In Defense of America (10 page)

Arrogance and the Bush Administration

The accusation that America is now entirely indifferent to international laws and institutions is provoked largely by a series of decisions by the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush, of which the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the most controversial. These include the decision to quit the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, a casual approach to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the continued refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the refusal to recognize the International Criminal Court, and a general contempt for the United Nations.

In addition, although the United States has traditionally kept trade disputes separate from diplomacy, the Bush administration approved a farm bill of such extravagant subsidies to farmers that it jeopardized the Doha trade round, a hugely ambitious attempt to write a new global trade pact particularly aimed at helping some of the poorest countries. President Bush’s keenness to pass a new farm bill in the final months of his tenure also threatened Doha, as did his enthusiasm for one-on-one deals with other countries —seen by economists and trade negotiators as a threat to the ambitious but precarious structure of broader global trade deals.

Other provocations included using the traditional American prerogative to name the head of the World Bank to put into that position Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon during the Iraq invasion and one of the most vocal advocates of the war. A further sting was the appointment of John Bolton, again one of the most abrasive figures of the war, as the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations. He was never a conciliator; the
Washington Post,
in a rare sortie into wit, said he had failed even to “broker a compromise between his sand-colored mop [of hair] and his snow-colored mustache.”
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Bolton’s skepticism toward the United Nations was summed up for many in his declaration in a 1994 speech that “there is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the remaining superpower, which is the United States.”
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It was that arrogant tone, on top of actual decisions, which caused offense among the United States’ potential allies, never mind its enemies. There is no question that the Bush administration was egregiously dismissive in its comments about international cooperation, its officials taking apparent delight in offending any country or organization which might presume to count on American support or assume that the United States would work within the established rules. But even though the tone was high-handed, in many disputes, the United States had a fair point.

The Military Burden

The United States’ strongest case overall to be upholding international institutions is perhaps its continuing acceptance of its role as “the world’s policeman,” even though the Cold War has ended. That includes its acceptance of the lion’s share of NATO’s responsibilities even though the circumstances which prompted the creation of the alliance are gone.

To some extent, the sheer amount of money America spends on its military will give it the role of the world’s policeman in any crisis, unless it bluntly refuses to take it up. Even before Iraq, the United States spent more on defense than the next ten countries combined, but that war has taken the discrepancy to even greater heights. In February 2008, President Bush asked Congress for $515 billion, and analysts reckon that 2009 could see outlays of $675 billion —depending on how many troops are kept in Iraq —which would take up 4.4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. In comparison, Britain spends about £25 billion ($50 billion) a year on defense —about 2.5 percent of its economy —in turn, a much higher proportion than in continental Europe.

In Afghanistan, a NATO-led effort, the United States still supplies half of the development aid, three-quarters of the military contribution, and 85 percent of the airpower. And it has complained about it; at the start of 2008, Robert Gates, secretary of defense, attacked European allies for not sending more troops. On this point, he is not on the strongest ground, for all the righteousness with which he expressed it. After September 11, NATO members responded, as they were obliged to under the alliance’s Article 5, which mandates a commitment to assist another member under attack. Yet the Afghan mission has broadened from the pursuit of Osama bin Laden into setting up all the institutions of state for one of the world’s poorest countries —a much more difficult task, and not clearly under the original mandate.

It is understandable that European governments, which do not consider themselves as directly under threat from Afghanistan as does the United States, have not responded as vigorously. (It also seems particularly perverse to berate the German government for keeping its soldiers out of fierce fighting —a stance the German public firmly supports —when America and Europe spent half a century persuading Germany to excise its military reflexes.)

But as a general lament about NATO, the United States has a good case in arguing that Europe should not take the American contribution for granted, and should pay more of the cost for battles close to home.

The United Nations

The United States also has good grounds for some of its frustration with the United Nations, two words that send conservative Americans into a frenzy of exasperation, although the Bush administration went too far in its rejection of the principle of searching for common ground with other countries.

There is a long history behind the United States’ irritation, reflected in its intermittent refusal to pay its dues to the United Nations (where it is the largest contributor). It certainly has a good reason to object to the actions of the General Assembly, the only UN body in which every one of the 192 member countries has an equal voice, and which sets the budget, makes resolutions, and appoints temporary members of the Security Council. It is one of the few arenas in which tiny countries can snub the superpower, and they take full advantage of it.

In many of these countries, politicians find it so valuable to be seen to challenge America that their opposition to American initiatives in the United Nations is almost automatic. More than two-thirds of the members of the General Assembly are developing countries, and for the past twenty years, they have made north-south relations the dominant theme of debates. Their anti-American reflexes can lead to absurdity. In the 2006 vote against the deployment of weapons in space, which America lost by 160 votes to 1, many piled on against the superpower even though they had no direct interest or capability in space, a swipe that cost them nothing. The United States is also right to have dismissed as a politicized insult the vote in 2001 which threw it off the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (whose members included such champions of human rights as China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia). At the same time, again by countries eager to score points, America was voted off the International Narcotics Board by a subsidiary council of the assembly.

The rise of the giants of the developing world —China, India, and Brazil —and their desire to express their new strength has moved the center of gravity farther away from the United States. They argue that the structure of the United Nations (including the site of its headquarters in New York) and the small size of the Security Council, where the only permanent members are those who had nuclear weapons soon after the end of World War II, are now out of date. They are right, and the United States would be wrong to think that the United Nations will ever return to the coziness of its first few decades, when the United States’ supremacy was unchallenged. But at the same time, the new voices have added to the anti-American tilt of the General Assembly in a way that vindicates the United States’ sense that it has become the target of wild political gestures.

The United Nations Security Council

The United States is on weaker ground in its impatience with the Security Council, especially in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The 1945 Charter of the United Nations, signed by every member country, says that countries have the right to take up arms in self-defense, but that any military action beyond that must be taken only with the authorization of the Security Council. That text, of which the United States was one of the prime authors in the wake of the Second World War, makes the council the cornerstone of any justification for war.

The United States has an entirely fair point that the present structure and powers of the council present real problems in exercising that principle. Any one of the five permanent members —the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France —can veto a resolution authorizing military action, for whatever its own motives, however strong the support among other countries for action might be. American officials are eloquent in arguing that they should not be hostage to the self-interest of the other four, which only by coincidence will align with their own.

The strength of that argument has been recognized in the past, albeit in a very few instances. In 1950, when Communist North Korea invaded South Korea, the Security Council did authorize military action against the North. Yet that agreement was achieved only because of two diplomatic accidents: the Soviet Union (a sure veto) was boycotting the council for unrelated reasons, and China’s seat was then still held by the Taiwan-based former regime, which was bitterly opposed to Communism. That said, anger among many countries at the invasion was so deep that there was a widespread feeling that the action would have been legitimate even if there had been a veto.

In 1999, the United States and other leading NATO countries did not attempt to get a Security Council resolution authorizing action to stop Slobodan Miloševic´, Serbia’s president, from murdering and expelling Kosovo’s ethnic majority of Albanians. They reckoned that Russia would veto it out of sympathy for Serbia, and that China might, too, out of a general dislike for ethnic separatists who rebelled against their sovereign capitals. But again, widespread support, particularly from nearby countries, helped the NATO expedition to claim to be fighting a justified war.

A year and a half later, in the Afghanistan invasion that began on October 7, 2001, the United States did have the council’s backing; it unanimously condemned the attacks of September 11 and recognized “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense.” Resolution 1368 passed by the council was not an explicit authorization to use force, but it put no obstacles in its way.

But for Iraq, the United States failed to get a resolution explicitly authorizing the action, nor did it get the widespread support that would have enabled it to argue that it was acting in any case with the goodwill of the international community. The “coalition of the willing” stapled together by the United States included countries peripheral to the conflict, such as El Salvador and Singapore, that were prompted, many thought, mainly by the preferential trade deals they expected to receive from the United States.
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The United States never put as much weight on the legality of the action under international law as did Tony Blair, faced with passionate opposition from within his own party in the House of Commons. But to the extent that the United States made a formal case, it was based on the claim that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, in breach of United Nations prohibitions. As well as relying on intelligence now shown to be false, this argument relied on the doctrine of preemptive war —striking an enemy before it strikes —now part of the U.S. National Security Strategy, but one about which other countries are understandably queasy.

Having failed to get the second resolution, the United States and Britain rested their case that the war was legal all the same on Saddam’s breach of United Nations sanctions, and on the “combined effects” of three earlier Security Council resolutions, 678, 687, and 1441, ordering Iraq out of Kuwait and forbidding it from acquiring weapons. As a practical argument, this had some force: the sanctions were unraveling as Russia and other countries sought ways of trading with Iraq. But as a legal argument, it was flimsy. American officials added horror stories about Saddam’s brutality, but as a legal justification for urgent military action, such claims would have had real force only in the late 1980s, when he had murdered Kurdish villagers, and again after the 1991 war, when he attacked those who had risen up against him.

The reason Iraq has been so destructive for America’s reputation abroad is not just that the mission went wrong, but that the United States dismissed international laws and opinions in pursuing it. In its final two years, the Bush administration appeared to find more use for the Security Council and more value in international support. It used the council as one avenue through which to put pressure on Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions, working with Britain and France within the council to try to get tougher resolutions despite the reluctance of Russia and China. It also turned to the council to rally international help on Sudan.

The United States is right that in many cases winning the unanimous backing of the Security Council will be impossible. The old problem is getting worse. Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, is increasingly hostile in relations with the West; China, while amending its traditional reluctance to take an active role on the world stage, has a keen eye for the allegiances it needs to secure energy supplies. But the United States would be wrong, both in principle and in its own interests, to attribute no value at all to the pursuit of international support and to the success of winning over some allies, even if not all.

Arms Treaties

Given the United States’ concerns about Iran, it is disappointing that it has not worked more consistently within the United Nations on proliferation of nuclear weapons, where it helped draw up one of the world’s most important arms control pacts, the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty restricted the possession of nuclear weapons to five countries: the United States, the Soviet Union (now Russia), China, Britain, and France. It offered other signatories, in return for not equipping themselves with these weapons, help with the peaceful use of nuclear energy and radioactive material. The United States played an irreplaceable part not just in bringing the treaty to life, but in making the bargain worthwhile for countries which might have been tempted to make a dash for the bomb. It offered them trade and extended over some of them its own security umbrella.