerous, because of Iraq; Americans prefer to be liked abroad and are uncomfortable with their isolation; U.S. international business is unhappy; and the budget is soaring out of sight, even if its costs haven't yet touched the private pocketbook.

The intensified nationalist and neoconservative agenda within the administration, with its dramatic policy consequences, has greatly divided the nation. While the shock of 9/11 helped create a certain national "can-do" spirit of solidarity against foreign terrorists, that sentiment was rapidly depleted by Bush's broader response to 9/11. The resultant ongoing bitter domestic divisions require the administration's foreign policy architects to drag along a large and hostile domestic minority even before dealing with an unsympathetic world as well.

Abroad, the administration now faces widespread international resistance. The honeymoon of the early post-9/11 days gave way to international reconsideration of the full implications of the Global War on Terror, particularly American doctrines of unilateralism and strategic pre-emption. In the last few years, diverse countries have deployed a multiplicity of strategies and tactics designed to weaken, divert, alter, complicate, limit, delay or block the Bush agenda through a death by a thousand cuts. That opposition acts out of diverse motives, and sometimes narrowly parochial interests, but its unifying theme--usually unspoken--is resistance to nearly anything that serves to buttress a unipolar world.

Regrettably, that kind of resistance now seems nearly indiscriminate. For example, most reasonable people might have agreed that, whatever the merits of the invasion may have been, the overthrow of Saddam is now a fait accompli and that further deterioration of the Iraqi scene is in no one's interest. Nonetheless, most of the world has in fact preferred, sometimes almost petulantly, to watch the United States twist in the wind in Iraq, rather than to coordinate an international effort to stabilize a dangerously drifting situation. While the early, gratuitously abrasive American diplomacy contributed to European distancing from Iraq, the unspoken European goal has been to lessen the superpower's freedom of action and to work towards a more multipolar world. This global trend will stamp the character of global politics for a decade or more.

While Europe is more circumspect, other major powers, most notably Russia, China and even India, are more explicitly committed to ending a unipolar world. To be sure, they lack the power--economic, political, military, cultural--to create an alternative power polarity of their own, but they have acted subtly, or even not so subtly, to complicate or block many of Washington's major initiatives. They have worked with European powers to this same end on an ad hoc basis. Thus Moscow and Beijing have in one sense or another helped strengthen the ability of Iran, North Korea, Syria, Palestine's Hamas and even Venezuela deflect the broadsides of American power and impose a process-driven, compromising and consultative approach that frustrates American resolve--precisely the nightmare of the Bush unilateralists from the outset.

While no state--not even China--wishes to explicitly declare itself at odds with the United States, the common agenda, almost in principle, remains the ability to stymie Washington's will. As self-defeating, negative and unrealistic as these anti-unipolar tactics may appear to Washington, they happen to drive much of the rest of the world. Furthermore, we witness a growing body of foreign policy observers inside the United States who share that rising doubt: Is a unipolar world truly desirable, even for American interests?

Among the many risks emerging from such unfettered national power has been the growth of an unprecedented American arrogance in its diplomacy--widely discussed by most foreign states. Washington itself is still fiercely driven by the awareness that no alternative forces exist capable of offering an alternative global agenda, much less the capability to implement it. The expectation is that other countries should simply acknowledge the reality of the new world order and get on with it. This creeping arrogance of expectation contributes at a minimum to a kind of "passive aggressive" backlash across the globe.

Finally, the greatest casualty of all is the credibility of American ideology itself. For America as sole superpower, it takes only a short step to conflate our own interests with "universal" interests. Our goals--because of their global reach--seem to take on universal validity. It becomes harder, at least in our eyes, to differentiate between our national interests and the interests of the globe. By one more step of logic, perpetuation of the American imperium becomes openly justifiable in the name of universal values. But what happens when those values then become compromised on the ground?

We may perceive democracy as a universal good--and in principle it may well be. But the ideal now becomes transformed into an instrument of U.S. policies. And as a policy tool, the call for democratization in fact has become an instrument to intimidate, pressure or even overthrow regimes that resist the global American project. Yet for Americans, any resistance to democratization becomes an affront to the very principle itself, an irrational, petty act of resistance against the "forces of history." Democratization just might gain some international credence if truly applied across the board as the central principle of U.S. foreign policy. But to date, democratization has largely been a punishment visited upon our enemies, never a gift bestowed upon friends. Selectivity of application heavily undermines Washington's protestations of support for universal principle; in the eyes of others it merely becomes another superpower tool opportunistically employed for its own transient ends. And now even Washington is dismayed and hesitant as democratization fails to produce new governments ready to embrace the American project. This is especially true in the Muslim world, but also in a growing wave across Latin America as well. The administration's extremely spotty and inconsistent record on democratization has heavily damaged our case for democracy. Indeed, is democracy in fact the global ideology most conducive to a superpower's continuing maintenance of its own hegemony? The democratic process more often than not tends to empower nationalist-minded publics who resent and resist foreign hegemony. Here, the pliable dictators so valued in Washington in the Cold War may soon be on their way back as Washington's most useful instruments for running a U.S.-dominated globe.

Globalization as a "universal" value presents similar problems. History demonstrates that globalization is almost invariably the favored political value of dominant world states--and why not, for which but those states are best poised to benefit from globalization? Economists debate the upsides and downsides of globalization, and each position has its own ideological camp and true believers, but for better or for worse, globalization is now increasingly perceived as a particular American agenda designed to serve American interests. It is therefore held in suspicion by many.

The upshot is that the message, whatever its virtue, becomes fatally tainted by the messenger. George Bush could today proclaim his support for the restoration of the Islamic caliphate and he would be hooted down in Cairo, Riyadh and Islamabad because of deep suspicions now of any position adopted by the sole superpower. Such a situation over time saps our best intentions and our wisest steps taken in pursuit of foreign policy, as the audience becomes more obsessed with the messenger than the message.

Many states therefore resist the processes of democratization or globalization simply out of concern that they represent mere instruments in America's tool-kit for promoting the American agenda. Our inevitably selective record of implementation strengthens the perception of American double standards. These international reactions discourage and even embitter an American public and their policymakers who fail to understand how other peoples, except out of sheer perversity, would resist such patently commendable values.

This problem transcends the Bush Administration. The ultimate lesson is perhaps that no sole superpower can promote its "universal values" without tainting them. While not the first U.S. administration to operate in a unipolar world, this administration was the first to drive the logic of such unchecked power to its ultimate unilateral policy conclusions, thereby validating early global fears about a unipolar world.

The setbacks and disappointments for the United States--both in policy failures and their international backlash--are of course intense. Yet our national debate still revolves around only the tactical or the specific--Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Global War on Terror, the Patriot Act, even unilateralism--but there has been no serious discussion at all about the implications of a unipolar world in itself--except to celebrate it.

But by now there is not much celebration left. We are indeed confronted by strategic fatigue. We did not create all of the conditions that led to the emergence of a unipolar world; obviously the collapse of the USSR had much to do with it. But our strategic exhaustion will likely grow as more and more Lilliputians arise to tie new knots in the web of nets that hold down the superpower whose military power is ill suited to changing the existing political situation.

Of course, the United States cannot simply decide to cease being the sole global superpower. But it may have to reconsider the uncertain blessings that emerge from a unipolar world to avoid the costly and growing hostility that hinders American freedom of action as never before, especially at the hands of former friends. Indeed, our revealing national penchant for early and dogged identification of potential "threats" on the horizon that might challenge American hegemony has a strong tendency to create self-fulfilling prophecies. And maybe the emergence of additional great-power centers--dare I say some elements of "balance of power" politics?--might not be quite the disaster it appears, despite Rice's brush-off that we've been there and done that and it doesn't work. It's not as if the world is likely to rally around any of those new contenders, either--except perhaps right now, in an urgent quest for a more multipolar world.

Graham E. Fuller is a former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council at CIA. His latest book is The Future of Political Islam (2004).