November 17, 2003 6:00 AM

A real leader could do this, but then we're talking about George W. Bush here....

Power without paranoia

(This post can also be found at Open Source Politics)

Today, it is the United States that finds itself alone. In the last three weeks, there were two votes on the Middle East in the U.N. General Assembly. In one, the vote was 133 to 4, and in the other, it was 144 to 4 -- the United States, Israel, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia. Japan and all of our NATO allies, including Great Britain and the so-called "new" Europe, voted with the majority.

- Zbigniew Brzezinski

Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, America and it's "Big Stick" was respected as a bastion of freedom and fair play. Then came Ronald Reagan and Bush pere and fils. No longer do you hear "American" and "credibility" ever being used in the same sentence. This is what the "America first, last, and always" policy of three Republican Presidents has brought us to.

Forty years ago, an important emissary was sent to France by a beleaguered president of the United States. It was during the Cuban missile crisis, and the emissary was a tough-minded former secretary of state, Dean Acheson. His mission was to brief French President Charles de Gaulle and solicit his support in what could become a nuclear war involving not just the United States and the Soviet Union but the entire NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact.

At the end of the briefing, Acheson said to de Gaulle, "I would now like to show you the evidence, the photographs that we have of Soviet missiles armed with nuclear weapons." The French president responded, "I do not wish to see the photographs. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me. Please tell him that France stands with America."

Would any foreign leader today react the same way to an American emissary sent abroad to say that country X is armed with weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States? It is unlikely. The recent conduct of U.S. foreign policy, by distorting the threats facing America, has isolated the United States and undermined its credibility. It has damaged our ability to deal with issues in North Korea, Iran, Russia and the West Bank. If a case ever needs to be made for action against a truly imminent threat, will any nation take us seriously?

Like the little boy who cried "Wolf!!" too often, American efforts to deal with international crises are handicapped by an international presumption of ulterior motives on our part. Judging by the Bush Administration's willing to lie to it's own people in order to win support for invading Iraq, that suspicion is well-placed.

Trust goes a long way in international diplomacy, but American leadership has shown itself willing to protect it's own interests even at the expenses of our own credibility. Can we reaonably claim to be be surprised at the current French refusal to back the war in Iraq? Certainly, some of Jacques Chirac's reluctance is based on French domestic politics, but the Bush Administration has operated in the international diplomatic community with a disturbingly heavy hand. Consensus is generally a good thing in diplomacy, hence the raison d'etre for the United Nations. Failing to achieve that consensus, however, the Bush Administration has demonstrated that it will do what it pleases regardless of world opinion.

The loss of U.S. international credibility and the growing U.S. isolation are aspects of a troubling paradox: American power worldwide is at its historic zenith, but American global political standing is at its nadir. Maybe we are resented because we are rich, and we are, or because we are powerful, and we certainly are. But I think anyone who thinks that this is the full explanation is taking the easy way out and engaging in a self-serving justification.

Since the tragedy of 9/11, our government has embraced a paranoiac view of the world summarized in a phrase President Bush used on Sept. 20, 2001: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." I suspect officials who have adopted the "with us or against us" formulation don't know its historical origins. It was used by Lenin to attack the social democrats as anti-Bolshevik and justify handling them accordingly. This phrase is part of our policy-makers' defining focus, summed up by the words "war on terrorism." War on terrorism reflects, in my view, a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy for a superpower and for a great democracy with genuinely idealistic traditions.

Our country suffers from another troubling condition, a fear that periodically verges on blind panic. As a result, we lack a clear perception of critical security issues such as the availability to our enemies of weapons of mass destruction. In recent months, we have experienced perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in U.S. history. That failure was fueled by a demagogy that emphasizes worst-case scenarios, stimulates fear and induces a dichotomous view of world reality.

It is important to ask ourselves, as citizens, whether a world power can provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety. Can we really mobilize support, even of friends, when we tell them that if you are not with us you are against us?

We may be the biggest kid on the block, but we still are not in a position where we can reasonably go it alone. Iraq is a perfect example of that. Given the American rush to "justice", it is understandable that Western countries are quite willing to let Americans do the fighting and dying. What incentive does the West have to commit to send their own troops and accepting the pending reality of receiving body bags in return?

No thinking world leader will get behind a fait accompli that will result in the death of their countrymen with no discernable positive result. Don't believe me? Just look at the Italian example from Nasariya.

The ironically Bolshevik example posed by the "if you're not with us, you're against us" rubruc simply proves that the Bushies just don't "get it". This philosophy could reasonably be taken as proof positive that George W. Bush is in way over his head on the world stage. Come to think of it, he's not exactly lighting it up when it comes to domestic policy, either.

Twelve months, y'all, and then we get to send Bush back to Crawford with his tail between his legs.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on November 17, 2003 6:00 AM.

She isn't really talking about what I think she's talking about...is she?? was the previous entry in this blog.

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