In Washington, support is growing for rewarding countries supportive of America's military policies with bilateral trade deals instead of pursuing multilateral agreements.

ECONOMIST: Geopolitics and business

We believe, moreover, that the Bush Administration's stances on such treaties reflect a clear-eyed assessment of the real limits of diplomacy with nations that do not honor their commitments, that deliberately conceal their activities so as to defeat verification and that seek to use bilateral and multilateral agreements as instruments of asymmetric warfare against nations like the United States that abide by their treaty obligations.

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What is more, where such constraints have been created (usually pursuant to agreements reached in the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, or COCOM), the German government has resisted bringing charges against violators or failed to impose meaningful penalties on those that are found guilty of export crimes.

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Moreover, all the main support measures undertaken in Central and Eastern Europe, like the Vienna Initiative, for instance, were not legally binding agreements, but based on voluntary participation within a multilateral framework.

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The benefits of a multilateral trade deal are vastly superior to those of a patchwork of bilateral and regional agreements.

ECONOMIST: World trade