Pubdate: Thu, 26 Oct 2000
Source: Guardian Weekly, The (UK)
Copyright: Guardian Publications 2000
Contact:  75 Farringdon Road London U.K EC1M 3HQ
Fax: 44-171-242-0985
Website: http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/GWeekly/front/
Page: 14
Author: Martin Woollacott

Comment & Analysis

IT'S TIME AMERICA WOKE UP TO THE REST OF THE PLANET

When the young Walter Lippmann, later to become the foremost advocate of 
United States engagement in the world, travelled to Europe in June 1914 he 
had not 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 were a country separate from 
all others: it had a stake in world order, and it had to respect what order 
existed. The issues that he raised are, in similar form, the same ones 
facing Americans today. The US still acts according to its own rules, and 
accepts only partially and reluctantly rules made by others.

This tendency, now more accurately called unilateralism than isolationism, 
was in abeyance when the US marshalled a network of alliances against 
communism. But once this threat had disappeared the US rapidly regressed, 
failing to pay its full United Nations dues, refusing since Somalia to 
place its troops under direct UN command, refusing to sign the landmines 
treaty and the Statute of Rome, refusing to ratify the comprehensive test 
ban treaty, and pursuing a missile defence scheme that would undermine most 
of the arms limitation agreements with Russia.

While declining to be bound by rules agreed on by large groups of nations, 
the US has come up with sanctions against some 60 countries that have 
offended it in one way or another. Congress, it appears, believes it has a 
right to legislate for the world, but the world has no right to legislate 
for the US.

The difference between Americans and others can be illustrated by the 
Statute of Rome, which sets up an international criminal court. The 
Americans did not like the idea that their servicemen might face charges in 
such a court, but their deeper objection was that their constitution would 
not permit the actions that a US government might have to take. France and 
Germany had similar difficulties. Both changed their constitutions. But in 
the words of one US 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 no clearer case of ancestor 
worship in the Western world.

Bill Clinton has already been forced into serious foreign policy 
compromises. If Al Gore were elected president he too would have to contend 
with a legislature in which unilateralism is entrenched. George W Bush is 
not shackled to the unilateralist idea, and in office realism would no 
doubt often prevail. The difference is that Gore would fight the 
unilateralist tendency, while Bush would be inclined to go along with it.

The second debate between the presidential candidates, on foreign policy, 
showed both men tiptoeing around the question of "humanitarian" 
intervention. In a strange way this has become for many Americans the most 
important international issue. The notion has been cultivated that the US 
has been forced into these tasks by a demanding and ungrateful 
international community. This 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 capricious manner.

It has been disturbing to watch this argument unfold without much awareness 
that a huge crisis may be just around the corner. The US effort to manage 
the Middle East may be in terminal trouble. Yet many Americans see this 
only as a problem for those who live there, rather than as a failure for 
which the US may well be largely responsible, and one that could affect all 
of us for the worse.

There is hardly a region or a country where US policy could be deemed a 
clear success. These policies, whatever their individual worth, belong in 
the broad unilateralist tradition, serving US interests in ways that often 
ignore the needs and 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 D W Brogan, in his 
introduction to Lippmann's book, implied when he called for an end to "the 
illusion that the US 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".

*Understanding Unilateralism in American Foreign Relations (ed Gwyn Prins), 
Royal Institute of International Affairs

The Guardian Weekly 26-10-2000, page 14