POLITICS-US: Cold War, and More

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Commentary Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 24 2001 (IPS) - This week’s foreign-policy cliché was ‘Cold War’. That phrase cropped up in headlines all over the country after the new administration of President George W. Bush announced that it was expelling 50 Russian diplomats, apparently in retaliation for running a highly successful intelligence operation in which a senior Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official played a key role.

Moscow promptly indicated it would return the favour by expelling an equal number of US diplomats – the kind of tit-for-tat mass expulsions common at the height of the Cold War period, most recently in the mid-1980s when Ronald Reagan was denouncing the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”.

But understanding this week’s events as limited to bilateral ties between Washington and Moscow would be to miss the point. Indeed, the timing of the expulsion – on the day that the highest-ranking Chinese official to Washington in two years was received by Bush at the White House did not appear to be coincidental.

“It seems the administration wants to send a message to all concerned: ‘we’re tough, we’re really, really tough’,” said one Congressional aide who works for a Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Coming two weeks after Bush rejected appeals by South Korean President and last year’s Nobel Peace Laureate Kim Dae Jung to swiftly resume direct negotiations with North Korea on permanently freezing its long- range missile programme, as well as its missile exports to “rogue states”, the expulsion order appeared to confirm a decisive break with Bill Clinton’s diplomacy of negotiation and co-operation.

Administration officials insist that they are trying to inject “hard-headedness” and a “new realism” into US diplomacy after eight years of what they claim was a “romantic” perspective, especially toward Russia and China, practised by the Clinton administration.

But critics, who are becoming more numerous and more worried virtually by the day, see a new belligerence – some even have described it as a “chip on the shoulder” – in Washington’s diplomacy in the two months since Bush was inaugurated, a belligerence which could well increase tensions just about everywhere, given Washington’s global pre-eminence.

The chief source of this new surliness within the administration appears to be in the persons of Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, both seasoned Washington veterans and formidable bureaucratic in-fighters who first came to prominence under Richard Nixon almost 30 years ago.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, the administration’s most public foreign-policy spokesman, is generally seen as having far more relaxed and conciliatory views of the rest of the world, especially potential US rivals, Russia and China. One Washington Post columnist this week described him as “Our Champion of Continuity,” with Clinton’s policy.

But Powell appears increasingly outflanked and outgunned by Rumsfeld and Cheney, as well as by rightwing forces in Congress who have been actively mobilising to place their own ideological soul-mates in key positions, even in the State Department.

John Bolton, a former Reagan official long championed by the ultra- right chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, was thus appointed to become Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, one of the Department’s half-dozen most influential posts.

An outspoken exponent of US unilateralism, Bolton, in almost total contrast to Powell, has opposed virtually every arms-control treaty signed by Washington over the last 20 years. His appointment to the top State Department arms-control post demonstrated to many experts here the limits of Powell’s influence.

Similarly, Powell appears to have played virtually no role in this week’s appointment of Otto Reich to the State Department’s top Latin America position.

Powell had recommended a career foreign services candidate. But right-wing forces, led by hard-line anti-Castro forces from the Cuban- American community pushed hard for Reich, a Cuban exile who, under Reagan, headed an office which ran a covert propaganda operation to influence US public opinion in favour of the US-backed Nicaraguan contras and who, more recently helped draft the notorious Helms-Burton Act to tighten the 40-year-old US trade embargo against Havana.

On substantive issues as well, Powell has suffered a number of setbacks. He was deeply embarrassed when Bush rebuffed Kim just hours after Powell himself had assured reporters that Washington was ready to resume talks with North Korea where Clinton had left off.

He has also appeared to lose other, less public skirmishes. He has been forced, for example, to harden his initial positions on Iraq, the Balkans, and deployment of National Missile Defence (NMD).

Indeed, NMD deployment appears to be the top foreign-policy priority of the Cheney-Rumsfeld faction and which, according to the CIA, could lead to an arms race with China and could suck in India, Pakistan, other Mideastern states and Russia, as well.

Powell also argued for a more-flexible US position on pending negotiations on global warming and the Kyoto Protocol, only to get shot down by the White House.

Indeed, whispered speculation about how long Powell may wish to remain in this administration as it turns ever-rightward has grown steadily since the Kim visit.

At the same as Powell appears be losing battles, Cheney and Rumsfeld are filling key operational positions in their domains with their acolytes who share their dark outlook on the rest of the world, especially China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.

They include Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s chief deputy, as well as his choices for the top policy positions in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone. They also include “Scooter” Lilly, Cheney’s top foreign policy adviser who served as counsel for a Congressional commission which, on evidence which was roundly denounced by many in the scientific and intelligence community, found that China was engaged in a massive intelligence operation to obtain top US weapons secrets.

Indeed, China clearly is seen as the major long-term threat for the new administration which must decide next month whether to provide Taiwan with advanced naval destroyers equipped with Aegis radar systems.

This week, Vice Premier Qian Qichen, who met with Bush Thursday, warned that such a sale would constitute a “grave violation” of previous Sino-US accords and would move China and Taiwan toward a “military solution”.