writing in the German weekly Die Zeit, Theo Sommer compared Mr. Bush's style to that of Andrei Gromyko, the longtime Soviet foreign minister known as "Mr. Nyet."
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"The president says 'no,' not grimly, but with a smile. Yet he shows his teeth in doing so," Mr. Sommer wrote. "He does not concede, he does not give up, he does not surrender. He offers everyone consultations, partners and rivals alike; he promises to keep in touch; that is why, he assures everyone, you cannot talk about an American go-it-alone attitude. Yet the conversations are aimed at conversion, not compromise."
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In China, the president's actions have served to cement in the public mind their government's characterization of the United States as hegemonic. The word, featured frequently in state newspaper headlines, is among the first adjectives that come to mind for everyone.
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"After Bush came into power, the most noteworthy aspect of his administration's foreign policy is unilateralism," Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Qinghua University, wrote last week in the People's Daily. "It neither negotiates with the principal countries whose interests are involved nor exchanges views with its allies on international affairs." WASHINGTON In his first six months in office, President George W. Bush has abandoned a treaty on fighting global warming, rejected protocols enforcing a ban on germ warfare, demanded amendments to an accord on illegal sales of small arms, threatened to skip an international conference on racism and vowed to withdraw from a landmark pact limiting ballistic missile defenses.
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The reaction from Berlin to Beijing has been one of concern that an American president who walks away from so many treaties might be one who wants to walk away from the world - or, at the least, one who will demand that the world live by terms dictated by America.
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Mr. Bush's advisers deny that he is unilateralist or isolationist, or that his administration has a blanket disdain for group action in conducting world affairs. They simply view treaties as a tool from the age of steam whose usefulness this far into the nuclear era will be judged one issue at a time, one negotiation at a time, one summit meeting at a time.
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"What you're going to get from this administration is 'à la carte multilateralism,'" said Richard Haass, the State Department's director of policy planning, coining a name for administration strategy. "We'll look at each agreement and make a decision, rather than come out with a broad-based approach."
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Thus far, the administration has mostly displayed unanimity in formulating this international policy, with only a few differences so pronounced as to become public. One of them concerns the global warming treaty. While Secretary of State Colin Powell told foreign leaders earlier this month that the United States would have a counterproposal to the Kyoto accord in time for an October conference in Morocco, Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, said over the weekend that the administration had no such deadline.
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In general, Mr. Bush and his most senior advisers say that they are applying what they see as a tough-minded assessment of treaties case by case based on America's interests.
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President Bill Clinton, in contrast, embraced arms control negotiations. He sent envoys to Moscow to seek a bargain that would defend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty by amending it, coupled with a new round of talks on strategic arms reductions. He also signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and sent it to the Senate, where it languishes.
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It should be noted, however, that Mr. Bush is criticized for rejecting two agreements that even Mr. Clinton did not wholeheartedly advocate: the international ban on land mines and an accord establishing a permanent International Criminal Court.
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Under Mr. Bush, there will be no rush to lengthy negotiations simply on the premise that talk is good. Treaties, Mr. Bush and his advisers say, will be adopted when they clearly carve U.S. interests in stone. In some areas of arms control, the administration believes that treaties bind only the honest but give cover to the cheat. And on nuclear arms control in particular, treaties move too slowly to manage a dynamic, but still uncertain, relationship with Russia at a time when historic reductions in arsenals are conceivable, officials say.
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"You'll not find a more internationalist administration than this administration," Ms. Rice said Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation." She criticized policies under which "internationalism somehow becomes defined as signing on to bad treaties just to say that you've signed a treaty."
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But by knocking off several of the hard-earned, high-profile treaties on arms control and the environment, Mr. Bush has been subjected to outrage from some of America's closest friends - who wonder what will replace a world ordered by treaties - as well as its adversaries who see arrogance in Mr. Bush's actions.
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The British, for example, consider themselves America's greatest friends in Europe and often find themselves defending United States behavior to skeptical continentals. But their task has been complicated by what many perceive as U.S. unilateralism and finger-in-the-eye confrontation in place of diplomacy.
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Any missile shield will have to use British radar and tracking facilities, and Labor politicians have already threatened Prime Minister Tony Blair with the kinds of protests that were widespread in Britain during the years when U.S. missiles were based there. As for the environment, Britain is very green politically, and the press denounced Mr. Bush after he rejected the Kyoto agreement on global warming.
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There was a notable change in feeling across Europe last week, after the Group of Eight conference in Genoa, that Mr. Bush was now interested in reconciliation with leaders who had been put off by some of his early decisions.
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Even so, writing in the German weekly Die Zeit, Theo Sommer compared Mr. Bush's style to that of Andrei Gromyko, the longtime Soviet foreign minister known as "Mr. Nyet."
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"The president says 'no,' not grimly, but with a smile. Yet he shows his teeth in doing so," Mr. Sommer wrote. "He does not concede, he does not give up, he does not surrender. He offers everyone consultations, partners and rivals alike; he promises to keep in touch; that is why, he assures everyone, you cannot talk about an American go-it-alone attitude. Yet the conversations are aimed at conversion, not compromise."
.
In China, the president's actions have served to cement in the public mind their government's characterization of the United States as hegemonic. The word, featured frequently in state newspaper headlines, is among the first adjectives that come to mind for everyone.
.
"After Bush came into power, the most noteworthy aspect of his administration's foreign policy is unilateralism," Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Qinghua University, wrote last week in the People's Daily. "It neither negotiates with the principal countries whose interests are involved nor exchanges views with its allies on international affairs." |
