How the USA lost its unquestioned place as defender of world peace

George Bush is right when he warns that the United Nations risks irrelevance. Its failure in the past decade to hold Iraq to account on the surrender undertakings it gave at the end of the Gulf War is surpassed only by its decision last week to put Muammar Gaddafi's Libya in charge of its global human rights watchdog.

And as Washington masses men and machines for another war against Iraq, it and much of the rest of the world are locked in a struggle that well might mark the end of the UN's usefulness as a global forum.

The eccentricity of giving control of the UN Commission on Human Rights to the Libyan terrorist at a time when terrorism is the clear and present danger is a signpost to the global wastelands in which the UN might finish up. However, the fact that it managed to slip the US into the straitjacket of weapons inspections in Iraq is proof that it remains a wily player.

How the US responds to the UN's Iraq agenda may seal the fate of the organisation set up in 1945 with a charter for global peace, security and co-operation after the horror of World War II. Now it holds court in a 39-storey tower overlooking the East River from Manhattan.

The diplomatic cut and thrust of the General Assembly and the Security Council conveys a notion of equality between nations - it was the "fair" rotation of jobs that landed Libya in the human rights job.

But reality is a different story.

"Superpower" doesn't start to describe the unprecedented combination of military and economic power that is America. Washington, in the evolving jargon of academia, is the "hyperpower" that strides the world with an assertiveness not seen since the early days of the Cold War.

George Bush is the global cop, offering protection everywhere from Jerusalem to Seoul. He has more than one million men and women under arms on four continents and his carrier battle groups are on every ocean. His military spending equals the combined defence budget of the next 14 highest-spending countries.

Even with all that security, there is much to fear. The world is on the edge of its seat as the US does the splits between Baghdad and Pyongyang. And as it gets deeper into the war on terrorism, the US has gone out of its way to disparage or belittle the international forums and treaties that were the stepping-stones to its own greatness.

But something has gone wrong. In the decade between the end of the Cold War and the start of the war on terrorism, the balance between the two superpowers, America and the Soviet Union, and much of what that implied - safety and security wrought by a fear of mutually assured destruction - suddenly dissolved. And so, unburdened, a less-caring US forgot about the problems of the world as it revelled in an economic boom at home.

The first president Bush and then Bill Clinton did little to renovate or renew the international diplomatic and military infrastructure that had been vital to keeping the peace in the half-century after World War II.

In the words of one American scholar, they made a good show of pretending that nothing had changed.

Now the Clinton years are derided as a time of irresolution, half-baked humanitarian interventions and limp responses to terrorism. Washington turned its back on Afghanistan and Africa; and it walked away from the UN, closing its chequebook instead of sending the president to make speeches like Bush did in the days after September 11 and again before Christmas - speeches that might have demanded a response.

And when Clinton did intervene on the side of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, he did so with such reluctance that it won him little kudos in the Islamic world. When he ran from Somalia because a handful of US servicemen died there in 1994, Osama bin Laden laughed in his face. And humanitarian intervention in Rwanda was too little and too late.

The difference a decade makes shows in the Iraq wars. At this point in the 1990-91 crisis - only weeks from when fighting might start - Bush senior had built a global coalition of committed support and participation for a diplomatic and military machine that went out and won a war. Now, almost 18 months after the September 11 attacks, Bush junior has shifted his focus from terrorists to his father's old enemy Saddam, and is labouring to get men and machines to the Gulf with no international consensus to back him.

Hindsight is easy, of course. But Michael Ignatieff's take on the missed opportunities of the '90s is pertinent, all the more so because this human-rights professor from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government is a liberal who supports the war on terrorism and who is on the verge of supporting war against Iraq.

He says: "At the end of the Cold War there was a historic opportunity similar to 1945 - but we missed it. Look at the incredible number of instruments devised between 1945 and 1951." And he reels them off, starting with the UN Charter, the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO), the Geneva Convention, before concluding:

"The whole order of the next 50 years was created in about four years.

"But we came out of the collapse of the USSR [and the end of the Cold War] with a shallow triumphalism that said no revision was needed. US presidents thought they could have imperial domination on the cheap, ruling the world without putting in place any new imperial architecture - the new military alliances, new legal institutions and the new international development organisations needed for a post-colonial, post-Soviet world.

"It was a failure of the historic imagination, an inability to grasp that the crises emerging in so many overlapping zones of the world - from Egypt to Afghanistan - eventually would become a security threat at home.

"Set against the marker of 1945-51, we failed abysmally in the '90s. The whole postwar international order was set up by my parents' generation, but the Clinton and Blair generations just coped. They didn't invent; there's no legacy."

September 11 was the cement of unity - but only briefly. NATO went on an immediate war footing while an editorial in Le Monde declared: "We are all New Yorkers." But now the trans-Atlantic hostility is palpable - Washington says Europe is soft on terrorism; the Europeans say US arrogance makes consultation and common purpose difficult.

The attacks on New York and Washington accentuated America's new isolationism and gave it a new urgency. But they didn't start it. Treaties have been falling like ninepins since Bush's presidential victory; during the 2000 campaign Condoleezza Rice was disparaging about "an illusory international community"; and the Bush team wore as a badge of honour its contempt for Clinton the internationalist.

In office for two years now, they have sculpted the Bush doctrine as a blunt instrument. The US will make decisions on the basis of its own interests, not some international greater good; if others disagree, too bad, and when necessary, Washington will use its unprecedented power to get its way.

The Bush Administration accepts only the multinational institutions that it sees going its way - the World Trade Organisation is in, but the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol on climatic change and treaties on landmines and even on biological weapons are out.

This is not just a passing tiff. There are many shoot-from-the-lip conclusions by media commentators that NATO, once the cornerstone of the Cold War peace, is "dead". An exaggeration, perhaps. But trawling the thoughts of "serious observers", Philip Gordon, a foreign policy scholar at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, is struck by an emerging consensus that significant damage is being done.

He quotes Jeffrey Gedmin, the director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin: "The old alliance holds little promise of figuring prominently in US global strategic thinking." And the influential Robert Kagan in Brussels: "It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world."

And Gordon himself concludes: "If the differences are mishandled, the result could be a trans-Atlantic divide deeper than any seen in more than 50 years."

Finding blame on both sides, he says: "Acting on the false premise that Washington does not need allies - or that it will find more reliable or more important ones elsewhere - could ultimately cost the US the support and co-operation of those most likely to be useful to it in an increasingly dangerous world."

US analysts trace Woodrow Wilson's doctrine of the "common interest of mankind" and Great Power co-operation through various World War II and Cold War presidencies - Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Reagan.

But marking the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, foreign affairs scholar Michael Hirsh notes in the journal Foreign Affairs:

"Many of the institutions that the Bush hardliners have so little use for were conceived as part of a [Wilsonian] new vision to correct the weakness of Western democratic capitalism in the face of opportunist threats like Fascism and Marxism-Leninism.

"The yearly round of talks at [these] institutions is the social glue of global civilisation. But Bush, to judge by his actions, appears to believe in a kind of unilateral civilisation. NATO gets short shrift, the United Nations is an afterthought, treaties are not considered binding and the Administration brazenly sponsors protectionist measures at home, such as new steel tariffs and farm subsidies.

"Any compromise of Washington's freedom to act is treated as a hostile act."

All of this is not the fault of the US. Europe has a population of almost 400 million and GDP exceeding $US8 trillion ($13.5 trillion). During and after the Cold War, it was able to focus on dialogue and diplomacy in the knowledge that US military power was always on call. But there is little for the US in Europe today, so Europe can't expect to be babysat, no more than the US can expect to bully.

What is the issue - is it about how the US leads? Or about how the rest of the world is led? What change would be required in the style and substance of US leadership to win an enthusiastic embrace rather than sullen acquiescence from the rest of the world?

And is this about more than trans-Atlantic relations? Where do Russia and China fit in this post-Cold War world? If the US tells the world that it's all right to abandon arms treaties, why can't North Korea walk away from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty?

If the US thinks it's fine to adopt a defence strategy of pre-emptive strikes against even those it only suspects are a threat, what about others which inevitably will refuse to wait for solid evidence or international legitimacy? Pakistan or India? Russia? China or Taiwan? Israel? Are we on the verge of another arms race if, when push comes to shove, a would-be nuclear power like North Korea can stare down the US? What rogue state looking at the recent experience of Iraq and North Korea would not opt for nuclear weapons?

And do Japan and South Korea decide that to keep the regional balance, they must go nuclear? If Iran leaps the nuclear hurdle, do Turkey and Saudi Arabia do likewise? And if US impatience totally discredits the notion of international weapons inspections in Iraq, how will we be sure what others are doing in the future? Will they be bombed, just in case?

Democratic double standards don't help either, particularly by a President who insists that he is driven by "moral clarity".

If Washington cosies up with Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Indonesia and Uzbekistan, it is not surprising that some around the world have difficulty believing its urgent desire to deliver democracy, human rights and freedom to the Iraqis and Palestinians. In its haste, Washington seems to have forgotten Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's friendly visit to Baghdad in the early '80s, even as Saddam was dropping gas on Iran in a war that Iraq started. And little thought is given to Washington's disastrous past dealings with the Shah in Iran, Mobutu in Zaire, Soeharto in Indonesia, Duarte in El Salvador, the Nigerian generals and Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party.

This is not simply an American problem. Just as Washington needs to adjust to changed circumstances, so too does Europe. Some in Europe box on as though little has changed. But it has, and they need to respond.

As Hirsh puts it:

"American power is the [key] ... It oversees the global system from unassailable heights, from space and from the seas. And if Bush has his way, this rise to hegemony will continue. As he said in his West Point speech: 'America has, and intends to keep, military strength beyond challenge.'"

But Hirsh sees a middle way between Europe's "squishy globalism" and Bush's "take-it-or-leave-it unilateralism".

"A new international consensus, built on a common vision of the international system, is possible," he says. "In today's world, American military and economic dominance is a decisive factor and must be maintained but mainly to be the shadow enforcer of the international system Americans have done so much to create in the last century.

"It's the international system and its economic and political norms that again must do the groundwork of keeping order and peace: deepening the ties that bind nations together; co-opting failed states such as Afghanistan, potential rogues and 'strategic competitors'; and isolating, if not destroying, terrorists."

However, in urging that the US has to listen as well as be heard, Georgetown University's Professor John Ikenberry, warns of dire consequences in the present US strategy: "[It] threatens to rend the fabric of the international community and political partnerships, precisely at a time when that community and those partnerships are urgently needed."

But here's the rub. At the same time, Ikenberry articulates the powerful Washington imperative that Europe has yet to accept:

"In a world of asymmetrical threats, the global balance of power is not the linchpin of war and peace. Likewise, liberal strategies of building order around open trade and democratic institutions might have some long-term impact on terrorism, but they do not address the immediacy of the threats.

"Apocalyptic violence is at our doorstep. So efforts at strengthening the rules and institutions of the international community are of little practical value. If we accept the worst-case imaginings of [Donald Rumsfeld], everything else is secondary: international rules, traditions of partnership and standards of legitimacy. It is a war."

If Ikenberry's contradiction cannot be resolved, history will be a harsh judge of what Ignatieff calls the missed opportunities and the shallow triumphalism of the '90s. For now, the war on terrorism is the only prism that matters. That might change with time and with it, perhaps, America's worldview.