In Defense of America (11 page)

The United States’ most damaging action toward the nuclear treaty, in 2006, was to offer India a nuclear cooperation pact that promised enormous help with civil nuclear work. It demanded far too little reassurance that this would not also help India’s weapons program, and it seemed to reward a country that had always refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty. But the United States would be justified in arguing that the current fragility of the treaty cannot be blamed on that action; it reflects the weakening of the original “bargain,” as countries’ desire to get nuclear weapons increases and as it gets easier to do so. That bargain will have to be redrawn if the pact is to hold, and in early attempts to explore whether that is possible, the United States has played a central role.

The United States has also only a partial defense for its decision to leave one of the main arms treaties it struck with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and then to protest when Russia later made a similar move. The United States said that it had to quit the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to develop its controversial missile defense system, or “Star Wars,” even though there was no assurance that the huge technical difficulties could be overcome. Yet in 2007, when Russia notified other signatories that it intended to suspend participation in the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, there was uproar from the Americans.

The treaty, signed in the last days of the Cold War, between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, limited the armed forces and weapons the United States and the former Soviet Union countries could have in Europe. Russia’s decision to leave, it said, was in retaliation for America’s decision to put new missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic. There is no question that Russia, under President Putin, took easy offense at such actions, but the United States had lost the high ground by its earlier action. America is right that these treaties are creaking, but it should not cast aside the products of its own efforts too lightly.

International Criminal Court

The United States is on stronger ground in its refusal to recognize the International Criminal Court, although it has conducted its attacks on the court with such hostility that it gives ammunition to those who argue that it is uninterested in any principles of international law.

The court, first conceived by the United Nations in 1948 after the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, to try crimes of war, formally came into being only in 2002. The principle that there should be such trials is an honorable one, and those who oppose it are never going to seem heroic. But the United States has a good case that the court is inevitably open to accusations of arbitrariness, and to partiality, in its selection of cases, given how few cases it will actually try and the huge political resonance each will carry. The United States has a point, too, in arguing that its soldiers are in danger of being singled out for alleged war crimes, given the widespread antipathy in parts of the world to the United States and the desire to see it “brought to book” for alleged offenses.

But it has made a poor job of justifying its objections. Instead, it conveys the sense that no one will hold its soldiers to account except American military courts —if then. When confronted with the evidence of the abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where American soldiers degraded and abused Iraqi prisoners, the Bush administration dealt with it slowly and with secrecy. The process did not help the credibility of the verdict, which blamed a few junior soldiers acting on their own, an account that remains deeply implausible.

When a British soldier in Iraq was killed in 2003 by American “friendly fire” from an aircraft above, the Pentagon refused for four years to release the cockpit recordings to the family. They were eventually leaked in early 2007 to
The Sun
newspaper in Britain. There was an uproar in Britain, but the reaction of Pentagon officials privately was to say that they should never have shared the information with the British Ministry of Defence, which they suspected of leaking the tape.
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This attitude of the United States —that its soldiers are beyond criticism other than its own, in private, at home —gives it a reputation for lawlessness and undermines acceptance of its role as the global policeman. It might feel resentful and complain that others should carry more of the burden, but to the extent that it does act in that role, it presumably wants acceptance and respect.

The Green Villain

The environment is the issue, of those on this list, that is going to give America the most trouble, because it resonates with ordinary people in so many countries. The United States does not easily see itself as the villain of the world’s environment, as so many others do. Americans look around and see a green and fruitful land, less polluted, less spoiled, and less populated than many areas of Europe or Asia, and they have a point.

The problem is climate change. America emits more greenhouse gases per person than any other country in the world. Until it was overtaken by China (roughly at the end of 2007), it emitted more than any other country overall, even though its population is just a quarter of China’s. That underpins its reputation as greedy, consuming “more than its share” of the world’s resources, its people refusing to compromise the world’s highest standard of living to save those in poor countries from the effects of climate change. The cars two feet longer than anything you could park in London or Paris, the sport-utility vehicles managing only fourteen miles to the gallon, the huge houses and ferocious air-conditioning —all these are brandished as evidence of America’s moral failing. (Although critics never adjust for the smaller size of the American gallon, only 83 percent of the size of the Imperial gallon used in Britain.)

Because of climate change the environment is not America’s strongest front. But there are still many points that can be made in its defense that are lost among the insults.

The first is the depth of the environmental tradition in American culture. The American reverence for the wilderness goes back before even the explorers who pushed the frontier westward —back to Native American culture. Robert Hughes, the Australian-born critic known for his historical analysis of his native country and of American art since its origins, has described how early Australian settlers pushed into the interior and found desert, whereas the Americans found a land of plenty. That reinforced Americans’ sense of “manifest destiny” —of their special mission —and also their delight in their new territory. German immigrants to America at the end of the nineteenth century added their own strong flavor to the cultural mixture with their particular love of forests and nature.

The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, is one of the world’s oldest environmental clubs, now with 1.3 million supporters. When I was a child at school in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, the curriculum was threaded with lectures about recycling and protecting wildlife, a good couple of decades before that became standard in British schools. “It was America which put environmentalism on the world’s agenda in the 1970s and 1980s,” recalled Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president for Conservation International. “But since then, somehow, the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet has gone to the back of the line.”
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A second point in the United States’ favor is that the environmental laws it passed in those decades are some of the world’s toughest. The 1980 Superfund act (formally known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act), a tax on petroleum and chemical industries to pay for cleaning up toxic land, and the five separate Clean Air acts between 1963 and 1990 were very expensive for American businesses and state governments. So was the drive to tighten health regulations, such as the 1980s move to ban and phase out asbestos. It is a measure of the importance legislators attached to the issue that they were made national standards, not left to states’ discretion.

The United States also moved quickly, when a 1976 National Academy of Sciences report found damage to the ozone layer, to ban chlorofluorocarbons from aerosols. It was one of the driving forces behind the 1987 Montreal Protocol to ban substances damaging to the ozone layer and develop replacement technologies, a move resisted initially by the European Union.

What is more, the United States enforces these laws, even if their application is challenged in court. The folly of Lloyd’s of London, the three-hundred-year-old insurance market, in thinking that insurance against these costs could be secured against the private wealth and property of the British middle classes was a misjudgment that brought parts of the market to collapse in the late 1980s. But it may have stemmed from a failure to appreciate that in the United States, once a law has been passed, it is generally enforced.

In contrast, although the European Union has been prolific in passing ambitious regulations on environmental standards, the marvel is how patchily they are enforced. Drinking-water standards, cleanliness of beaches, the protection of wildlife habitats —the European Commission in Brussels has had plenty to say on all of these. But the countries on Europe’s southern fringe, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal —the poorer ones, before the influx of those from the former Soviet bloc —have often been treated with some lenience when they have failed to comply.

Even in France, one of the founders of the European Union and one of its richest countries, compliance has been patchy. The left-wing government of Lionel Jospin between 1997 and 2002 struggled to impose an “eco-tax,” to eliminate nitrates from drinking water (a particularly troublesome consequence of farming), and to comply with the toughest measures of the Kyoto accords on climate change, even though he had Green Party members among his ministers.

But then we come to climate change, and America has a more difficult case to make, one that, so far, has won no worldwide sympathy. The Bush administration did, in February 2008, say for the first time that the United States would agree to be bound by limits on emissions —but only if China and India were, too. But that sidesteps their main objection: that the emissions of the developed world have caused the problem and that rich countries should bear the cost of mitigating climate change.

The United States’ best defense is that it would find it much more expensive than would other countries to make those changes to its economy, and if it did so abruptly, it would have an effect on growth that would also hurt other economies, particularly the poorest. Given its size, and its reliance on road transport, America is inevitably more dependent on gasoline than are smaller, more densely inhabited countries.

America might add to that another argument (one I’m sympathetic to, even though I’m conscious that it drives my greenest colleagues to a point beyond anger), that there is a moral value in encouraging people’s mobility because it encourages their understanding of one another and their ability to work together. Americans’ delight in crisscrossing their own country springs from the exhilaration of the American project itself, even though it does carry a cost in pollution.

There is some force in America’s defense of its difference from other countries. The Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets for reducing emissions or requires countries to trade permits for them if they exceed the set levels, was much easier for European countries to meet, as it coincided with a shift from coal- to gas-fired power stations, which immediately reduced emissions. Germany was helped by the closure of many old, dirty East German industries, which scythed through the emissions levels of a united Germany, as well as by the slow shrinkage of its aging population. Even given those advantages, the European Union has not found it easy to make the required cuts. The European Environment Agency, a Copenhagen-based think tank, warned in November 2007 that the fifteen European countries covered by the Kyoto commitment (not including those who joined the European Union since 2004) were on course to achieve only a 4 percent cut in emissions, not the 8 percent required.

The United States’ proposal to research new green technologies and to export or give them to other countries is also a strong point in its favor. The speed with which it did this with ozone-damaging chemicals was dramatic, although the demands of innovation were less, as substitutes were developed with comparative ease once the need was clear. In December 2007, Bush signed into law new rules on energy efficiency in cars and houses —the Energy Independence and Security Act —which had overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. That will slowly but profoundly shift Americans toward cars and appliances that use less fuel.

It is also fair for the Bush administration —and the Clinton administration before it —to claim that there is no point in the president’s signing on to curbs that Congress will never pass. A Russian president can push through a law on a whim, but the leader of a democracy cannot, let alone one with the separation of powers dictated by the U.S. Constitution. To that extent, President Bush could be said merely to have been honest in pointing out to the world, at the start of his presidency, that Congress would not pass the Kyoto Protocol, a blunt declaration that President Clinton had avoided making.

However, the weakness of America’s case, under Clinton as well as Bush, is that administrations have not tried harder to persuade Congress to back reforms —ones better designed than the Kyoto Protocol, say —building on the significant minority that wants change. The United States could have been much more vigorous, for example, in investigating market-based ways to curb emissions.

It helps the United States’ case that, as well as new federal efforts, some of the states have begun moving on their own to encourage behavior that would reduce carbon emissions. That contradicts the caricature of America as a country unified in its lack of concern about global warming.

The same phenomenon is true in all developed countries —people are concerned about global environmental problems but do not much want to sacrifice their own standard of living to help. It is unfair for countries that, because of the structure of their economy, find these changes easy, to accuse America of entirely neglecting something that it would find more difficult.