[iwar] [fc:'New'.US.Global.Role.Pits.Unilateralism.Against.Cooperation]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-07-19 16:04:27
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Chinese.Office.Software.Challenges.Microsoft's.Win98]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:South.Korean.Hackers.Declare.War.on.US]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200207192304.g6JN4S208314@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 16:04:27 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:'New'.US.Global.Role.Pits.Unilateralism.Against.Cooperation]
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Christian Science Monitor
July 18, 2002
'New' US Global Role Pits Unilateralism Against Cooperation
US stubbornness over the International Criminal Court signals struggles to
come.
By Howard LaFranchi, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - Rome, Kyoto, Ottawa. To the average American these cities may
sound like nice places to visit, but for US policymakers they're shorthand
for a nettlesome post-cold-war trend toward constraining international
institutions and accords.
Rome conjures up the Colosseum? Nope, the International Criminal Court
(ICC), which was cobbled together in a whirlwind five-week negotiating
conference there. Kyoto suggests dreamy Shinto shrines and minimalist
gardens? Try, rather, a global climate-change agreement. And Ottawa, a cool
respite from summer's sear? Think instead: international ban on land mines.
The US has said no to all of these initiatives - considering them
unreasonable limitations on the sovereignty of the world's sole superpower.
Yet with the strong trend in such international responses to global issues
continuing, diplomatic experts say the US must develop a more proactive
approach to global initiatives - and not just because it's developing a
reputation for arrogant unilateralism. Even those experts sympathetic to
American reservations about proliferating treaties and institutions say the
US can't afford simply to react to others' proposals and lose its place as
an involved power.
The recent controversy over the ICC, for example, "is not a world-changing
issue but it is a harbinger of things to come," says William Wolforth, an
associate professor of government at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. In
the post-cold-war, globalizing world, he says, "the US is going to face
these ideas again and again, and it should ask itself if a more subtle
approach won't be better than confrontation."
At the height of the heat over the ICC, the US threatened to shut down UN
peacekeeping missions unless it got its way. The controversy was defused
Friday when the UN Security Council adopted a compromise that suspends for
one year any ICC investigation or prosecution of UN peacekeepers from
countries - such as the US - that haven't ratified the ICC treaty. This will
give the US 12 months to sign bilateral accords with the court's signatories
to avoid future prosecutions.
But as Wolforth suggests, the era of multilateral responses to a wide range
of global issues has only begun - as the internationalization of justice
suggests.
David Davenport, a legal expert at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto,
Calif., says initiatives like the ICC are part of "the new diplomacy" being
developed by "1,000 nongovernmental organizations and like-minded states."
This, he says, is a challenge to both traditional post-cold-war diplomacy
and the US in particular.
But even though he believes the US - as the world's de facto policeman and
the only military power with the reach and resources to deploy globally - is
right to rebuff the ICC as it was conceived in Rome, Mr. Davenport says the
US nevertheless can't afford to only react as other countries and NGOs
promote new ideas.
"As the US tries to figure out how to act as the world's sole superpower, it
will find we can't be isolationist about these issues, but in fact we'll
have to get more involved in international affairs," Davenport says. "The US
should be proactive on these issues to realistically fashion results more to
its liking."
Traditionally the US and the international community have worked out many
differences through diplomatic channels or great-power venues like the UN
Security Council. But such paths aren't accepted by an influential part of
the Bush administration for sending the message that the US will not accept
damaging limits to its sovereignty, says Dartmouth's Wolforth.
But one result of confrontation may be a burning of bridges the US would
like to use in the future. "In international relations, goodwill matters.
And one of the first rules is you don't pick fights where you risk winning
little but losing a lot," says James Lindsay, an analyst at the Brookings
Institution in Washington. "We seem to be burning up goodwill at a rapid
rate."
More productive for the US, says Hoover's Davenport, would be a focus on
building multilateral responses and even sympathetic NGOs to "engage the new
building multilateral responses and even sympathetic NGOs to "engage the new
diplomacy as it promotes more of the initiatives it's going to come up
with."
He notes, for example, that for all the accusations of "unilateralism"
lobbed at the US, other international powers like China, Russia, Japan, and
India have either not signed or not ratified the ICC.
Yet, he says, the US gets portrayed as "rebuffing the world."
Instead of letting that happen, he says, the US should consider banding
together with like-thinking countries to develop "a less ambitious but
perfectly effective" alternative to the ICC.
The US will have to think more in terms of shifting alliances depending on
the issue at hand, he says.
Part of that process will be recognizing that the powers behind the "new"
diplomatic endeavors - especially the European Union and large international
NGOs - have a different perspective on national sovereignty from the US.
But as Wolforth argues in a recent Foreign Affairs magazine article, one key
to US effectiveness in the world will be actively pursuing multilateral
diplomacy and resisting a temptation to "go it alone" just because America's
unique military and economic might would allow it to do so.
As Brookings' Mr. Lindsay says, "It's preferable to have a sense of the end
state you want to create, not just the end you want to avoid." 

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Discover Remote PC Acess Now
http://us.click.yahoo.com/p5uw2C/1ncEAA/Ey.GAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Chinese.Office.Software.Challenges.Microsoft's.Win98]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:South.Korean.Hackers.Declare.War.on.US]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2002-10-01 06:44:31 PDT