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 t's
become one of the most frequently invoked post-Sept. 11 clichés,
right up there with "everything has changed" and "it's
a different kind of war": the idea that the Bush administration
has had to jettison its unrealistic "unilateralism" in
response to the attacks.
Embedded in
this cliché is a convenient misunderstanding of the administration's
unilateralism.
The Bushies
never thought that the U.S. could go it entirely alone in the world,
without any allies whatsoever. Obviously, this would have been absurd,
but that didn't stop critics from creating a hostile caricature
of just such a simplistically unilateralist administration.
The actual
Bush position was that occasionally the U.S., in pursuit of its
interests or other important goals, has to be willing to go it alone.
Sometimes an issue is important enough that it is worth being isolated
over, period.
But more often
it's the case that showing your willingness to go it alone is a
way to get allies to agree with you — in other words, unilateralism
in the cause of creating multilaterialism, on your own terms.
Take the Bushies'
two biggest "unilaterialist" initiatives: Kyoto and the
ABM treaty.
The administration's
deep-sixing of Kyoto was only truth telling, since none of our European
allies were going to ratify the impossibly ambitious treaty either.
So, this wasn't
really unilaterialism, since we weren't truly going it alone. We
were just louder about what everyone else was doing anyway, i.e.,
letting the treaty lapse into obsolescence.
The ABM treaty
is a better case. Advocates of multilateralism apparently believed
the best way to get the Russians to accept profound changes to the
treaty was to make clear to them that we would never really insist
on such changes, and never be willing to withdraw from the treaty
if they didn't approve.
As a negotiating
strategy, this would have been totally feckless. In contrast, the
administration — or at least its shrewdest strategists —
hoped that giving six months' notice of an impending withdrawal
from the ABM treaty would make the Russians more amenable to the
administration's missile-defense plans.
And if the
Russians went along, the Europeans would have been compelled to
as well — and suddenly we would have been one big multilateral
family again, just with the U.S. having achieved an important policy
goal in the process.
I suspect that
this was the real problem critics had with the administration's
approach — not its supposed unilateralism, but its policy objective.
In a similar
way, the current debate over the war on terrorism is not between
unilateralism and multilateralism, as Colin Powell's friends in
the media like to portray it (because it makes the whole debate
seem like such a slam dunk for the Powell forces).
The real question
is whether the administration will lead the alliance or be led by
it, whether we will seek to impose our war aims on hesitant allies
or just resign ourselves to accepting the status quo in international
opinion.
Because, with
enough determination, getting key allies to accept, say, a war against
Saddam should be possible in exactly the way we were able to get
Pakistan to go along with dumping the Taliban.
Remember how,
just a few weeks ago, the Pakistanis were telling us they couldn't
possibly support an effort to oust the current Afghan government?
Well, things change — with enough pressure.
This, then,
is the real issue: Will we let American power stretch to its full
extent in a just cause, dragging the rest of the world with it —
or allow that power to be blunted by recalcitrant (and often nasty
and undependable) allies?
Unilateralism
— especially the cartoon variety — has little to do with
it.
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