After his Wednesday speech to The Canadian Press in Toronto, in which the prime minister-in-waiting sketched out his thinking on Canadian foreign policy post-Iraq, perhaps a Martin skeptic should be the one to say: Here was vision.

The speech was apparently several months in the making. But what made it historic was not its willingness to overturn several decades of Liberal orthodoxy, but the sure grasp it showed of how the world has changed these last few months. Or perhaps, how the true state of the world was at last revealed.

The pieces of that world are separately familiar; it is how they fit together that is poorly understood. The first is the emergence, post- Cold War, of a unipolar world, a Pax Americana. The second is the emergence, post-Sept. 11, of an unprecedented security threat, most particularly to the United States, but to all the free and democratic countries. And the third, post-Iraq, is the utter unsuitability, if not irrelevance, of the institutions that had managed relations between states during the Cold War.

The first of these, the United Nations, was always largely irrelevant.

How could it be otherwise, with every state having the same vote, large or small, democracy or dictatorship -- and France given a veto? The second, NATO, only latterly proved to have run out of raisons d'etre.

Regardless, the failure of either body to face up to the Iraqi challenge was a watershed. Post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11, the United States felt neither obliged nor inclined to give way to French barracking. In future, it will not even pretend to do so. Whatever one's view of this, it is a fact.

So the first significant point to be gleaned from Mr. Martin's speech is that he gets this. And the second is that he accepts it. On both counts, this marks a fundamental break with the Liberal government of which he was once a part.

Mr. Martin did not, unlike his erstwhile colleagues, blame the United States for the failure of diplomacy that preceded the Iraq campaign. He blamed the system, "the mechanisms by which nations collectively make decisions on problems that affect us all." After Sept. 11, he said, "it became manifestly clear that the rules of the game had changed forever. But while the rules have changed, the players haven't made the necessary adjustments." Where the Chretien government remains wedded to the concepts and instruments on which the 20th-century world order were built -- deterrence, sovereignty, the UN -- Mr. Martin notes that "the building blocks of world policy are being transformed." Where the government, in keeping with traditional Foreign Affairs doctrine, chanted multilateralist dogma to the end -- even after multilateralism had plainly failed, even at the cost of alienating our allies, even if it left us standing for nothing but multilateralism -- Mr. Martin proposes a foreign policy rooted in "our deepest values." Multilateralism, he was bold enough to say, is "a means not an end." And so where the government cannot think beyond the United Nations, Mr. Martin argues we should begin to imagine new forums for international co-operation, more suited to the world described above.

"The absence of consensus in the UN should not condemn us to inaction," he said. "In appropriate circumstances, and when consistent with our values, we should be prepared to use the means necessary to achieve our international goals." Mr. Martin suggested the G20 as a model. Perhaps. But whatever evolves -- broader than NATO, less corrupt than the UN -- will be built around the United States. Mr. Martin evidently has no interest in indulging French fantasies of "multipolarity." Neither does he see the United States as a threat, least of all to Canada. Rather, he sees our relationship with the world's only superpower as a priceless asset. That is, it can be, once it is restored.

And this, I think, is the most significant part of Mr. Martin's speech.

There were, to be sure, a raft of worthy proposals for rebuilding the bilateral relationship: a Cabinet committee on Canada-U.S. relations, that sort of thing. But the key to understanding Canada's future foreign policy role is not to see bilateral and multilateral issues as separate. In a post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 world, they are much the same thing.

How we get along with the Americans will be less about the border between us -- still less about silly insults hurled by infantile MPs -- than about what we can contribute to global security: "We will be judged not simply by how we fight terrorism at home but how we engage the fight around the world." That means, as he said, a beefed up military force ("the current gap between expectations and our military capacity ... affects our international credibility"). It means participation on joint security projects, such as missile defence. Most of all, it means establishing ourselves as dependable allies, possessed of good judgment, strong values, and a sound grasp of international affairs. We were known for that once. Perhaps we may be again.