US foreign policy, open and pragmatic, is now the polar opposite of what it was two months ago

I got up soon after six last Monday morning and peeked out of my front window.

Perhaps it was my years in Belfast, but something immediately made my eyes fasten on to a large, enclosed truck parked opposite. What was a vehicle like that doing at night in the heart of Georgetown? Not long afterwards, my doorbell rang: it turned out to be a plumber I had forgotten about, who had arrived early but did not want to disturb the household.

That little vignette of life in still-leafy Washington made me realise just how contagious the current jitteriness here is; what is most troubling is that the more senior you go in terms of contacts and conversations, the more people here are full of real fear and foreboding, even certainty, that the next bio-, chemical, nuclear or old-fashioned bombing attack will strike Washington very soon. Every time they go south of the Potomac, Washingtonians still see a huge, crumbling, burned-out gap in the edifice of the Pentagon - an all too visible reminder of a humiliating and enraging tragedy.

I nevertheless decided to take the (public) advice of the White House and go out to a restaurant, a supposedly potent symbol of Americans resisting both terrorism and the recession (figures out last Tuesday suggest that 80,000 will soon have lost their jobs as a direct result of 11 September alone). Of the 15 or so tables at the French bistro on Wisconsin Avenue, only two others were occupied: one by four elderly men and women, the other by three men.

"The problem with the Taliban . . ." one of the elderly men was saying. "And then you've got to remember Pakistan, too." One of the younger men asked his colleagues earnestly: "What's [Ariel] Sharon going to do?" Americans are belatedly discovering that there is an outside world that can and does affect them. Indeed, the turnaround in US foreign policy has been quite staggering. In the six days following 5 November, President Bush was due to have talks with no fewer than 19 separate overseas leaders - not just with Tony Blair, glamorously jetting in on Concorde. Last Tuesday, it was the turn of Jacques Chirac to tower magisterially over Bush at the rostrum, as Bush said something that would have been quite unbelievable two months ago: "We've got to make sure there's a post-Taliban government [in Afghanistan] that reflects the values of our countries." Later, Bush also saw the Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, and the day before he had seen the Algerian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

What is so striking about all this is not just that the US, by necessity, is suddenly engulfed in the kind of furious diplomacy it abhorred and thought tedious and unnecessary as recently as two months ago; the frantic reshuffling of the pack means that scores of other countries are now jostling to catch the favoured eye of the world's only superpower, and secure favourable deals. In his first eight, balmy months in office, Bush was happily tearing up the Kyoto Protocol, the 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty and Biological Weapons Convention, and so on; simultaneously, he was talking about a private nuclear missile defence shield for the US. If the rest of the world didn't like any of that, the message went, it could simply get lost.

But now it is not only Bush who is constantly in talks with the leaders of other countries: in the space of a long weekend, Donald Rumsfeld went to Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and India. Colin Powell pops up on Egyptian television. General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff - of all people - appears on al-Jazeera television. And Christopher Ross, former US ambassador to Syria and one of the few top people around Washington who speaks Arabic, is brought in to give interviews to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.

Pass that pesky little free-trade pact with Jordan that the Senate had blocked for more than a year? Sure, so long as those Jordanian guys are on our side.

The former Senate majority leader and Ulster peacebroker George Mitchell puts it succinctly: "He [Bush] has simply discarded almost everything he's said on foreign policy prior to 11 September. What he said in his campaign doesn't apply any more . . . We clearly have to engage in the process of . . . nation-building." In the election campaign, the very concept of nation-building was anathema to Bush, and a theme used to hammer Al Gore. Now, a star from the Bush Sr administration, Richard Haass, has been appointed "policy co-ordinator" for a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

While the Bush administration frantically forges agreements with countries few had heard of only weeks ago, so other countries rush to seize the opportunities to extract favours from the US. Together, they strive to conjure up a virtual-reality world. Russia, seeking to be a world player again after a decade of humiliating reversals, contrives to make Washington overlook its nasty little war in Chechnya, on the grounds that poor Chechnya is riddled with al-Qaeda. Ethiopia, wanting control over neigbouring territory, paints neighbouring Somalia as an anarchic little country still run by warlords and equally riddled with al-Qaeda. These dirty agendas are willingly accepted by Washington in its new, multilateral pragmatism.

In the words of Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday, the world is changing in ways not even yet known. Countries are reassessing their relationships with one another. But there is one aspect that has not changed since 11 September: America is still calling the shots.

When Bush and Chirac appeared in front of the press on Tuesday, there was a revealing, semi-private little exchange between the two men: "You want one more question from the French press?" Bush asked Chirac, after a laborious translation from English into French. The laid-back Chirac responded in perfect English: "You're the boss." The same day, Bush repeated: "You're either with us or against us in this fight against terror", adding that he would tell this to the UN General Assembly later in the week. In other words, though allegiances may have changed and international packs reshuffled, it is still the US that has the power and might to dictate to all other countries what the anti-terrorist policies will be - and those countries can like it or lump it.

So far, most countries have chosen to like it, rather than face the consequences of lumping it. "A coalition partner must do more than just express sympathy," Bush said alongside Chirac. "A coalition partner must perform." And then he added a grim warning for non-performers: "Over time, it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity." To whom and for what? He did not elaborate. It was left to Tony Blair, appearing on CNN later that night, to chime in with unconditional cheerleading from Britain. "He [Bush] is someone it's been a real pleasure to work with," Blair told Larry King. Then, later: "But, I mean, you know, for those of us in positions of leadership, I think we just [sic] got to explain patiently to people, 'Yes, it can take time, but it's necessary to do'."

And so the public pronouncements and the private fear continue to coexist here so uneasily and so surreally. By Monday night, my plumber had driven his white truck away. But an aural carpet-bombing persists for the good citizens of Washington: police sirens scream their alarms nearby and in the distance, and those patrolling F-16s continue to rumble overhead, 24 hours a day.

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