Schizophrenic Adminstration Heightens U.S. Isolation

Schizophrenic Administration Heightens U.S. Isolation

By Jeffrey Laurenti

The Bush administration has put its foreign policy schizophrenia on very public display this holiday season, and as often happens, it is hard-line conservatives' obsessive- compulsive fixation with the
United Nations that is triggering the current episode.

Just as
President Bush was citing the support of the United Nations as the crucial international pillar of his strategy for victory in
Iraq, his representative in New York was threatening its financial strangulation. In the same week that the United States insisted on
Syria's complete cooperation with the U.N. investigation of the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister, it warned it might itself walk away from the Organization.

"Either we need to fix the institution or we'll turn to some other mechanism to solve international problems,'' the president's emissary in New York, John Bolton, told guests of the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina. And he elaborated for Britain's Financial Times: "The UN is simply one of many competitors in the global marketplace for problem solutions and problem solvers."

Mr. Bolton's threat to take America's international business elsewhere was unlikely to sway votes at the United Nations because it has already long been administration policy. Washington takes problems to the United Nations, not to do a favor for Secretary-General
Kofi Annan, but only when it cannot achieve its ends in a more controllable setting.

The Bush administration went to the U.N. over Syria's role in Lebanon, to get peacekeepers into Darfur, to extend legal authority for U.S. troops to stay in Iraq, and even to get a global convention (unsuccessfully) to block embryonic stem cell research, because it could not achieve these goals elsewhere.

On the other hand, it steered responsibility for peacekeeping forces in
Afghanistan to
NATO, and away from the U.N., just as the Clinton administration had done in post-Dayton Bosnia and in
Kosovo. It even sought to bar the United Nations from coordinating the global humanitarian response to last December's Indian Ocean tsunami in favor of a four-power coordinating directorate, a maneuver that collapsed when other countries refused to cooperate.

Sparking the current manifestation of bipolar disorder are Washington's growing international isolation and the multiplying signs of its own incipient irrelevance. Since 2001, forceful U.S. campaigns to pressure countries to reject the
Kyoto protocol on global warming and the International Criminal Court have failed spectacularly, with both treaties coming into force and the Court now investigating war crimes in Darfur. Mr. Bolton's drive to oust the widely admired Mohamed El-Baradei as head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency was humiliatingly unsuccessful; at the Organization of American States, Latin democracies rejected the administration's hand-picked Colombian for secretary-general. Asians convened a greater East Asia summit that included Russia's
Vladimir Putin but pointedly excluded Washington.

The Europeans, who once trembled at threats from Washington to cut off funds to U.N. agencies or walk out of international fora, are now inured to them. As with papal interdicts in the later Middle Ages, by dint of repetition these threats have lost their power to terrify-and Europeans have lost irretrievably their post-1945 habit of deference to U.S. leadership.

The administration's new urgency on U.N. reform stands in sharp contrast to its disengagement from the two-year reform debate initiated by Kofi Annan that led up to the September 2005 world summit. The administration was not sure that there was much in the way of U.N. restructuring that it really wanted. It saw merit in some of Mr. Annan's eventual proposals -- a peace- building commission to oversee countries emerging from conflict, a legally binding definition of terrorism, and recognition of a U.N. responsibility to protect endangered populations -- but it did not really need any of these.

To the extent that Washington was riled about anything at the U.N., it was about hostile dictatorships sitting on the U.N. Human Rights Commission and staffing in the U.N. Secretariat. The administration embraced Mr. Annan's proposal to replace the commission with a new council, with election rules that would make it easier to block rights-abusive governments. But Mr. Bolton's confrontational strategy would sabotage the council proposal at the summit.

The General Assembly president had done months of consultations and assembled the basic text of the declaration that would be approved at the summit when President Bush installed his new U.N. representative. Mr. Bolton immediately demanded deletion from the document of all references to the Millennium Development Goals and the targets for development assistance from wealthy countries -- targets the United States had reaffirmed in 2002.

The predictable result of frontally attacking the symbolic top priority of all developing countries was a storm of opposition to core U.S. priorities on human rights, even among developing countries friendly to the United States like India, Egypt, and Pakistan. Mr. Bolton then surrendered all summit language specifying the structure of a new human rights body, saying those essential "details" could be resolved in the General Assembly afterward.

Only when the national leaders went home did the U.S. delegation begin pressing its agenda on the human rights political body and the control of Secretariat staffing. But the opportunity for achieving a strong human rights council was at the summit, as part of a package that included development goals. What were the sweeteners for developing countries, such as recommitment to the development assistance target, are now off the table - finessed away at the summit. So the U.S. delegation resorts to brinkmanship, with threats to block the U.N. budget.

Mr. Bolton's penchant for confrontation has distressed European representatives, even as his personal intelligence has impressed them. Perversely, representatives of some Third World countries profess satisfaction that they are at last dealing with a straight-talking American envoy who does not bother to conceal Washington's supposed lust for world domination behind insincere talk of shared values and global concerns: As Mr. Bolton described it to students in North Carolina, "They enjoy dealing with someone who tells them exactly what he thinks." John Bolton, it seems, is just the man to speak power to truth.

Washington's announcement that a new human rights council - which it had never even imagined before Mr. Annan proposed it early this year -- absolutely had to be in place by March 2006 has seemed odd. Its threat to block U.N. funding is eerily reminiscent of the federal budget showdown forced by determined conservatives in Washington's domestic politics ten years ago. The political fallout from a similar game of budgetary "chicken" at the United Nations may not be what its strategists have envisioned.

Perhaps the Europeans can confect a short-term compromise and salvage something of the broader reform agenda at the United Nations. But for many conservative hardliners in Washington, the point of U.N. "reform" is still to de-fang the beast, not to give it more bite. On the U.N., as with the rest of his foreign policy, the President is constantly juggling his administration's realists and its ideological illusionists. It is a split personality that keeps the world guessing.

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