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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (45322)	9/19/2002 10:20:04 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

Gore really twisted a lot of arms to get other countries to sign on, and then Bush did a 180. That's what makes people mad. It is "moot" anyway. The senate would never confirm Kyoto, even if you could get a President to sign it.

To: Ilaine who wrote (45322)	9/19/2002 12:03:25 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Your right of course w.r.t environmental clean up. The USA leads, others follow. Politics from the FT news.ft.com Gerard Baker: America 's new bargain By Gerard Baker Published: September 18 2002 20:58 \| Last Updated: September 18 2002 20:58 The spectacle of France and Russia dutifully jumping through hoops Saddam Hussein has set for them at the UN Security Council serves only to emphasise how significant was the victory Colin Powell secured last week in formulating the US approach to a showdown with Iraq. The hawkish crowd at the Pentagon and in the White House had warned all along about precisely this risk. Going the UN route would leave US national security interests at the mercy of the cunning Iraqis, the calculating Russians and the cavilling French, they said. But the secretary of state and his supporters inside and outside the administration assured President Bush they could handle the diplomatic gymnastics necessary to get around Iraq's manoeuvrings. And last week, in what even critics acknowledge was one of the most persuasive and impressive performances by any US president at the UN, Mr Bush carefully placed the US on the diplomatic path. Assuming (as diplomats were on Wednesday) that the current Franco-Russian obstructionism is only a bit of posturing, the no-longer-underrated Mr Powell should still be able to make good on his promise. That is not to say, as some believe, that the US has turned away from a confrontation with Iraq. The genius of the speech was that, without deflecting the US from its ultimate aim of eliminating Mr Hussein, it gave the rest of the world the cover it needs to get on board the US-led bandwagon. The events of the last week have shed much new light on the dynamic equilibrium of the international system in the post-cold war, post-September 11 world. It would be wrong to assume that the UN démarche is a victory for multilateralism; but it would be equally wrong to suppose it marked a thinly disguised triumph for US unilateralism. In fact the unilateralism/multilateralism dichotomy supposedly brought into play by the combination of the arrival of the Bush administration and the acts of the September 11 terrorists was always something of a false dialectic. In truth, we are all a bit unilateralist and a bit multilateralist. The precise balance is determined by our military and political ability to get our way. Is there a single neo-conservative in Washington, who, given the choice between acting alone, for all America's undeniable might, and acting with the support of other nations, would not choose to get international support? Is there a single country in Europe or the Arab world that, faced with what it believed to be a profound threat to its security, and armed with the capacity to neutralise it, would not do so, even if the "international community" opposed it? Here, one has to concede, to use the terminology of John Rawls, that there might be a distinction between "act unilateralism" and "rule unilateralism". Countries committed to a multilateral approach might be prepared to pass up acting alone in the face of a grave threat in the interests of maintaining a multilateral cohesion to deal with even bigger threats. But the point is still the same. If the threat is sizeable enough, and if it can be neutralised, few nations would sacrifice themselves on the altar of multilateralism. The essential truth of the modern era is that the US has the power, for the most part, to achieve its aims; other nations do not. But, as the Iraq issue demonstrates, the equation is more complex than that. The right way to look at it is not some great struggle between multilateralism and unilateralism but as a bargain. The US and the rest of the world each need to decide whether having the US act alone is in their respective interests. The factors in this decision are twofold - the risk of instability on one side and the risk of irrelevance on the other. Instability and its consequence - the emergence of a longer-term threat to its security - is the risk the US must always weigh when it considers what action to take in promoting its own interests. The military planners and neo-conservative hardliners may have been confident about the likely success of any operation in Iraq - both in military and broader political terms. But they could never quite banish the nagging doubt that, if the US acted alone (or with Britain, which amounts almost to the same thing) it would stoke violent anti-American sentiment in the region and increase global instability in a way that would come back to haunt them. The rest of the world faced its own persistent doubt. The Arab nations, the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese may have believed that unilateral US action would light a fire of instability in the region. But they could never quite extinguish the nagging fear that the US hawks might be right after all - that a quick victory in Baghdad would knock down one of the largest obstacles towards democratic progress and peace throughout the Middle East. If that happened these nations would confront the nightmare reality that they are, essentially, irrelevant in the great edifice of the international system. The US really could get its way. And so a bargain was struck. By bringing the rest of the world on board through some ingenious diplomatic language and measures at the UN, the US has limited the risk of instability if it strikes Saddam Hussein. With the Saudis now saying they could back US action, presumably to be followed by other Arab states, the chances of a catastrophe have fallen. At the same time, by clambering aboard the US-led bandwagon, the rest of the world has kept alive its faith in its relevance in a unipolar world. Other governments can say, with some plausibility, that it was only their support for or acquiescence in a US-led campaign that ensured its success and a broader stability as a result. If both sides can only hold to it, it should, like all good bargains, make everybody better off.