to rejuvenate a global system of strong nation states that exercise full sovereignty over their borders as the preferred alternative to "global government", the two incidents help illustrate how far Washington will go in interfering with that sovereignty to further its own interests.

Last Sunday, the Central Intelligence Agency launched a laser-guided Hellfire missile from an unmanned Predator reconnaissance plane at a car travelling in a remote region in northern Yemen, instantly incinerating the vehicle and its six occupants, who reportedly included a senior operative of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group, Qaed Senyan al-Harthi.

The attack marked the first time that Washington has used an armed Predator drone to attack suspected terrorists outside of Afghanistan and in a country at peace with the United States. While Washington insisted that it had permission from the Yemeni government to carry out the attack, Yemeni officials declined to confirm that.

The second incident took place two days before the attack, when Mauritius' ambassador to the United Nations, Jagdish Koonjul, was abruptly recalled by his government after Port Louis received a complaint from Washington that Koonjul was not lining up with sufficient zeal behind Washington's latest draft resolution on weapons inspections in Iraq at the UN Security Council.

It had apparently been pointed out to the Mauritians, who export most of their textiles to the United States, that by signing a preferential trade agreement with the United States in 2000, they had agreed not to "engage in activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests". The not-so-subtle message was that if they failed to support Washington at the Security Council, their trade interests would suffer.

In many ways, neither event was terribly surprising.

The use of economic pressure by one state against another for political ends, for example, is nothing new in the history of interstate relations. On the other hand, making a trade agreement explicitly conditional on a state's surrendering control over its foreign policy on issues deemed important to a more powerful trading partner, not only narrows the definition of sovereignty; it smacks of 19th-century imperialism.

More dramatic, of course, was the attack over the Yemeni desert. The incident, which sparked outrage in Arab countries, immediately drew questions about parallels with Israel's policy of "targeted killings" of suspected Palestinian terrorists, a policy condemned even by the Bush administration.

While Yemen, like the Philippines, Georgia and Pakistan, among others, has taken up offers by the administration of US military advisers to provide intelligence and train their own troops to track down alleged terrorists, this was the first time that Washington had unilaterally killed a target far from the battlefield in Afghanistan.

Hawks in the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld exulted over the operation, which they called a foretaste of things to come. "We've got new authorities, new tools and a new willingness to do it wherever it has to be done," noted one administration source quoted by the New York Times. "This is an extraordinary change of threshold," a former intelligence officer told The Washington Post.

Indeed, just 13 years ago, a major controversy erupted when the Justice Department under former president George Bush Sr asserted a unilateral US right to arrest a criminal suspect in a foreign country without the consent of the host country. That notion, which was overruled by the State Department, seems quaint in light of Sunday's attack.

But the larger question raised by the incident is how such an attack furthers the administration's stated goal of building an international order based on strong nation-states that exercise sovereignty over their territories. The Bush government has long made clear that it opposes any system of "global governance" in which multilateral institutions could, in its view, compromise or encroach on US sovereignty.

As an alternative, the administration and its supporters have argued that world order is best secured by rejuvenating the nation-state system created by the 354-year-old Treaty of Westphalia, which ended Europe's calamitous Thirty Years War.

That treaty, which codified the principles of sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, was explicitly invoked by Bush himself in the same West Point speech last June in which he first announced his intention to maintain unequalled military superiority into the future.

Former secretary of state George Shultz, who exercises a not-inconsiderable influence on the thinking of several of the president's top aides, particularly National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, first argued last January that the war on terror's main aim should be to "revitalize" the nation state's authority, which had been undermined by globalization.

That aim has been explicitly endorsed numerous times by administration officials to justify policies that rejected multilateral solutions to problems.

In announcing Washington's renunciation of the Rome Statute to create the International Criminal Court, for example, US ambassador for war crimes issues Pierre Prosper argued that much more emphasis should be put on building national judicial systems capable of handling crimes against humanity and genocide.

Similarly, when the United Nations and the European Union and even the US-installed Afghan government called for expanding the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan beyond Kabul, Washington argued that such a step would only prolong the government's dependence on the world body. Better, it said, to focus on building the country's own army, however long that might take.

However appealing the notions of restoring sovereignty and state responsibility may be from a theoretical point of view, they bear little relation to the way in which the United States is pursuing its war on terrorism.

On the contrary, sovereignty - the right and power of the nation state to regulate its internal affairs and external relations without foreign dictation - is clearly being subordinated to the will of the United States.

"Complete sovereignty for us; complete intervention for everyone else," said French foreign-policy expert Pierre Hassner about the administration's world view several months ago. "This is typical of empire."

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