May
8, 2002, 8:45 a.m. One
Less Follower
The U.S. dumps
the ICC.
By Gary T.
Dempsey
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Bush administration's decision to renounce the treaty creating a permanent
international criminal court, or ICC, has been met with howls of indignation.
"The administration is putting itself on the wrong side of history,"
says Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. Sen. Russ
Feingold (D., Wis.) apocalyptically warns that the White House's actions
"actually call into question our country's credibility in all multilateral
endeavors." With "history" and "all multilateral endeavors"
on the line, what must the Bush administration be thinking?
Fortunately, "history"
and "all multilateral endeavors" are not really on the line.
What is on the line is intellectual honesty, and the president's critics
seem to be abandoning it in increasing numbers. They claim, for example,
that the president's decision not to back the ICC is just the latest example
of Bush's "unilateralism," which they say is "isolating"
and "minimizing" the United States. Michael Posner, executive
director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, says, "By abandoning
the court, the U.S. forsakes the leading role it plays in the world."
Others, especially in European capitals, loudly argue that the U.S. withdrawal
from the ICC worsens Bush's "record of hostility toward multilateral
commitments," from the Kyoto global-warming treaty to the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Such dire rhetoric, however, is not supported by the facts. A closer look
at these anti-Bush criticisms instead reveals a willingness to ignore
inconvenient facts and a perverse understanding of the concept of leadership.
For starters, it
should be recalled that opposition to the International Criminal Court,
the Kyoto Protocol, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has been bipartisan
and predates President Bush's arrival in Washington. In fact, in 1997,
95 members of the 100-member U.S. Senate voted for a resolution opposing
the carbon emission limits in the Kyoto Protocol. In 2000, the Senate
decisively rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And in early 2001
President Bill Clinton said that the International Criminal Court treaty
had "significant flaws," and recommended that the incoming Bush
administration not submit it for Senate ratification unless and until
U.S. concerns were resolved. The Bush administration has apparently concluded
that the ICC treaty is beyond repair and that no amount of fine-tuning
will correct its flaws.
With respect to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the president's critics
must be aware that finding a framework other than a Cold War relic is
something Bush must do if he wants to honor one of the core issues upon
which he ran for, and won, the U.S. presidency: namely, deploying a missile-defense
system to protect the United States against accidental launches and deliberate
attacks by rogue states and would-be terrorists.
Most troubling, however,
is the muddled understanding the president's critics have of the concept
of leadership. Indeed, the president's critics seem to believe that it
is an expression of American leadership to go along with treaties that
are flawed, like the International Criminal Court, and treaties that are
contrary to U.S. national interests, like the Kyoto Protocol. By that
logic, following the bad policies of other countries is a form of American
leadership.
True leadership,
however, is something different than the president's critics imagine.
True leadership means pursuing policies that are in America's national
interest, and persuading other countries that the policies are in their
national interest too. It does not mean, as some of the president's critics
contend, doing things because they will make other countries happy. That's
what we might more accurately call "followership."
—
Gary Dempsey is a foreign-policy analyst at the Cato
Institute.
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Bush administration's decision to renounce the treaty creating a permanent
international criminal court, or ICC, has been met with howls of indignation.
"The administration is putting itself on the wrong side of history,"
says Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. Sen. Russ
Feingold (D., Wis.) apocalyptically warns that the White House's actions
"actually call into question our country's credibility in all multilateral
endeavors." With "history" and "all multilateral endeavors"
on the line, what must the Bush administration be thinking? 
