The United States is taking an increasingly hard-nosed line on global treaties. This new approach could spell trouble. Without politically agreed rules, globalisation will be subject to the laws of the jungle.

The US wants to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. It will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. It opposes a UN treaty on the small arms trade.

Despite President Clinton's insistence that Slobodan Milosevic stand trial for war crimes, his own administration refused to ratify the International Criminal Court, which would try war criminals generally, whether their side had lost a war or not.

It is prepared, even without UN sanction, to infringe the sovereignty of other nation states (e.g. Serbia) to protect human rights and prevent ethnic cleansing but will not subject its own citizens to an international court. It also deplores global terrorism, arms smuggling, and the activities of rogue states. It agreed that climate change was a global problem to which there must be a global solution, but it could not accept the only attainable solution on the table - the Kyoto protocol.

This week, the US took a further step back from global rules when the Bush administration withdrew from negotiations on a protocol to enforce the UN biological weapons convention of 1972.

There is thus a deepening contradiction at the heart of American world leadership. The United States has difficulties taking steps towards agreed rules for global governance but wants, at the same time, to open up global markets for business.

The US seems to have difficulty reconciling itself to the fact that free and open global markets are impossible unless there are global rules to govern the use of those markets.

In ways, the problem caused by the US rejection of the biological weapon protocol is more alarming than the others, because the threat of biological weapons is so horrifying.

The pre-existing natural proliferation of diseases like AIDS and TB is already a cause of deep public unease. The thought of diseases being developed and used as a weapon of war is even more terrifying.

Why did a Republican president of the United States take this stand? After all, it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who led the world in 1969 in unconditionally renouncing all methods of biological warfare. His administration went on to negotiate the 1972 United Nations global ban on biological weapons which was endorsed unanimously by the US Senate under President Ford.

This included a ban on possessing all agents or toxins "that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purpose". In short, unless a substance or organism has a demonstrably peaceful purpose, even its possession is banned. This provision may affect unlimited experimentation in genetic modification, which may explain United States concerns.

The United States has argued that the new protocol would mean rogue states will adopt the Iraqi precedent of obstructing the inspections under the protocol, while US facilities would be open to inspection, espionage and theft of commercial secrets. Supporters of the protocol counter this argument by pointing out that there are commercial confidentiality clauses in the protocol and that states retain the right to deny access to certain areas. The Canadian Foreign Minister said the protocol has "met the requirements of commercial confidentiality". The European pharmaceutical industry agrees.

The US says it is developing alternative ideas to control the spread of biological weapons and associated substances, but it has not tabled these yet. It is also questioning the philosophy of inspections on the ground that many or most toxins have a "dual use" i.e. they could be used in weapons or for a peaceful purpose. Again the US has proposed no alternatives to inspection.

It is important, from an Irish point of view, that these differences be sorted out quickly. The United States pharmaceutical industry represents 40 per cent of the world's production. It is a major investor in Ireland. As biotechnology is developing very rapidly, we need an agreed global approach to determining what substances can be used in weapons and how, when, and by whom they can be controlled.

The Irish Government should take a very strong line in insisting the current differences between the United States and the rest of the world are sorted out before November, when a comprehensive review of the UN Biological Weapons convention is to take place.

Some 225 years ago, the United States pioneered the concept of democracy under the rule of law at the level of the nation state. It should now recognise that the success of globalisation requires the strenuous application, at global level, of the same principle of democracy under the rule of law.

John Bruton is a Fine Gael TD for Meath and a former Taoiseach