U.S. foreign policy

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Guardian of London October 20, 2000

It's Time America Woke Up To The Rest Of The Planet

The US acts internationally according to its own rules and accepts
only partially and reluctantly rules made by others.

by Martin Woollacott

When the young Walter Lippmann, later to become the foremost
advocate of American engagement in the world, travelled to Europe in
June 1914, he had not even the faintest notion that a terrible war was
imminent. "It was possible," he wrote, "for an American in those days to
be totally unconscious of the world he lived in." He dallied in the Lake
District for a while, then crossed to Belgium, planning to go on through
Germany to Switzerland for a walking holiday. He remembered "being
rather annoyed when I went into the railway station and found that the
German border was closed because Belgium had had an ultimatum."
Lippmann recorded this anecdote in a book he wrote in 1943 arguing
that the United States could no longer operate as if it was a country
separate and aloof from all others, that it had a stake in world order, and
that it had to respect what order existed. The tenaciousness of the
American sense of separateness can be seen in the fact that the issues
which Lippmann raised are, in not too different form, the same ones
which face Americans today. The blissful ignorance of the world which he
sketched is gone. If there is ignorance now it is wilful rather than
blissful.
But America still acts internationally according to its own rules and
accepts only partially and reluctantly rules made by others. This
tendency, now more often and more accurately called unilateralism rather
than isolationism, was in abeyance during the years when the US
marshalled a network of alliances against the communist states. Even
then, some argue, the appearance of collective decision making was
usually misleading. In any case, once the Russian and Chinese enemies
had disappeared, the US rapidly regressed, spurning treaties over which
other nations had long laboured, misbehaving in international
organisations, and acting with others usually only in ad hoc alliances of
which it was the main organiser. And all this was under a president, Bill
Clinton, who began in office committed to the UN, to international law,
and to multilateralism in all spheres.
The difference between Americans and others can be illustrated by
the case of the Statute of Rome, which sets up an international criminal
court. The Americans, it is well known, did not like the idea that their
servicemen might face charges in such a court, but their deeper objection
was constitutional. The US constitution would not permit the actions
which an American government might have to take under the statute.
France and Germany had similar constitutional difficulties. Both chose to
change their constitutions. But, in the words of one American opponent of
the statute, writing in an illuminating recent publication from the Royal
Institute of International Affairs, "The US ... is not going to amend its
constitution to accommodate the latest international fad ... the US shall
stand by its old ways which have served it well for over 200 years." There
is surely no clearer case of ancestor worship in the western world than
this.
A partial accounting of American delinquency during the Clinton
years includes the failure to pay its full UN dues, the refusal, since
Somalia, to place American troops under direct UN command, the
refusal to sign the landmines treaty, the refusal to sign the Statute of
Rome, the refusal to ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty, and
the pursuit of a national missile defence scheme which, if realised,
would almost certainly undermine most of the existing arms
limitation agreements with Russia. While refusing to be bound by
rules agreed on by large groups of nations, the US has meanwhile
come up with sanctions against some 60 countries which have
offended it in one way or another. The Congress, it appears,
believes it has a right to legislate for the world, but the world has no
right to legislate for the US.
It cannot be simply said that in choosing between Gore and Bush, the
American people are choosing between an internationalist and a
unilateralist road. Clinton has already been forced into serious
compromises, with which Gore is associated and, if he is elected, he too
would have to contend with a legislature in which unilateralism is
entrenched. Bush is not absolutely shackled to the unilateralist idea and,
in office, realism would no doubt often prevail. The difference is rather
that Gore would fight the unilateralist tendency, while Bush would be
inclined to go along with it.
The second debate between the candidates, on foreign policy,
showed both men tiptoeing around the charged question of
"humanitarian" military intervention. In a strange way this has become
for many Americans the most important international issue. In spite of
the fact that the US has committed its forces to such interventions
very much on its own terms and conditions, the notion persists
there, or at least is assiduously cultivated for political reasons, that
America has been forced into these onerous tasks by an
international community which is at the same time demanding and
ungrateful. The concentration on the military question also obscures
the fact that what the world needs from the US is not a constant
readiness to come up with troops, but constant and responsible
attention, while resisting the temptation to act in a solitary and
capricious manner.
It has been disturbing in recent weeks to watch this American
argument over foreign policy unfold without much awareness that a huge
crisis may be just around the corner. The American effort to manage the
Middle East, an effort which goes back at least 40 years and which
Clinton had tried to round off with a settlement between Israelis and
Palestinians, could be in terminal trouble. Yet many Americans see this
only as a tragedy or a problem for the people who live there, rather than
as a failure for which America may well be largely responsible and one
which could affect all of us for the worse. In other regions where the US
has made similar efforts to manage and control events, notably East and
South-east Asia, serious trouble could also be brewing. There is hardly a
region or a country where American policy could be deemed a clear
success. These policies, whatever their individual worth, belong in the
broad unilateralist tradition, serving American interests in ways which
often ignore the real needs and the real sentiments of the countries
concerned. That they may therefore not truly serve American interests
either is an idea whose time ought to have come. Acts have
consequences, as DW Brogan, in his introduction to Lippmann's book,
implied when he called for an end to "the illusion that the United States
has complete freedom of choice, that the American people can order as
much peace, security and prosperity as they want, on their own terms, in
their own time."