Washington ? And now, a few words from the man who best personifies the edgy quality of life in the dawn of the 21st century. My candidate for Mr. Zeitgeist is speaking about the United Nations:

My country “will not at any price accept that a collection of states more or less totalitarian and professional at dictatorship, a collection of new states more or less responsible, more or less consistent, dictate its law to us. The United Nations is a derisory tribune for sensational speech-making, overbidding and the worst kind of threat-making.”

Nope. That’s not George W. Bush saying what he would if he could. It was Charles de Gaulle four decades ago, enraged at efforts at the United Nations to interfere with France’s “sovereign” colonial policies.

But the excerpt makes my point: It is only a small stretch to look at Bush and perhaps British Prime Minister Tony Blair as the last Gaullists of world leadership, however inadvertent or unacceptable the comparison may be for them and for a French nation that will no doubt be horrified by the notion.

Dead 32 years, de Gaulle nonetheless seems present — and in unconscious political vogue — in Washington, London, Berlin and elsewhere in an era when many nation-states are reassessing their headlong rush down the paths of globalization. Increasingly they return to national strength and national glory as the protectors of all that is good and valuable. That is the purest definition of Gaullism I can devise.

For better and for worse, most key international transactions today have become bilateral affairs. Don Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and France’s Foreign Ministry work separately but equally industriously to bypass NATO and enlist allies individually. The United States signs bilateral commercial accords that suggest a disinterest in stumbling global trade talks. From trade to defense, the world is witnessing a renationalization of strategy and tactics in important areas.

Would this have happened if 19 Arab fanatics had not flown jetliners into Manhattan skyscrapers and the Pentagon to provoke the war on global terror? Mais oui, I can hear the general of all the French saying in exasperation. You Anglo-Americans never listen and never pay attention to history’s big trends. (Or to history at all, he would probably mutter.)

Supersized Gaullist attitudes on nationalism seem to come naturally to Texans. Consider this as well: De Gaulle once described his role as a national psychiatrist, dealing with France’s traumas of defeat in World War II and loss of a colonial empire. Bush post-9-11 has been cast in the same psychically healing role, if on a different scale.

Moreover, the needs of the war on global terrorism have at least initially amplified and accelerated the decline in importance of international and regional organizations that de Gaulle derided. National police and intelligence exchanges between Washington and Paris — supremely bilateral matters — have actually improved while the diplomats argued over Iraq and multipolarity.

In London, Blair has built his opposition to a federal constitution for the expanding European Union around de Gaulle’s phrase describing a Europe that is run by its national governments — “a Europe of countries” — and not run by Brussels. Blair manifests in his leadership style de Gaulle’s stubbornness, confidence in his own world vision and willingness to lecture his country on its shortcomings, even at his own political peril.

Paradoxically, it is in Paris that Gaullism seems in decline as an operational doctrine today. President Jacques Chirac’s foreign policy was recently described by the daily Le Monde as “dedicated to multilateralism, the defense of the United Nations, especially against the unilateral use of force … and constructing a multipolar world in which Europe can hold its own with the United States.” That’s right — Europe, not France.

De Gaulle’s biographer, Jean Lacouture, points up the contrast through an imaginary dialogue between de Gaulle and Chirac published in the summer issue of the French quarterly le debat.

You did well to oppose American hegemony and the ill-conceived “crusade” against Iraq, de Gaulle says to Chirac, but you missed an essential point: “When I withdrew from the integrated military command of NATO in 1966, I made a point of not breaking with the alliance itself.” In Lacouture’s text, de Gaulle suggests that each time he underlined his prickly determination to act independently, he consciously reinforced cooperation with Washington on other issues. He found ways to underscore his commitment to the alliance of free countries facing Soviet totalitarianism.

“An audacious strategy must rely on prudent tactics,” de Gaulle’s ghost says. Good advice from beyond the tomb to the hyperactive multilateralists in Paris and the neo-Gaullists of Washington as they sort out a topsy-turvy relationship desperately in need of equilibrium.