How to Anger Friends and Lose Influence With People

You know, I never wanted Bolton -- I don't trust folks with such aggressive facial hair -- but I figured he'd be on a short leash, a neutered sop to the neocons. And so watching him bark, growl, and tear through the UN Reform process, killing a document we should have wanted, derailing progress on nonproliferation that we benefit from...It doesn't brighten my mornings.

But even so, I still believe him symptom rather than cause. Bolton's a boil on the ass of our foreign policy, a hacking cough and chunky phlegm afflicting our Diplomatic Corps. No fun, to be sure, but not the underlying problem, either. For that, you should look to the accelerating worthlessness of America's signature on a treaty. Examples range from the big, like our split from the ICC and Kyoto Accords, all the way down to the small, like our gleefully illegal rejection of NAFTA's rulings on softwood. This is from The Economist:

RARELY are Canadians as angry with their American neighbours as when they are squabbling over timber. Their 20-year trade dispute might have come to an end last month, when Canada won a supposedly definitive ruling under the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ordering the United States to drop its punitive duties on Canadian softwood and refund around $4 billion already collected. But the United States refused to comply and, later in the month, won support for its stance from the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Outraged, Canada has cut off talks with the United States on the issue.

American timber firms complain that Canadian rivals, who cut trees mostly from publicly owned forests, pay artificially low cutting fees that amount to an unfair subsidy. Three years ago, the United States imposed hefty duties on Canadian lumber, prompting Canada to complain under NAFTA. After several rounds of sparring, a NAFTA panel last year made a “final” decision to reject the United States' case.

However, the United States launched an “extraordinary challenge”, claiming the procedure had been flawed and that one of the panel's members had a conflict of interest. Nevertheless, NAFTA's extraordinary-challenge committee last month upheld the panel's final verdict. When the United States rejected even this ruling, rancour exploded in Canada, and members of Parliament started baying for retaliation.
[...]
Look, says the United States, the NAFTA and WTO rulings conflict, so let's just negotiate a compromise. There's no conflict, snorts Canada, because the WTO's ruling has no legal force whereas NAFTA, being a treaty between the countries, is legally enforceable. Indeed, it intends to ask the United States' own Court of International Trade to make its government obey the NAFTA ruling. Meanwhile, Canada also plans an information campaign telling other countries seeking trade deals with the United States what it has learned about the value of its signature on a treaty.

Excellent. We're such unreconstructed cheats that other countries can actually threaten us with information campaigns dedicated to exposing our bad faith. Maybe we can get a verse about that into the national anthem somewhere.

Update: Matt makes some good points on why, in addition to being bad diplomacy and worse precedent, this is really poor economics as well.