The United States is engaged in a strenuous diplomatic struggle with the global community over its recent decision to strengthen a 1972 treaty banning germ warfare. The source of America's troubles is its historically ambivalent policies on the subject.
As recently as last July, President George W. Bush had rejected a widely supported protocol to enforce the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) through on-site inspections.
By October, however, with the country's mail system infected by anthrax-laced letters intended for political and media leaders, the White House began to seek international support for a new proposal that would commit the treaty's 144 signatories to criminalizing bioweapons activities on their territories.
But administration officials and experts tell Strategic Policy that the response of the European and other allies with whom Washington shares its ideas was less than enthusiastic.
There was indeed consensus, sources say, that the US draft is a good first step, but they acknowledged that many foreign governments believe the revised treaty fails to legally bind all parties to a more rigid set of international standards.
"Not everybody agrees with our approach," says one Bush administration official. "Some countries, for example, have an interest in weakening and abolishing multilateral export controls. But we are not going to water down our approach to get a least-common-denominator agreement."
When Washington initially rejected the BWC protocol, which had been the result of six years of negotiations, it called it "unworkable" and said the regime proposed by the draft treaty would threaten US military and trade secrets while allowing "rogue states," such as North Korea and Iraq, to "cheat."
The US position angered many countries, which described it as yet another example of unilateralism.
At that time - just four months ago - Washington had already abandoned the Kyoto protocol on climate change, and had threatened to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty banning missile defense.
Now, with a new sense of urgency in light of the recent anthrax attacks that have infected 17 persons and killed five, the Bush administration seems more open to other ideas and views.
Although the US remains "skeptical" about on-site inspections, the American negotiating team that arrived last week at the BWC conference in Geneva says it is willing to discuss so-called challenge inspections, "triggered by requests from member-states in event of suspected violations," says one White House official.
"We'll keep talking at the conference to see where we can find common ground," adds the official.
In a statement issued Nov. 1, President Bush called for "strict national criminal legislation against prohibited bioweapons activities with strong extradition requirements" and "sound national oversight mechanisms for the security and genetic engineering of pathogenic organisms."
Bush also proposed "an effective United Nations procedure for investigating suspicious outbreaks or allegations of biological weapons use," as well as "a code of ethical conduct" for bioscientists and "responsible conduct in the study, use, modification and shipment of pathogenic organisms."
Even though the administration expects better understanding and sympathy from other countries after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax cases, biowarfare experts and US officials are bracing for intense and difficult negotiations in Geneva.
Ideally, the United States would like to see its proposals become part of a declaration adopted at the end of the three-week-long BWC review conference in Switzerland, which takes place every five years.
The differences with most other countries, however, are still too big, experts say. Critics argue that most of the proposed measures are already included in the BWC.
"The administration should be proposing an international treaty, if it's serious, not political commitment," says Elisa Harris, who served as President Bill Clinton's director for nonproliferation export controls at the National Security Council.
But Mike Moodie, president of the Washington-based Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute and a former negotiator in the first Bush administration, says the BWC addresses only "general obligations" that are not being observed in reality and need to be better detailed, which the new US proposals would do.
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