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POLITICS-U.S.: Unipolarity Re-Affirmed
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 10 (IPS) - Just one week ago, conventional wisdom both here
and in European capitals was that President George
W. Bush's second term would see a modest turn
toward multilateralism and a new readiness to
compromise on key issues with traditional U.S. allies.
Today, however, that particular conventional wisdom is
being questioned amid renewed anxiety that the
unilateralist trajectory on which Bush launched the
United States after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New
York and the Pentagon is back on track.
The biggest single reason for the change was
Monday's nomination of John Bolton, undersecretary of
state for arms control and international security during
the first term, to the high-profile post of U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations.
The problem, as pointed out by a number of
Democrats, is that virtually everything Bolton has ever
said about the U.N. suggests that he thinks the world,
and particularly the U.S., would be better off without it,
once opining (before 9/11) that if the U.N.. secretariat
building lost 10 stories, "it wouldn't make a bit of
difference".
"This nomination is a poke in the eye to the world
diplomatic community and a signal that the Bush
administration is going to continue its unilateralist
approach," noted Joe Volk, executive secretary of a
major peace group, Friends Committee for National
Legislation (FCNL), one of a growing number of groups
who are gearing up for a lobbying campaign to
persuade senators to oppose Bolton's confirmation.
Former Ambassador Chas Freeman described the
appointment as "the equivalent of dropping a neutron
bomb on the organisation".
But whatever the nomination said about Bush's attitude
toward the U.N., it also demonstrated that Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, who is supposed to serve as
his superior if he is confirmed by the Senate, will likely
play a much less powerful role in Bush's second term
than had been thought, particularly in the wake of her
two tours - one with the president - of Europe last
month.
Knowing how much Bolton had undermined former
Secretary of State Colin Powell during the first term,
Rice resisted pressure from Bolton, his Congressional
backers and Vice President Dick Cheney by refusing to
appoint him as her deputy secretary of state -
choosing instead arch-realist Robert Zoellick - in what
was seen as a kind of declaration of independence
from the hawks perched in Cheney's office and around
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
That defiance, followed by her triumphal tours of
Europe where she repeatedly promised closer
consultation, was widely considered a sign that the
"realists," previously led by Powell, had a new
champion at Foggy Bottom and one who also enjoyed
a much closer personal relationship with the president
than her predecessor.
But the nomination of Bolton - who really served as
Cheney's and Rumsfeld's cat's paw at the State
Department under Powell - has profoundly challenged
the notion that Rice can stand up to them.
The fact that her strongest argument in favour of Bolton
when she was challenged by senators privately on the
decision to send him to the U.N. was that his tenure
there may persuade him to modify his hard-line views,
just as former anti-communist President Richard Nixon
decided to launch a strategic relationship with
Communist China in the early 1970s, confirmed to
many here that Bolton was being forced down her
throat.
While Bolton's nomination was the immediate cause of
the reassessment that is now taking place, there have
been other signs that the balance of power within the
administration has indeed shifted strongly toward the
hawks.
Perhaps the most important was the little-noted
appointment of J.D. Crouch as the deputy national
security adviser under Rice's former deputy, Stephen
Hadley. While Hadley's foreign policy views were seen
as a mixture of realism and Cheney's aggressive
nationalism, Crouch, who served most recently as
ambassador to Romania, is regarded as a right-wing
extremist on both domestic and foreign policy issues.
A protege of William Van Cleave, a Rumsfeld ally and
one of the leaders of the Committee on the Present
Danger (CPD) in the 1970s who claimed that the Soviet
Union intended to fight and win a nuclear war with the
United States (whose daughter now serves as the chief
of counter-intelligence under Rumsfeld), Crouch was
also a favourite of then-Defence Secretary Cheney
during Bush's father's administration, 1989-1993.
He worked in the Pentagon's policy division under the
current deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, and I.
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who has been Cheney's chief of
staff and national security adviser over the past four
years.
After the first Gulf War in 1991-92, Wolfowitz, Libby and
Crouch were all involved in the draft of a controversial
Defence Planning Guidance (DPG), parts of which
were leaked to the New York Times and then explicitly
repudiated by the administration.
It called for global engagement by the U.S. on its own
terms calling for a military posture designed to deter
"potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger
regional or global role".
It also urged Washington to create "ad hoc
assemblies" to deal with crisis situations - the 1992
version of "coalitions of the willing" - and a doctrine of
unilateral military pre-emption "to prevent the
development or use of weapons of mass destruction".
And it predicted that U.S. military interventions would be
a "constant fixture" of the new world order. It omitted any
role for the U.N. in preserving international peace and
security.
When the draft was leaked to the Times, it caused an
uproar, with Democratic Senator Joseph Biden
claiming that it amounted to a prescription for a "Pax
Americana" and others that it would make Washington
the "world's policeman".
On Thursday, the Boston Globe reported that Rumsfeld
has set forth the main priorities for the Pentagon's
latest "Quadrennial Defence Review" (QDR), a major
policy paper to guide strategic planning through the
end of the decade and beyond.
Among the most prominent priorities, according to the
Globe account, will be preventing the emergence of a
"peer competitor", stopping the spread of weapons of
mass destruction (WMD), and dramatically expanding
the size of U.S. special forces in order to operate more
freely and unilaterally worldwide.
The Globe, which described the Rumsfeld memo
setting out his priorities as having a "go-it-alone" tone,
omitted boilerplate language that has appeared in
previous QDRs about the importance of U.S. alliances
or the U.N.
The unipolar world conceived by Wolfowitz & Co. in
1991 was expressed best by Bolton himself back in
2000.
"If I were redoing the Security Council today, I'd have
one permanent member because that's the real
reflection of the distribution of power in the world," he
said during an interview with National Public Radio's
Juan Williams.
"And that one member would be, John Bolton?"
Williams asked.
"The United States," Bolton responded. (END/2005)
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