Abstract
Unilateralism is identified frequently as a component of George W. Bush’s foreign policy.1 Nevertheless, unilateralism antedates the Bush presidency, being already at work during Clinton’s second term in office in the refusal to sign in 1998 the Statute of Rome that created the ICC; in the endorsement of NMD (National Missile Defense) in 1999, even though it violated the existing ABM Treaty; and in the interventions without Security Council authorization against Iraq and Yugoslavia.2 George W. Bush thus inherited a unilateral foreign policy that he simply carried through to the next step: the rejection in his first three months in office of the ICC, followed by the abrogation of the ABM Treaty in December 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, to mention only the most prominent items on an otherwise much longer list.3 Therefore, the growing US unilateralism at the cusp of the millennium supplements its proclivity to use force, resulting in a substantially more assertive policy from the early post-Cold War.
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Notes
Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2003), pp. 13–4, 40–1; Charles Krauthammer, “The Bush Doctrine: In American Foreign Policy, a New Motto: Don’t Ask, Tell,” Time, March 5, 2001, p. 42.
For analyses stressing the continuity between Clinton and George W. Bush, see James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking Books, 2004), pp. 214, 286–8;
Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh, After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Comprehensive lists should also include peacekeeping, relations with the UN, chemical weapons, the Landmine Treaty, the ban on nuclear tests, human rights, global warming, and international trade relations. Steward Patrick and Shepard Forman, eds., Multilateralism and US Foreign Policy: Ambivalent Engagement (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002);
David Malone and Yuen Foong Khong, eds., Unilateralism and US Foreign Policy: International Perspectives (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003).
Elizabeth Pond, Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance (Pittsburgh: European Union Studies Association, 2004), p. 34.
Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003), pp. 144–5, 147;
Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), p. 133, chap. 4.
John Gerard Ruggie, “Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution,” in Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form, ed. Ruggie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, “International Relations Theory and the Case against Unilateralism,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (September 2005): 509–24, esp. 509–10; also see David Malone and Yuen Foong Khong, “Unilateralism and US Foreign Policy: International Perspectives,” in Unilateralism, ed. Malone and Khong, p. 3;
Sarah Kreps, Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions after the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 15–20.
Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 149.
The very historical evidence used by Krauthammer to support his argument, derived from the Gulf War, is tenuous, because no country joined the coalition solely because the United States made it clear that the invasion of Kuwait would not stand. Considerable diplomatic finesse and tact were used to secure and maintain the help of the coalition partners (especially in the cases of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Soviet Union). James Addison Baker, III, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995);
Lawrence Freedman and Ephraim Karsh, Gulf Conflict, 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).
Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), pp. 146–7;
Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), pp. 155–6; “Transcript of President Bill Clinton Second Inaugural Speech to the Nation,” New York Times, January 21, 1997.
Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary (New York: Miramax Books, 2003), p. 506.
Robert Jervis, American Foreign Policy in a New Era (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 79–80.
Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 65–6.
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in Roy S. Lee, ed., in The International Criminal Court: The Making of the Rome Statute: Issues, Negotiations, Results (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1999), pp. 479–572; Philippe Kirsch and John T. Holmes, “The Rome Conference on the International Criminal Court: The Negotiation Process,” American Journal of International Law 93 (January 1999): 2–12;
Cherif Bassiouni, “Negotiating the Treaty of Rome on the Establishment of the International Criminal Court,” Cornell Journal of International Law and Public Policy 32, no. 3 (1999): 443–70.
Philipp Meißner, The International Criminal Court Controversy: An Analysis of the United States’ Major Objections against the Rome Statute (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005), 33–56.
Kirsch and Holmes, “Rome Conference”; Lawrence Weschler, “Exceptional Cases in Rome: The United States and the Struggle for an ICC,” in The United States and the International Criminal Court: National Security and International Law, ed. Sarah Sewall and Carl Kaysen (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
David Frum, “The International Criminal Court Must Die,” Weekly Standard, August10, 1999, p. 27; also see John Bolton, “The Risks and Weaknesses of the International Criminal Court from America’s Perspective,” Law and Contemporary Problems 64 (Winter 2001): 167–80.
Benjamin Schiff, Building the International Criminal Court (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 172–9. The president has the right to waver annually such requirements, so that major allies are exempt.
Treaty between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems, signed at Moscow, May 26, 1972, reproduced in James Lindsay and Michael O’Hanlon, Defending America: The Case for Limited National Missile Defense (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2001), pp. 169–74.
Derek Smith, Deterring America: Rogue States and the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 36–40.
Bradley Graham, Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), p. 92.
Ibid. pp. 163–4; Walter Slocombe, “The Administration’s Approach,” Washington Quarterly 23 (Summer 2000): 79–85; Walter Slocombe, “Remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies,” November 5, 1999, at www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=550.
Reproduced in Anthony Cordesman, Strategic Threats and National Missile Defenses: Defending the US Homeland (Westport: Praeger, 2002), p. 21.
Victor Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (New York: Ecco, 2012), p. 237.
Ibid.; Mike Chinoy, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008). On Kuwait, see Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Conflict. On the European opposition to NMD see Graham, Hit to Kill, pp. 153–6.
Richard Garwin, “A Defense That Will Not Defend,” Washington Quarterly 23 (Summer 2000): 109–26;
George Lewis, Lisbeth Gronlund, and David Wright, “National Missile Defense: An Indefensible System,” Foreign Policy 117 (Winter 1999): 120–39; Lindsay and O’Hanlon, Defending America, chaps. 2, 4;
Richard Dean Burns, The Missile Defense Systems of George W. Bush: A Critical Assessment (Denver: Praeger, 2010), p. 149.
Anthony Cordesman, Iraq and the War of Sanctions: Conventional Threats and Weapons of Mass Destruction (Westport: Praeger, 1999), p. 178;
Graham Sarah Brown, Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), p. 57;
Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (New York: Harper, 2000).
On these efforts, see Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (London: Verso, 2002);
Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002).
Brown, Sanctioning Saddam, pp. 58–60, 78–9; Phoebe Marr, “Symposium on Dual Containment,” Middle East Policy 3, no. 1 (1994): 1–26.
Cordesman, Iraq and the War of Sanctions; Richard Butler, Saddam Defiant: The Threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Crisis of Global Security (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), pp. 96–119, 137–63, 192–5, 219–35;
Dilip Hiro, Ircaq: In the Eye of the Storm (New York: Nation Books, 2002).
Cordesman, Iraq and the War of Sanctions, pp. 225–42; Bob Woodward, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 492.
Marc Weller, “The US, Iraq, and the Use of Force in a Unipolar World,” Survivczl 41 (Winter 1999): 81–100.
James Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: US Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2003), pp. 249–50.
Paul Heinbecker, “Kosovo,” in The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21 st Century (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004), ed. David Malone, pp. 545–8.
Wesley Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat (New York: Public Affairs, 2002).
Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies at War: America, Europe, and the Crisis over Iraq (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), pp. 77–80, 121–2, 146–7.
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison Wesley, 1979), pp. 159, 105–7, 129–59.
John Mearsheimer, “The False Promise, of International Institutions,” International Security 19 (Winter 1994): 5–49, esp. fn. 13. Mearsheimer’s critique is all the more poignant since he identifies institutions with multilateralism: “The term ‘multilateralism’ is also virtually synonymous with institutions.”
See for a similar argument that the United States cannot promote, but can only prohibit policies, Samuel Huntington, “The Lonely Superpower,” Foreign Affairs 78 (March/April 1999): 35–50.
Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment Revisited,” National Interest 70 ( Winter 2002/2003): 5–17.
Lindsay and O’Hanlon, Defending America, pp. 156–8; Cordesman, Strategic Threats, pp. 66–77, 80–1; Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeier, “Russia,” in Rocket’s Red Glare: Missile Defenses and the Future of World Politics, ed. James Wirtz and Jeffrey Larsen (Boulder: Westview, 2001), pp. 219–20.
Anthony Cordesman, Iraq and the War of Sanctions: Conventional Threats and Weapons of Mass Destruction (Westport: Praeger, 1999), pp. 261–3, 273; Weller, “The US, Iraq, and the Use of Force,” pp. 84–6; Heinbecker, “Kosovo”; Gordon and Shapiro, Allies at War, pp. 122–4, 146–9.
Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 39–51;
Bradford Perkins, The Creation of a Republican Empire, Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 22–4;
Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 5–15.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Unilateralism in Historical Perspective,” in Understanding Unilateralism in American Foreign Relations, ed. Gwyn Prins (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2000), pp. 20–9, 20, 24; Lieven, America Right or Wrong; Lynch and Singh, After Bush, pp. 37–8; Leffler, “Bush’s Foreign Policy”; Gaddis, Surprise, Security and the American Experience.
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© 2013 Tudor A. Onea
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Onea, T.A. (2013). The Indispensable Nation and US Unilateralism. In: US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137359353_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137359353_5
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