US needs to reaffirm support for global system

By: William Pfaff Raslan
First published: 3 August 04, TODAY

PARIS - For the world outside the United States, the upcoming presidential election is all about the US' international role. The result of the election will determine what choices other governments make now and in the future.

The election will thus have more influence than many may suspect on the US' future. If there is one lesson already learned from Iraq, it is that the US is neither invulnerable nor omnipotent.

It is the acknowledged superpower, but its armed forces are over-stretched desperately by Iraq and Afghanistan. They suffer seriously from a lack of support from allies, whose views were denigrated and whose objections to the war were spurned earlier by Washington. The US economy is also vulnerable because of its budget and trade deficits.

The US, thus, needs international legitimacy and allies. But whether it will have them in the future depends on what people and governments abroad think of the administration that takes power in January.

It is important to remember that the reason the US remained an uncontested superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union, until very recently, was that international society was generally content to have it as one.

Or, at least, international society was not so troubled by the situation and its implications as to challenge it or attempt seriously to subvert American predominance.

Even Russia - a deposed superpower - and China - seen by many in the US and undoubtedly inside China as a prospective superpower - were content with American predominance in the 1990s, or at least reconciled to it.

This might have been the situation still had 911 not provoked the US to react in a way that swept away the foundation of existing international relationships and alliances.

The unilateralism in action and the bullying language of the leaders of Mr George W Bush's administration may have been annoying to others and counter-productive, but the most consequential act of the US government was its repudiation of the international legal order.

The Bush administration announced policies of absolute military supremacy and unilateral pre-emption of perceived threats. It rejected the prevailing "Westphalian" international system of state sovereignties and substituted a claim to superseding or superimposing American national sovereignty. Mr Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US National Security Adviser, described it recently as an American right "to seek more security than anyone else".

The US probably did this without considering seriously the eventual implications of this claim, but it was, as Mr Brzezinski understood, "revolutionary in its subversive impact on sovereignty-based international politics".

This American claim to possess rights in international relations superior to those of anyone else, accompanied by a series of repudiations of treaties that constrained American freedom of action (such as the Geneva Agreements on the laws of war and the treatment of prisoners), naturally provoked disquiet among other governments.

These governments were inclined initially to treat these steps as the excesses of an over-excited and ideologically-aggressive Bush administration. Their subsequent endorsement, although in less abrasive language and with more persuasive arguments, by such influential people as Mr Brzezinski, identified with the Democratic Party and a member of the mainstream US policy community, was more disturbing. It was particularly so for countries or groups of countries with serious claims of their own to international power.

One of these, obviously, is the European Union, where an informal core coalition of strategically-ambitious members already exists. The EU has collectively a larger economy than the US. Further, its civil and military aerospace is already the second most important in the world, as Boeing and the American space industry have discovered.

Mr Andrew Moravcsik, director of the European Union Program at Harvard University, has argued that Europe is already in possession of "five instruments that, taken in total, constitute an influence over peace and war as great as that of the US".

These are trade policy, aid, peacekeeping and policing, international monitoring and multilateral legitimation (the last being what the US lacks in Iraq, to its considerable cost).

There is also China, with nuclear arms and a powerful, if inchoate, industrial economy; Japan, until now - but surely not indefinitely - content as a US satellite; and Russia, which still has its old strategic arms, and under President Vladimir Putin would also seem unwilling to recognise permanent US international domination -- especially if that is applied with the misconceived ambitions and maladroit tactics of recent months.

Popular political sympathy abroad for Democratic presidential candidate Mr John Kerry can be attributed to international public disappointment with the US, which, under Mr Bush, has squandered respect and sympathy. Whether these can be restored will decide the strategic choices of foreign governments eventually.

In the past, a challenge of any kind to the US seemed unneeded and possible only at the price of undermining a generally stable international system. The Bush administration has repudiated that system.

It follows that a fundamental issue for the next US administration is whether to reaffirm support for an equitable and lawful international system. Otherwise, if Washington maintains its claim to "more security" than anyone else, this eventually will be challenged.

William Pfaff writes for the International Herald Tribune.