New Year’s Resolution 1998: Forget “the allies.” Don’t even use the term, there being none more flaccid in the American diplomatic lexicon. As in: We’re consulting with “the allies.” Or: We’ll put Saddam back in his box just as soon as we can get “the allies” to go along.
Perhaps the only more vacuous term is “the international community.” We have local communities. We have national communities. We have no international community. Why? Because community implies a commonality of interest. Different nations have different, often conflicting, interests. What overlap there is tends to be narrow and temporary. The notion of a global unanimity of interest is always an illusion, and almost always an evasion.
“The allies” is a smaller version of “the international community”–and equally fictional. When a crisis like Iraq comes along, the obvious becomes blindingly obvious: When it comes to defending fundamental American interests, the United States is, with at most an exception or two, alone.
Consider: We have a deadly serious interest in keeping Saddam contained in his region and relieved of his toxins and nerve gas.
Who is with us? The French (our “allies”) and the Russians (our “partners”) have been undermining us in the United Nations Security Council for years. They have thwarted our every attempt to curb Saddam’s weapons. In fact, just this Monday, they prevented the Security Council from condemning Saddam for keeping his 70-odd “palaces” off-limits to UN inspectors.
The Arabs? When Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made her recent disastrous tour of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, even Kuwait told her they wanted no part of this fight. The British are behind us, but more timidly under Blair than under Thatcher (who kept George Bush from “going wobbly” when Saddam invaded Kuwait). Who else is there?
It is not that we enjoy going it alone. It is that when serious threats arise to American national interests–whether in the Gulf or the Taiwan Strait or the Korean DMZ-unilateralism is the only alternative to retreat.
Yet this administration came to power with Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the UN, proclaiming a policy of “aggressive multilateralism.” It has made a fetish of maintaining alliance cohesion. This is puzzling. Why don’t we just go it alone?
The answer goes back to George Bush. When marshaling his forces for Desert Storm he took a calculated risk: He mortgaged much American freedom of action to get the blessing of the Security Council. He needed these trappings, first, because many countries–in particular, Saudi Arabia, the essential ground base for Desert Storm–demanded the cover of the “international community.”
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Second, for political cover at home. Bush needed UN approval to get the approval of the Democratic-controlled Congress. (And even so, had but three senators voted differently, the Gulf War resolution would have been defeated.) Democrats remain enthralled with the notion of acting under the UN umbrella. Why morally we needed the blessing of the butchers of Tiananmen Square–Bush cajoled a Chinese abstention at the UN–is beyond me. But Bush was right in supposing that, without the Security Council’s laying on of hands, Congress would have voted against the Gulf War.
Bush thus tied himself to a coalition out of necessity. For Clinton, however, coalitions are the very stuff of foreign policy. This is an administration that revels in multilateralism.
Why? Partly out of the Democrats’ dreamy, century-old Wilsonianism; partly out of the Vietnam generation’s distrust of American power. Hence the theme running through five years of Clinton foreign policy: the attempt in almost every endeavor–Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, the Gulf; trade, treaties, conventions, wartime coalitions–to subsume America in some larger international construct.
In desperately clinging to the Gulf War coalition, Clinton has elevated multilateralism, which for Bush was a means, to an end in itself. After all, the end is not empty collegiality at the Security Council. The end is keeping Saddam defanged.
Sooner or later, we will have to dispense with multilateral fictions–the Gulf War coalition died long ago–and declare: “Saddam’s weapons are a deadly threat. We are going to meet it. We don’t care who is with us and who is not. We welcome all. We require none. We are going to act.”
Do we need international legal approval? Well, if we must, we can always cite Article 51 of the UN charter, which grants every nation the right of self-defense. And if the Chinese or the Russians or the French don’t like it, too bad. End of argument.
But maybe Clinton does not really believe his own internationalism. Maybe deep down he does not believe he needs the sanction of “the international community.” Maybe he is merely glad for the lack of it, which then justifies his policy of timidity and drift.