For the past two centuries, U.S. presidents have oscillated between warning the world that if you mess with America’s interests we will come and get you, and a profound isolationism. Both the instinct to save the world and to withdraw from it grow out of the underlying belief that the United States is a special nation that is never to be confused with the run-of-the-mill countries of this planet.
How else, at a time when the U.S. has been building a global coalition against terrorism, can we explain the stunning slap at America’s allies and de facto partners, that came with George W. Bush’s announcement that the U.S. is jettisoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty? Withdrawing from the ABM Treaty allows the U.S. to test and deploy an anti-missile defence system. Europe, Russia, China (and Canada some days of the week), have warned that this could trigger a dangerous new global arms race.
The ABM announcement demolishes the conventional wisdom that the terror attacks of September 11 taught the Bush administration that unilateralism is not the way to go for the United States. Prior to September 11, George W. Bush and his advisors steered clear of multilateral agreements. Since that dark day, according to the accepted view, the Bush administration has done a U-turn, devoting enormous energy to bringing other nations on side. Almost on a daily basis, the President has been seen in Oval Office photo-ops with foreign leaders.
Now it is undeniable that since September 11, the Bush administration has been pursuing a bold new unilateralist strategy. The world has had the optics of multilateralism without the substance.
It is true that in a bow to internationalism, the Bush administration pressed the U.S. Congress to pay long-overdue American contributions to the UN and called on the U.S. Senate to ratify two UN conventions that deal specifically with terrorism. But the White House remains adamantly opposed to the Kyoto environmental accord, the nuclear test ban treaty, the land mines treaty, an international accord to limit the world’s trade in small arms, the biological warfare protocol, and the proposed International Criminal Court.
In his war on terrorism, George W. Bush has enunciated two key principles as the cornerstone of his approach. The first, as he declared in a speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, is that "every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." In Bush’s second principle, the U.S. claims for itself the right to take military action against any country that harbours terrorists. There is nothing multilateralist about this U.S. stance. The United States is proclaiming that it will act unilaterally on its agenda and woe be it to any country that is not on side.
The anti-terrorist coalition has been constructed in a similar spirit. The U.S. is using a hub and spoke system to coordinate its relations with members of the coalition. This means, for instance, that the Americans tell Defence Minister Art Eggleton what role they want Canada to play in the campaign. The other coalition members get the same treatment. There is no collective decision making within the coalition, let alone accountability to the UN. Insisting on complete operational control over the war, Washington hands out the assignments.
The goals of the coalition are also conceived in Washington. The great debate at the moment is whether to launch an assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq once the campaign in Afghanistan is concluded. But that debate is being conducted, not within the coalition, but inside the Bush administration itself. For weeks, Bush’s top advisors have been divided about whether an attack on Iraq should be next. Hard liners, including Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, want to seize the present moment for a march on Baghdad, while others such as Secretary of State Colin Powell are less enthusiastic. Coalition members have to wait and watch what the U.S. will do next, but the decision will be made in the White House.
The U.S. response to the tragedy was what you would expect from any nation that has been attacked out of a clear blue sky. At the same time, the response has been uniquely American.
The Bush administration has rested its case for military action on the right of the United States to self-defence----the right of a country that has been violated to strike out at the perpetrators even if they are half a world away. In theory, the same rationale could be used by any nation that has been brutally assaulted. In practice, the United States is the only nation that has the means to mount a military campaign in any region of the world. The power to do this rests on the fact that the U.S. spends as much on its military as the next eight nations combined.
In 1982, Britain sent its navy to the south Atlantic to repel the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina. But that mission could only be carried out with the tacit permission of the U.S. Without such American sanction, no country could mount any military operation in a region remote from its home territory. And even with such sanction, only a handful of countries could consider undertaking such an operation. In reality, the doctrine of self-defence, proclaimed by American leaders as though it is universal, is a right that belongs to the USA alone. The Bush administration is actually proclaiming the right of the global hegemonic power to intervene under its own flag anywhere in the world when its interests are threatened.
That is not to say that the U.S. does not pay heed to the power of other nations. In the current crisis, the Bush administration has paid special attention to Russia and China, the countries with the second and third largest military budgets. Washington has found common ground with Moscow and Beijing in the struggles of all three countries against Islamic fundamentalism. Now though, the diplomatic gains made with both Russia and China could be jeopardized with the abrogation of the ABM Treaty.
America is a new kind of global power. While profoundly shaping the fate of every person in the world, the U.S. still wants to build walls around itself so it can bask in splendid isolation. A system of global or regional collective security can only work when nations submit to collective decision making. That is exactly what the unilateralist United States is not prepared to countenance for itself.
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