Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (2 page)

These sentiments were best expressed by a longtime European leader and firm friend of the United States, Etienne Davignon, who said to me, ‘After World War II, America was all-powerful and created a new world by defining its national interest broadly in a way that made it attractive for other countries to define their interests in terms of embracing America’s. In particular, the United States backed the creation of global institutions, due process, and the rule of law. Now, you are again all-powerful and the world is again in need of fundamental restructuring, but without talking to anyone you appear to be turning your back on things you have championed for half a century and defining your interest narrowly and primarily in terms of military security.’
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Added another Atlanticist, co-chair of the Trilateral Commission and former World Trade Organization Director General Peter Sutherland in another conversation, ‘You no longer seem as committed to the multilateralism you did so much to foster.’ And yet another European, the former EU Ambassador to the United States Hugo Paemen, remarked that ‘Domestically you have the wonderful system of checks and balances, but in foreign policy you are completely unpredictable, and your pendulum can swing from one side to the other very quickly, while those of us who may be deeply affected have no opportunity even to make our voice heard, let alone to have any influence. This is really worrying because while your intentions are usually good, your actions are frequently informed by ignorance, ideology, or special interests and can have very damaging consequences for the rest of us.’

Strange as it may seem to Americans, many people abroad feel that despite all our talk of democracy, human rights, and free trade America’s real aim is to control the destiny of other nations in pursuit of its own short-term interests or ideological preoccupations. Examples are legion, as we are invested in some way in almost every country in the world. Take Korea. Americans tend to see it as a country that owes a lot to the United States – for saving the Koreans from the North Korean and Chinese communists in the early 1950
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at a cost of 36,000 American dead, and for providing much of the basis of the Korean economic miracle. More recently, Americans have seen themselves as defending South Korea by linking North Korea with the Axis of Evil, and by withholding promised food and electricity aid to the North until it abandons its nuclear weapons programs.

Pleasing and logical as this picture appears to Americans, it can look very different from the other side. While Koreans acknowledge and are grateful for the American sacrifice in their defense, they note that the U.S. action was not 100-percent selfless but was part of a larger policy of containment of communism aimed at protecting American interests. Koreans also point out that after the end of the war, the United States supported a series of brutal military dictatorships that systematically abused the rights of the Korean people without visible protest from Washington. Kim Dae-jung, who has just finished his term as Korea’s president, still walks with difficulty because of his years of torture and imprisonment. While it is true that U.S. troops still face North Koreans across the Demilitarized Zone, it is also true that our troops enjoy a kind of imperial status. One of the biggest U.S. military bases in the world is in downtown Seoul where it is a constant irritant. The recurring incidents of U.S. soldiers accidentally killing Koreans in traffic accidents, assaulting local women, and committing infractions of Korean laws have seldom led to an American’s being thrown into a Korean jail or tried before a Korean court. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the United States and Korea provides that only U.S. authorities are to deal with offenses by U.S. soldiers when they are on duty (in principle, Korean authorities have jurisdiction over off-duty soldiers, but in practice this too is restricted).

As for the U.S. effort to destabilize North Korea, the South Koreans emphasize that they didn’t ask for it and that it conflicts with the ‘sunshine’ policy of the south, which has been trying to build bridges to the north in an effort to achieve gradual change. When I met last year with one of Korea’s top foreign policy officials, he begged me to explain to Washington that South Korea cannot afford a sudden collapse of the Northern regime. ‘We are not West Germany,’ he said, ‘and we cannot afford to absorb the North as West Germany absorbed East Germany.’

U.S. relations with China, a more significant subject for Asia and the world, show a similar disconnect. Although the improvement in U.S.- China ties through cooperation on combating Al Qaeda is one of the bright spots of the War on Terror, U.S. attitudes remain ambivalent. On the one hand we have promoted trade and investment with China, so much so that our largest bilateral trade deficit is no longer with Japan but with China as tens of billions of dollars of U.S. investment have poured into the country. On the other hand, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have tended to shift the focus of our defense establishment toward China as a potential threat because of its growing economy, its rhetoric about regaining its ‘rightful role’ in the world, its nuclear weapons and upgrading of its military forces, and its insistence on eventually raising the Chinese flag over Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province. It was partly as a result of these concerns, and in a state of some schizophrenia in view of the rapidly growing economic stakes that the United States moved ahead with the missile defense deployment and designated China a ‘strategic competitor.’ With regard to Taiwan, U.S. attitudes have been particularly ambivalent. Although we cut off formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and affirmed a ‘one China’ policy after President Nixon’s opening to China in 1972, we have continued to maintain close economic ties with the island. Moreover, as it has recently emerged from dictatorship into a democracy and has talked of declaring independence from China, U.S. support of Taiwan has become even stronger, with President Bush announcing major new arms sales and emphasizing that the United States would ‘do whatever it takes’
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to defend Taiwan.

In my travels in Asia, I found that these actions were causing more alarm than comfort. Few shared the view that China, with its eighteen ballistic missiles and a defense budget one tenth that of the Pentagon, has either the intent or the ability to become a strategic competitor to the United States in any meaningful period of time. Indeed, the Chinese leaders I met were continually expressing the fear that, in lieu of the Soviet Union as an enemy, America now wants to make China the bogeyman and to ‘keep China down.’ They pointed out that it is not China that has ringed the United States with bases or constantly patrols its coast with spy planes. They also pointed out that China’s emphasis, with enthusiastic support from both U.S. industry and the U.S. government, has been on economic development, which could be retarded by large military expenditures. As one official in Shanghai said to me: ‘We want to sell to America, not attack it.’ Others, including a former U.S. Defense Secretary, noted the danger of self-fulfilling prophecy, pointing out that if we treat China like an enemy it may begin to think it is one. As for Taiwan, many Asians expressed shock that, after thirty years of carefully maintaining a ‘one China’ policy, we might now endanger the stability of the region by changing a position on which our whole relationship with China is founded. Even in Taiwan, a majority does not support independence, nor is there much fear of a communist invasion. Indeed, it is the Taiwanese who are invading the mainland, where they have invested more than $60 billion. Nearly 500,000 have gone to live in Shanghai alone. Some Asians I spoke with wondered whether the United States just needs an enemy.

Many foreign leaders also mentioned another troubling aspect of U.S. unilateralism – inconsistency and neglect. Afghanistan, they pointed out, hardly existed for Americans until 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded and established a puppet communist regime. The U.S. reaction was to fan an Islamist jihad reaction and to fund and arm the Mujahedin, including Osama bin Laden, to oppose the Soviets. Once the Soviets left the country, America lost interest and didn’t say a word when the Taliban forced Afghan women out of the schools, out of employment, and back under the veil. Now, of course, America is again keenly interested. From this perspective, the United States can appear unreliable, selfish, and amoral.

A similar Janus face is seen with regard to globalization. America’s economic power is as inescapable as its geopolitical presence; over the past fifty years, the United States has become the high priest of globalization, preaching free trade, open markets, privatization, deregulation, and interdependence. When economies like those of Indonesia, Brazil, and Malaysia have gotten into trouble, the United States and the international bodies with which it is closely associated (like the International Monetary Fund) have made emergency loans conditional on an end to subsidies and ‘crony capitalism.’ In endless negotiations with Japan, Korea, and Europe U.S. officials have insisted on an end to protection and subsidies for so-called sensitive sectors, and demanded the opening of markets for rice, beef, citrus fruit, and a host of other products. Preaching ‘trade not aid’ the United States has emphasized free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as the best road to development and growth.

So the world was heartily disappointed by the imposition of emergency tariffs on steel imports into the United States in 2001. Even more offensive was the rationale. Steel, said the U.S. government, is a ‘sensitive sector’ suffering from surges of imports. Many around the world who had suffered the browbeating arrogance of U.S. trade negotiators could only laugh. More significant, however, was the U.S. farm bill that sharply raised subsidies for a whole range of American agricultural products. To mention the impact on just one country, as a result of emergency tariffs and subsidies, nearly 75 percent of crisis-ridden Brazil’s exports would not be able to compete in the U.S. market. ‘So much for trade not aid,’ the Brazilians remarked. The situation of Mexico was even more egregious. Despite the NAFTA agreement, strict quotas prevented most Mexican sugar from entering the U.S. market. Meanwhile, Mexican sugar workers lost their jobs as heavily subsidized U.S. corn sweeteners replaced sugar in Mexican soft drinks.

Like trade, global warming has been the object of extensive negotiations over the past twenty years. As the world’s biggest source of the greenhouse gases that contribute to the warming, the United States has been a key player in these talks. While the fact of warming is generally agreed upon, its causes, likely extent, and implications remain matters of debate. Because reduction of emissions could also reduce economic growth, the United States has expressed cautious concern but resisted quantitative targets until more is known. In 1992, the United States committed under the Treaty of Rio to make efforts to retard warming, but determinedly kept quotas or specific targets for emissions reductions out of the agreement. Then in March 2001, the Bush administration turned away from any treaty by rejecting eventual ratification of the Kyoto Agreement on Global Warming.

Popular at home, this move was widely condemned in the rest of the world, especially the argument that the world’s richest nation couldn’t join other countries in trying to stave off potentially severe environmental degradation by reducing emissions because there might be some economic costs.

When President Bush visited Goteborg, Sweden, on June 14, 2001, for meetings with the heads of fifteen European Union countries, he was greeted by hundreds of demonstrators, and the Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson spoke for the European leaders when he told the press the United States was pursuing ‘wrong policies that would endanger the environment.’
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On no issue is the gulf between America and the rest of the world greater than on the Israel-Palestine question. For Americans, Israel is a close friend and ally. Millions of Americans have been to Israel as tourists and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have lived there themselves or have friends and relatives who live there. For many Jewish and Christian Americans, Israel is the Bible’s Promised Land of the Jews. American technology companies have made large investments in cutting-edge factories there. For nearly forty years, the United States has been Israel’s chief weapons supplier, defender, and financial backer. Moreover, in the wake of September 11, Americans have come to see Israel’s struggle with terrorist suicide bombers as like our own war against the terror of Al Qaeda, and President Bush’s demands for an end to Palestinian violence and for new elections to replace the currently elected leaders of the Palestinians (i.e., Yassar Arafat) thus seem quite natural and legitimate in the United States. Abroad, however, several U.S. allies said that according to their understanding of democracy they would deal with whomever the Palestinians elect, including Yasir Arafat if need be. The rest of the world, while condemning the suicide bombings, also notes that the Palestinians have been under occupation for nearly forty years and that Israeli settlements in the occupied territory have grown inexorably over the past ten. This, say many, constitutes a kind of creeping, quiet violence. Indeed, some have likened it to the U.S. treatment of Native Americans during the settlement of the American frontier in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In interviews with me in the summer of 2002, a number of foreign leaders emphasized that calling for an end to Palestinian violence without mentioning Israeli settlements is unfair and counterproductive.

This issue has gone far beyond Israel and Palestine and is seeping into a broad range of our foreign policy concerns. During a recent trip through Southeast Asia, I found that attitudes in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia are rapidly being radicalized. Strategically important and traditionally practitioners of a liberal Islam, neither nation has significant ties with the Middle East. Yet few conversations could get past the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio. Every night on television, they see U.S. leaders holding pep rallies with Israeli leaders and Israelis using American weapons to attack Palestinian targets. The result is that many old friends of America conclude that the United States is attacking Islam itself. In Europe, the situation is not so emotional, but an official in Paris remarked to me that, in view of France’s large Muslim minority, ‘U.S. policy in the Middle East could be seen as a security risk by my government.’