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