July 31, 2001
White House Says the U.S. Is Not a Loner, Just Choosy
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, July 30 — In his first six months in office, President Bush has abandoned a treaty on fighting global warming, rejected protocols enforcing a ban on germ warfare, demanded amendments to an accord on illegal sales of small arms, threatened to skip an international conference on racism and vowed to withdraw from a landmark pact limiting ballistic missile defenses.
The reaction from Berlin to Beijing has been one of concern that an American president who walks away from so many treaties might be one who wants to walk away from the world — or, at the least, one who will demand that the world live by terms dictated by America alone.
Mr. Bush's advisers deny that he is unilateralist or isolationist, or that his administration has a blanket disdain for group action as a way of conducting world affairs. They simply view treaties as a steam-engine-age tool whose usefulness this deep into the nuclear era will be judged one issue at a time, one negotiation at a time, one summit meeting at a time.
"What you're going to get from this administration is `à la carte multilateralism,' " said Richard Haass, the State Department's director of policy planning, coining a name for the administration's approach.
At a gathering last week at the Nixon Center here, he added, "We'll look at each agreement and make a decision, rather than come out with a broad-based approach."
So far, the administration has displayed unanimity in formulating international policy, with only a few differences so pronounced as to become public. One concerns the global warming treaty. While Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told foreign leaders earlier this month that the United States would have a counterproposal to the Kyoto accord in time for an October conference in Morocco, Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, said last weekend that the administration had no such deadline.
In general, Mr. Bush and his most senior advisers say they are applying what they see as a hard- headed assessment of treaties case by case, and based on America's interests.
President Clinton, in contrast, embraced arms control negotiations. He sent his envoys to Moscow to seek a grand bargain with Russia that would defend the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty by amending it, coupled with a new round of formal talks on strategic arms reductions. He also signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and sent it to the Senate, where it languishes today.
It should be noted, however, that President Bush is criticized for rejecting two agreements that even Mr. Clinton did not wholeheartedly advocate: the international ban on land mines and an accord establishing a permanent International Criminal Court.
Under President Bush, there will be no rush to lengthy negotiations simply on the premise of history that talk is good. Treaties, Mr. Bush and his advisers say, will be adopted when they clearly carve American interests in stone. In some areas of arms control, the administration believes that treaties bind only the honest but give cover to the cheat. And on nuclear arms control in particular, treaties move too slowly to manage a dynamic yet still uncertain relationship with Russia at a time when historic reductions in arsenals are conceivable, officials say.
"You'll not find a more internationalist administration than this administration," Ms. Rice said Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation." She criticized policies under which "internationalism somehow becomes defined as signing on to bad treaties just to say that you've signed a treaty."
But by knocking off several of the hard-earned, high-profile treaties on arms control and the environment, Mr. Bush has been subjected to outrage from some of America's closest friends — who wonder what will replace a world ordered by treaties — as well as its adversaries who see arrogance in Mr. Bush's actions.
The British, for example, consider themselves America's greatest friends in Europe and often find themselves defending United States behavior to dubious Continentals. But their task has been complicated by what many perceive as American unilateralism and finger-in-the-eye confrontation in place of diplomacy.
Any missile shield will have to use British radar and tracking facilities, and Labor politicians have already threatened Prime Minister Tony Blair with the kinds of protests that were widespread in Britain during the years when American missiles were based there.
As for the environment, Britain is very green politically and the press denounced Mr. Bush after he rejected the Kyoto agreement on global warming; The Independent published a front page picture of him under the caption "Polluter of the World."
There was a notable change in feeling across Europe last week, after the Group of 8 conference in Genoa, that Mr. Bush was now interested in reconciliation with leaders who had been put off by some of his early decisions.
Even so, writing in the German weekly Die Zeit, Theo Sommer compared Mr. Bush's style to that of Andrei A. Gromyko, the grizzled Soviet foreign minister known to a generation of diplomats as "Grim Grom" and "Mr. Nyet."
"The president says `no,' not grimly, but with a smile. Yet he shows his teeth in doing so," Mr. Sommer wrote. "He does not concede, he does not give up, he does not surrender. He offers everyone consultations, partners and rivals alike; he promises to keep in touch; that is why, he assures everyone, you cannot talk about an American go-it-alone attitude. Yet the conversations are aimed at conversion, not compromise."
In China, the president's actions have served to cement in the public mind their government's characterization of the United States as hegemonic. The word, featured prominently and frequently in state newspaper headlines, is among the first adjectives that come to mind for everyone from university students to migrant laborers when asked what they think of America.
"After Bush came into power, the most noteworthy aspect of his administration's foreign policy is unilateralism," Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Qinghua University, wrote last week in the People's Daily. "It neither negotiates with the principal countries whose interests are involved nor exchanges views with its allies on international affairs."
Regardless of a presidential candidate's politics and personal desires, the realities of global responsibility constrain any American president — something that each new occupant of the White House learns after the quadrennial irritation of new policy reviews ordered up after Inauguration Day.
Just as few war plans survive the first engagement with the enemy, so do presidential perceptions adapt to the first handshake with a rival and a first tour of the world aboard Air Force One.
President Bush entered office vowing to speedily scrap the ABM Treaty, regardless of Russian objections. There is little doubt that Mr. Bush still plans to invoke the six-month notice to legally withdraw from the pact. But after he met President Vladimir V. Putin, and said he had looked into the Russian's soul, Mr. Bush instructed his national security team to begin accelerated discussions to create a new security framework with Russia as a partner.
"Our critics and the people who love the ABM Treaty probably have trouble accepting the idea that that is a framework of mutual enmity, but that's what it reflects," Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, said in an interview. The administration's goal is "to replace that framework of dealing with each other as potential adversaries with a framework of dealing with one another as potential allies — and if that's too strong a word, perhaps it is at least countries with major security interests in common," he said.
Indeed, the administration points to a list of nonproliferation treaties it supports as essential to United States and global security, including the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Nonproliferation Treaty.
But the administration faces a new challenge on its nonproliferation policy, deliberating over the last months how to explain its stance on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ahead of a conference this September at the United Nations in New York. The nation's closest allies will be exhorting holdout states to move forward on the test ban, yet the administration has made it clear that it is content to have the treaty remain frozen in the Senate.
Japan's foreign minister, Makiko Tanaka, urged the administration again just last week to push for ratification, and urged Mr. Bush to send a high-level delegation to the meeting in September. So far, the administration has not been moved.
Mr. Bush did undergo a transformation on the nation's obligations to peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo: although he criticized such deployments during the campaign, he has since determined that tending to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, perhaps the most successful multilateral alliance in history, is worth keeping American combat boots deep in the Balkan mud — at least as long as the allies do, too.
The administration is striking back at Congress, which always has members exhibiting a strong isolationist — or at least independent — streak, for what Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, described today as acts of unilateralism and attempts to hobble the president's global role.
He attacked those who support a union-led campaign to thwart tenets of the North American Free Trade Agreement and keep Mexican truckers off American highways, and who also are hampering the president in trade negotiations; most of them are Democrats.
"I think it's a worrisome indication that there's some people on the Hill who are pursuing an isolationist path," Mr. Fleischer said. "And the president would like to stop that from happening."
