Bush's International Charade

A notable passage appeared in President Bush's Sept. 20 speech to a Joint Session of Congress: "This is not just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight."

On Nov. 10, in an address to the United Nations General Assembly, Bush continued to stress this theme of collective engagement. "We resolved that the aggressions and ambitions of the wicked must be opposed early, decisively and collectively, before they threaten us all," he said. "The civilized world is now responding. The United Nations has risen to this responsibility. Before the sun had set [on Sept. 12], these attacks on the world stood condemned by the world."

When Bush's speechwriters penned these words, they sought to prevent the war on terrorism from being seen as an independent, unilateral initiative. As expected, NATO had expressed its solidarity with the White House the day after the attacks by unanimously invoking Article 5 of its basic treaty, which affirms that an attack on one member is an attack on all. More tangibly, shortly before bombs began falling on Afghanistan on Oct. 7, the U.S. government assembled an impressive coalition of countries to carry on the War Against Global Terror. It even managed to prod Congress into finally paying a substantial portion of the dues the United States had long owed the United Nations.

One result of this "collective" action was that prominent liberals, seeking sunshine in the dark sky of October, proclaimed that the Bush administration had been forced to realize that unilateralism would not work in the 21st century, that international cooperation and multilateral arrangements were essential for the fulfillment of national interests.

But since Sept. 11 it has become clearer every day that President Bush and his advisors are not the overnight multilateralists that liberals and others took them for. Instead, the U.S. government has been developing only a façade of support and subordination, a one-sided, almost imperial, coercive multilateralism revealed by the famous Bush threat: "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." These words to Congress made it clear that the price of non-cooperation with the U.S. could be military confrontation.

In the conduct of the Afghanistan War this declaration reveals not joint decision-making or military cooperation, but complete control by the United States. Other countries and entities, including the United Nations, have been asked to help with post-conflict reconstruction but also told not to interfere with the conduct or goals of the war itself. When the U.S.'s allies in the war warned that the extension of the war to Iraq or elsewhere might break the coalition, Washington's official line was, "The mission will define the coalition, not the coalition the mission." Such an orientation suggests that even in the context of organizing the response to Sept. 11, the multilateralist element is marginal, and easily cast aside.

Perhaps the most telling development in the Bush administration's domineering multilateralism is its blithe dismissal of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. This unilateral withdrawal from a treaty that has served as a principal basis of arms control and stability for the last three decades is worrisome not only to Russia, one of the U.S.'s new allies in the war on terrorism, but to China and the nations of Europe as well. However, the most provocative aspect of America's unilateralist abrogation of the ABM Treaty is that it will allow the U.S. to construct a missile defense shield and possibly go on to weaponize space, which would threaten the rest of the world with American predominance. The goal of this revived and enlarged "Star Wars" project, it must be understood, is nothing less than to put the U.S. in charge of global security, thereby making all other states vulnerable.