Granted, the initial ambition of the Kyoto Protocol for slashing the carbon dioxide emissions suspected in global warming has been downsized. For example, Russia and Japan sought and gained substantial credit toward their emissions-cuts targets for the ability of their forests to absorb carbon dioxide. Yet for all that, the Marrakech implementation talks on the climate treaty can only be understood as a critical vindication for the Kyoto vision, both as ecology and governance.

On the environmental front, the completion of the treaty in Morocco represented an important moment in industrial history, as Andrew Revkin observed in The New York Times recently. After a century of fossil fuel burning with little regard for consequences, the Kyoto Protocol as prepared for ratification in Morocco tenders the first global mechanism for limiting the harm of greenhouse emissions, with its target of rolling back industrial emissions to 5 percent below their 1990 level by 2012. As such the new document represents the strongest, most far-reaching environmental treaty that's ever been drafted. That is immensely gratifying.

Yet it is not the ecological side of the treaty that is most heartening just now. What is even more compelling in the troubled, post-September 11 climate is the extent to which Marrakech represents a victory of a persevering, hard-won internationalism. At a time of challenge world wide, Morocco reasserts the potential of internationalist cooperation to resolve fundamental problems. In this regard, the agreement of more than 160 participating countries to an intricate yet coherent system for measuring emissions, cutting them and enforcing discipline pulls off an important labor of repair for a world system that has seemed embattled of late. Marrakech strengthens the claim of negotiation in the wake of the terrorist insurgency manifested on September 11. It also offsets with multilateral engagement the unilateralist impulse of the Bush Administration in the United States before September 11.

And indeed, the perseverance of the key nations toward concord despite the American rejection of Kyoto in March looks even more important since it may ultimately permit the Americans' entrance into the conclave. The U.S., of course, remains the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But with the U.S. on the sidelines, the European Union led the way toward a solid, balanced regime through a process that actually seems to have managed to improve relations with the recalcitrant Americans. Paula Dobriansky, the under secretary of state for global affairs, pronounced the U.S. committed to solving the greenhouse problem. Meanwhile, it could be that completion of the "rule book" for Kyoto may make it easier for the Bush Administration to reconsider its irresponsible withdrawal from the negotiations. Perhaps in this regard seeing precisely what participation would involve will move Bush to join up at a time he has been promoting world unanimity against terrorism. That an American idea in gas emissions cuts help.

In this way, the results at Marrakech are auspicious as much for the process by which they came together as for any slowing of global warming they may achieve. They show that the world and its atmosphere can be repaired through patient engagement, and that multilaterism still works. It is a satisfying result.