America alone
A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL
8/4/2002
IF THERE WAS one unmistakable lesson to be learned from the atrocities of Sept. 11, it was that the United States, despite its unmatched military and economic power, cannot afford the delusion of believing it does not need the good will of other countries, other peoples.
Too often, President Bush and some of his senior advisers have acted as if they have accepted only what is convenient in that lesson. They have asked governments in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East to cooperate with the United States in its war against terrorism. Traditional allies such as Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany responded by having their intelligence agencies share information with their American counterparts and by coordinating police work against terrorists.
Less publicized was the cooperation offered by governments that until recently had been regarded by Washington as untrustworthy, hostile, or themselves implicated in terrorism.
Syria, which is still on the State Department's terrorism watch list, has nevertheless been avid to enlist in Washington's war against terrorists associated with Islamist movements in the Arab world. The secular, pan-Arabist Baathist regime in Damascus has a fearsome history of suppressing its own Islamic Brotherhood by force. Twenty years ago Hafez Assad, the deceased father of Syria's current ruler, Bashar Assad, massacred some 20,000 people in the town of Hama in response to a rebellion by the Islamic Brotherhood. From an Assad perspective, the United States is now enlisting in Syria's war on terrorism.
The relevant moral is not merely that the war on terrorism makes strange bedfellows. It is that even the loftiest superpower may need cooperation with other countries - as the Bush administration has now experienced directly. From Manila to Islamabad, from Cairo to Moscow, the United States has had to seek help in tracking and catching implacable enemies.
This dependence on other nations in a time of need shows how untenable is Bush's doctrine of unilateralism.
So there is something irrational about the Bush administration needlessly, and repeatedly, going it alone.
America's best friends around the world were justifiably provoked by the recent spectacle of the United States threatening to drop out of all UN peacekeeping missions and veto all such missions unless the UN Security Council granted American peacekeepers complete immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court that came into being on July 1.
That court, known as the ICC, owes its genesis in large part to traditional American internationalism. It was founded upon the precedent of the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II. The aim of the court is to be able to indict - and ideally to deter - perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic.
US negotiators played a central role in defining the rules and procedures of the court, and although there are still some clarifications that would be desirable, the ICC poses almost no danger at all to the 700 US peacekeepers who are among 45,000 UN peacekeepers serving in many places around the world.
The administration's solo efforts to sabotage both the court and UN peacekeeping forces became the most blatant display yet of an American arrogance so foolish that it almost validates French complaints about a US ''hyperpuissance'' - hyperpower. The message sent to the rest of the world is that we Americans, with our smart bombs and our $400 billion defense budget and our high-tech economy, have no need to heed the interests and counsel of even our closest foreign allies.
Bush and his advisers are telling those friends as well as tactical partners: We will call on you for help when it suits our purposes, but we will not hesitate to disdain your pleas for cooperation when we need to placate the paranoid right wing in our domestic politics.
This is also the message delivered when Bush lauds free trade but then unilaterally adopts steel tariffs that affect Europeans and Russia particularly, or when for blatant political reasons he backs high farm subsidies. The administration also inspires resentment among its allies when it scorns international agreements and treaties such as the Kyoto accord on climate change, the Protocol on Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, the Convention on Discrimination Against Women, and the US-Russian Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed in 1972 and expunged this year to enable the administration to pursue its expensive dream of creating a missile defense system.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has defended the administration against the charge of going it alone by asserting, correctly, that he consults continually with other countries. This is true, and Powell deserves particular praise for his efforts to keep India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, from going to war over Kashmir. But there is a crucial distinction between instances of self-interested diplomacy and a foreign policy rooted in a true internationalist sharing of constraints and obligations.
In the starkest terms of power politics, the United States has acquired such military and technological superiority over all prospective rivals that, for at least the immediate future, it can feel free to impose its will on other countries. However, in a world order dominated by a single superpower, what that dominant nation most needs to avoid are actions that provoke lesser powers to unite against it.
Afghans have a saying about their rugged national game, buzkashi. They say that only one player wins, and he does not win for very long. If the Bush administration wants to protect the United States from the fate of a temporary victor at buzkashi, it will cede a little of its unilateral privilege for the long-term benefits of international cooperation and good will.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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