Unilateral Strawman
Critics created a hostile caricature of a simplistically unilateralist administration.

October 16, 2001 1:30 p.m.

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.