President Bush is known to be an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt, the man who felt that the United States should speak softly and carry a big stick — a not altogether lofty maxim, but one nevertheless that has guided American foreign policy for a very long time indeed, and certainly since the early 1950s.
Before El Salvador, before Chile, even before Vietnam, the boys from Langley had engineered a coup in Guatemala that resulted in the ouster of the elected populist reformer Jacobo Arbenz in 1952; put in place something called Operation Ajax that brought about the overthrow of the greatly revered Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953; and saw to it that in the Congo, the allegedly "left-leaning" Patrice Lumumba was ignominiously dispatched to his grave through torture and later execution by his rivals in 1962. And where in other places the boys failed, the Marines, or indigenous proxies, went there to do the job — a job well done in pursuit of the noble cause of fighting communism.
Why, you ask, dredge up all this now? The times have changed. We live in a different world. Let’s move on.
In reality, no past is independent of a people’s archetype or a nation’s character. The past, as they say, is prologue.
Now enter, after Iraq, another card-carrying member of the "axis of evil" to present President Bush with a crisis that he does not need at this time: North Korea pushing its nuclear confrontation with the US to the limit by announcing that it will reopen a long-closed plutonium processing plant that may enable it to possess, we are told, enough fissile material to build a half dozen nuclear bombs within six months.
So far — and only so far — the administration has adopted a deliberately low-key posture in handling the crisis, but clearly in its escalating conflict with Washington, Pyongyang could aggravate the situation beyond the current dispute over the reactivation of the mothballed nuclear reactor complex.
Would the US then play hardball? Go out there, as it were, and show those uppity Orientals — as it is about to equally show those uppity Middle Easterners — a touch of American steel, the splendor of its musketry?
Your guess is as good as mine. But the issue that concerns us today is the Bush administration’s dangerous tilt toward unilateralism, which it has evinced even before Sept. 11 when the US, for example, withdrew from the Kyoto accord on climate change, vehemently opposed the International Criminal Court, took a pass on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and imposed high tariffs on imported steel (forget the president’s rhetoric on "free trade’).
But more importantly, this propensity for unilateralism is seen in the conduct of the war on terrorism and the attendant strategic doctrine that has emerged from it — namely, that the US is empowered with a carte blanche to act against perceived rogue states when, where and how it chooses. Indeed, even on those occasions where it made overtures to the international community to seek consensus, say, at the UN Security Council, Washington did so with the understanding that it reserves the right to pursue its chosen course.
In other words, the UN does not, in the end, count, nor for that matter does NATO, the security arm of Western Europe. Decisions over war and peace belong to the US, and the US alone, by virtue of its pre-eminent power.
Yet power needs restraint. This is a lesson that imperial nations (which had torn at each others’ throats in two world wars during the first half of the 20th century) learned the hard way.
It is to the enduring credit of American statesmen, after World War II, that they took in that lesson, insisting on a new world order where restraints were put upon powerful states to act in concert with the international community and in accordance with international law. That is, multilateral decision-making.
It did not take long, however, for all that to become water under the bridge.
Writing in the Fall 2002 issue of World Policy Journal, organ of the World Policy Institute, David C. Hendrikson, professor of political science at Colorado college, said: "At no time in the last 50 years has the United States stood in such antagonism to both the primary norms and the central institutions of international society. The reason is not difficult to find. These rules and institutions convey a simple message to the Bush administration: by right you should not do what you want to do (invade Iraq, wage preventive wars, etc.). Hence these normative and institutional restraints have been belittled and demeaned by the administration, as relics of a former age."
Thus, by opting to raise the specter that it might develop nuclear weapons, North Korea is gambling (with a very weak hand indeed) that the Bush administration, busy with the "Iraq thing," may decide to deal with one international confrontation at a time, which presumably would give Pyongyang the opportunity to develop a credible nuclear deterrent as fast as possible — since, its leaders must have concluded, not altogether improbably, that their country is next on Washington’s hit list.
This is dangerous brinkmanship because we live in unilateralist times, dominated by a unilateralist superpower convinced that, to get its way in the world, whether in Iraq, Palestine, North Korea and Iran, it is best not to work with others.
Arab News Opinion 2 January 2003
