2. Bilateral relations: refers to the one-to-one relationship between two countries;
3. Multilateral relations: Generally speaking, it refers to the relations between many countries participating in the same international organization or activity.
Extended data:
Even during the Cold War, although multilateralism dominated foreign policy, traditional unilateralism based on isolationism still influenced American foreign policy from time to time.
1. During the Korean War, the United States used the United Nations to form a United Nations army to fight in the DPRK. Its essence is entirely for its own strategic interests in the Far East, not to achieve the lofty goal of the United Nations, a multilateral international cooperation organization-maintaining world peace.
2. In the cold war, the United States often put multilateralism and multilateral cooperation aside for its own interests, even just for ideological struggle, and acted unilaterally at will, leading to international turmoil.
In order to contain communism in an all-round way, the United States launched the Vietnam War alone in 1960s, which not only caused another hot war in the Cold War, but also greatly affected multilateral cooperation with its allies.
4. Even in the economic field, although the United States is an advocate of the post-war global multilateral trading system, since the disintegration of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the United States has often used domestic legislation to protect its trade interests, among which 1974 and 1988 trade laws have a very strong color of unilateral protectionism.
5. 1988 The Comprehensive Trade and Competition Law requires the President of the United States to take unilateral retaliatory measures against "unfair trade" of foreign countries and unilateral sanctions against countries that infringe "American intellectual property rights".
Baidu encyclopedia-unilateralism
Baidu Encyclopedia-Bilateral Relations