As India and Pakistan exploded their nukes and American diplomats scurried about trying to look important, there was another piece of news, overlooked among the more spectacular shocks, that symbolized better than anything else the flaccidity of current American foreign policy. President Clinton has quietly cut by more than half the forces he had sent to the Persian Gulf during our most recent crisis with Iraq.
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This run up and back down is not just an embarrassment. It is an expensive embarrassment. The supplemental defense spending bill signed by Clinton in May contained $1.3 billion to cover this troop deployment. A tidy sum to spend on bluster.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, however, thought it a fine expenditure. It provided a splendid backdrop for his February peace-and-appeasement mission to Baghdad. Indeed, upon his return he praised the leaders of the United States and Britain for being “perfect UN peacekeepers.”
With inadvertence and mortifying accuracy, Annan thus highlighted the absurdly shrunken role Clinton’s America has come to play in the world. The only remaining superpower has under Clinton found its niche: providing military choreography for UN paper signing–uhhh–peacekeeping.
The United States had cranked up its military machine in the gulf not just at great expense but at considerable risk. An urgent memo from our commander in Korea revealed how vulnerable the diversion of a carrier group and ammunition ships had left U.S. forces there. And yet twice Clinton totally lost control of events.
First, he allowed the Russian foreign minister to broker a phony agreement. Then three months later, he allowed the UN secretary general to broker a second. Clinton was particularly pleased with that one–a “written commitment,” he noted, as if Saddam acquires scruples in the presence of parchment.
Why this extraordinary self-abasement of American diplomacy?
The Clinton administration came into office pledged to “aggressive multilateralism,” the slogan proclaimed by then-UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright. Abandoned after the debacle in Somalia, it is now back in full force. Except that the Clinton Doctrine today is more properly termed “passive multilateralism.”
The passivity is born of fear, fear of acting (a) alone and (b) militarily. The multilateralism is born of naivete, a touching belief that actions carried out under UN auspices are inherently more just and moral than American action.
To be fair, that belief in the sanctity of UN mandates is deeply ingrained in late 20th-Century American diplomacy. Why, even that connoisseur of realpolitik, George Bush, could not escape it. Among his reasons for stopping the Gulf War before overthrowing Saddam was the wish not to be seen “unilaterally exceeding the UN’s mandate.”
But if American soldiers are carrying the burden of battle and dying disproportionately, why should strangers–the United Nations, “the international community”–determine the mandate? What country sacrifices its young in battle to achieve the objectives of others?
America. Indeed, Bush is proud of the very selflessness of the American war effort. “Our Arab allies,” he wrote recently in an apologia in Time co-authored with Brent Scowcroft, “now trusted us far more than they ever had. We had come to their assistance in their time of need, asked nothing for ourselves, and left again when the job was done.”
Perhaps this is the problem when a gentleman goes to war. What country fights asking nothing for itself? For an individual, this is the very definition of public service, the highest form of nobility. For a nation, however, it is a form of insanity.
And the insanity continues to this day: Clinton undertakes an enormous Gulf buildup, earns the opprobrium, takes the risk, incurs the expense–and then lets UN civil servants and our adversaries on the Security Council determine when and if we are to act.
Senator and former POW John McCain put this paradox in stark relief: “It’s not UNSCOM’s young people (whose) lives are on the line, and it’s not the Security Council’s.” So why do they set the terms for American action?
Why can’t an American president simply stand up and say we act not for the world but for ourselves? Of course, the world would benefit greatly from our thwarting the likes of Saddam. But we are agents of no one.
Why can’t we say this? Because we have lost faith in the rightness of our cause–hence the addiction to multilateralism. Perhaps it takes a man like McCain, who spent three years in the Hanoi Hilton on behalf of that cause, to have the courage to affirm it unilaterally and without apology.