Something must be wrong with the way the United States exercises its power. Too many people, in too many countries, see U.S. foreign policy as lacking universal principles that resonate with the rest of the world. It seems to them that an America projecting its power in pursuit of its own interests will only end up destabilizing a globalizing world.

Certainly, the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism has shown what can be achieved by an organized multilateral effort to combat a global problem. The world, including Japan, has been impressed by America's show of high-tech military power in Afghanistan.

The war against terrorism, however, is one of very few recent instances in which the United States has worked together with a sizable number of other countries. It has, for example, pulled out of the Kyoto protocol on climate change, boycotted a meeting to put the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty into effect and spurned a draft agreement to update the Biological Weapons Convention.

There is a frustratingly long list of global problems crying out for solution. It includes chronic poverty in developing countries and two issues that are of particular concern to Japanese: environmental pollution and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In these and other areas, effective U.S. leadership — underpinned by universal principles of democracy, human rights and environmental protection — is badly needed.

The administration of President George W. Bush has taken to unilateral thinking on these world issues. This represents more than just an about-face in America's basic foreign policy. In discontinuing Washington's principal international commitments, the Bush administration has behaved the way only dictatorial states usually do.

This has caused many nations to lose confidence in Washington. Notable in this connection are the results of a 24-nation poll conducted late last year by the International Herald Tribune with the Pew Research Center: U.S. policy and action was given as the main cause of international terrorism by 18 percent of Americans vs. 58 percent of foreigners. The United States should resume its exploration of multilateral or multinational ways to cope with global problems.

Yutaka Mataebara is editor in chief of the Japan Times, a national English-language daily newspaper.