USS Clueless - Advice from around the world
     
     
 

Stardate 20020106.0507

(On Screen): The Washington Post has solicited opinions from journalists in nine nations, so that they can tell us what we should do. The response is, shall we say, predictable.

From Germany, Josef Joffe tells us that we really should reconsider unilateralism; wouldn't it be ever so much nicer to ask permission from the world before choosing where next to take this war? Hugo Young in the UK more-or-less agrees.

From Canada, Michele Landsberg says that America should use its new-found might to advance the cause of women around the world; indeed, that this should become the centerpiece of American foreign policy.

Zubeida Mustafa, of Pakistan, wants us to settle the crisis in Kashmir (presumably in favor of Pakistan). Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian, wants us to use military might against Israel. Mahmood Mamdani, of Uganda, would like us to solve the problems of Africa.

From Mexico, Rossana Fuentes-Berain wants us to stop feeling like victims, and to realize that we've got to settle the issue of migrant workers crossing the border. (She says that yes, we lost thousands of people but Mexico and Central America has lost even more in earthquakes. That's specious; they have nothing to do with each other.)

Perhaps it was inevitable. Each of them basically says, "Boy, it sure would be neat if the United States were to use its military, economic and political might to advance my particular agenda." Only one of the writers (Hernando de Soto) manages to come up with advice that isn't parochial.

The discussion by Yutaka Mataebara, from Japan, is the one which I disagree with most thoroughly.

Something must be wrong with the way the United States exercises its power. Too many people, in too many countries, see U.S. foreign policy as lacking universal principles that resonate with the rest of the world.

He begins right off with the a priori assumption that US foreign policy has an obligation to be acceptable to the rest of the world, to be based on "universal principles". Has any other nation in history ever had the onus of serving the world's interests to the detriment of its own? If so I've never heard of it. Why should the US be uniquely burdened in this way?

Certainly, the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism has shown what can be achieved by an organized multilateral effort to combat a global problem. The world, including Japan, has been impressed by America's show of high-tech military power in Afghanistan.

The war against terrorism, however, is one of very few recent instances in which the United States has worked together with a sizable number of other countries. It has, for example, pulled out of the Kyoto protocol on climate change, boycotted a meeting to put the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty into effect and spurned a draft agreement to update the Biological Weapons Convention.

And the theme continues: why don't y'all just cooperate instead of following all this unilateralist crap? The only problem is that I take exactly the opposite lesson from this. I see a continuum beginning with the Gulf War, running through the Serbian bombing, and ending with the Afghan campaign. In the Gulf War, a substantial coalition was created. The majority of the forces involved were American but other nations were given strong ability to affect the overall strategic goals of the campaign. In particular, there was active participation by Arab nations, but their price was an insistence that Iraq not actually be conquered and the government of Saddam Hussein not be toppled. Thus the Gulf War had the limited objective of reversing Saddam's conquest of Kuwait without resolving the underlying problem (that Saddam is a petty tyrant bent on dominating everything within reach, who won't give up those ambitions as long as he's alive and remains in power). President Bush (Sr.) stopped the ground action after the now legendary 100 hours, leaving a substantial part of the Republican Guard intact and even permitting them to escape with their equipment. The result was deeply unsatisfying and has left a running sore in the Middle East. The United States was prevented from serving its own interest there by its participation in a coalition.

In the case of Yugoslavia, during the 1990's there was another petty tyrant, this time Milosevic. The United States kept pressing for military action to bring him down and our European Allies kept resisting, insisting instead on lesser acts like economic sanctions, announcements of disapproval, and empty declarations of "safe zones". The result was years of slaughter in Bosnia and elsewhere as Milosevic demonstrated how utterly unimpressed he was by it all. Finally the

Captured by MemoWeb from http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/01/fog0000000113.shtml on 9/16/2004