Bush Fear of `Rogue' States is Laughable
by Richard Gwyn
YOU ARE the dictator of Lower Volta and you've been able to acquire an entire, nuclear-tipped intercontinental missile from one of the ex-Soviet Asian republics by smuggling out diamonds, despite the sanctions imposed by the United Nations to deter you from repeating the ethnic cleansing that originally brought you to power.
The U.N. is only an irritant, though. Your real object of anger is the United States, which insisted on the sanctions despite Russian and Chinese concerns about ``intervention with state sovereignty.''
So you set up your missile in the jungle and get your scientists to aim it at Washington. Then you push the button.
About 20 minutes later, half of Washington is devastated.
About 15 minutes after that, all of Lower Volta, including you, disappears from the map.
Substitute so-called ``rogue states'' like North Korea or Libya or Syria or Iran or Iraq for this mythical Lower Volta and you have the entire intellectual and geopolitical justification for the National Missile Defence (NMD) system that President George W. Bush intends to build to protect himself and Americans and the world.
It's absurd. It's laughable. It's surreal. Why would the leader of any of these backward, near-bankrupt, states commit suicide, even if, as is highly improbable, any of them could ever actually lob a missile across the Atlantic or Pacific?
Yet Bush and his highly praised cabinet team (they are capable; they are experienced) all take this seriously. The only question about NMD, they insist, is not whether, but when.
The most obvious difference between Bush's foreign policy and that of Bill Clinton is that it won't be anything like as activist and idealistic. Secretary of State Colin Powell has called for a ``humble'' foreign policy, meaning wariness about humanitarian interventions, as in Bosnia, and far greater wariness about attempts at ``nation-building,'' as in Haiti and Kosovo. In parallel, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has made it clear that he doesn't believe in lecturing others - the Japanese, specifically - about their economic policies, preferring to leave it to market forces to get everything sorted out.
The most important difference, though, may be that under Bush, the U.S. will act unilaterally. It will do what it wants. It will behave more like an imperial power (even if an oddly unambitious one) than the leader of an alliance.
The NMD is the case example. No one else likes it or wants the U.S to have it (for the sake of international treaties, for the sake of avoiding an arms race), whether in all the capitals of Europe, or in Ottawa, or in Moscow or Beijing.
It's going to happen anyway - or will if it actually works.
Almost as good an example is the Bush team's attitude to the 60,000-strong rapid reaction force that the European Union plans to build so it could play an active part in another Kosovo.
In Brussels a week ago, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech to a NATO meeting in which he managed, first, never to mention the phrase European Union, then to infuriate the Europeans all over again by telling them not to engage in ``confusing duplication'' or ``perturbing the transatlantic link.'' In other words, stay in step with the U.S.-run NATO or risk the U.S. pulling out of Europe.
It's not certain that Bush's foreign policy will be less activist than Clinton's. That's Bush's personal style and attitude - and Powell's.
Important advisers think otherwise, though. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defence, has argued that the U.S. should use its military might to discourage potential contenders. Neo-conservative commentator and former White House aide William Kristol has written in Foreign Affairs magazine that ``American hegemony must be actively maintained.''
The reason for citing this potential for American aggressivity under Bush is that, if it happens, it will happen unilaterally and so be much more violent.
Here, Bush's model isn't his father, who, during the Gulf War, built up a vast alliance to provide political and diplomatic and financial support for his military counterattack against Saddam Hussein. Instead, he's gone one president further back - to Ronald Reagan.
Among Republicans, it's an article of faith that Reagan won the Cold War alone, by threatening to bankrupt the Soviet Union with his Star Wars anti-missile defence system.
It's not a coincidence that another missile defence system is the centrepiece of Bush's national security policy. Nor is it a coincidence that, just like Reagan, he intends to keep America secure his way, no matter what anyone else thinks or wants. Keep your seat belts buckled.
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