In Defense of America

by Bronwen Maddox

  The Military Burden

  The United States’ strongest case overall to be upholding international institutions is perhaps its continuing acceptance of its role as “the world’s policeman,” even though the Cold War has ended. That includes its acceptance of the lion’s share of NATO’s responsibilities even though the circumstances which prompted the creation of the alliance are gone.

  To some extent, the sheer amount of money America spends on its military will give it the role of the world’s policeman in any crisis, unless it bluntly refuses to take it up. Even before Iraq, the United States spent more on defense than the next ten countries combined, but that war has taken the discrepancy to even greater heights. In February 2008, President Bush asked Congress for $515 billion, and analysts reckon that 2009 could see outlays of $675 billion —depending on how many troops are kept in Iraq —which would take up 4.4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. In comparison, Britain spends about £25 billion ($50 billion) a year on defense —about 2.5 percent of its economy —in turn, a much higher proportion than in continental Europe.

  In Afghanistan, a NATO-led effort, the United States still supplies half of the development aid, three-quarters of the military contribution, and 85 percent of the airpower. And it has complained about it; at the start of 2008, Robert Gates, secretary of defense, attacked European allies for not sending more troops. On this point, he is not on the strongest ground, for all the righteousness with which he expressed it. After September 11, NATO members responded, as they were obliged to under the alliance’s Article 5, which mandates a commitment to assist another member under attack. Yet the Afghan mission has broadened from the pursuit of Osama bin Laden into setting up all the institutions of state for one of the world’s poorest countries —a much more difficult task, and not clearly under the original mandate.

  It is understandable that European governments, which do not consider themselves as directly under threat from Afghanistan as does the United States, have not responded as vigorously. (It also seems particularly perverse to berate the German government for keeping its soldiers out of fierce fighting —a stance the German public firmly supports —when America and Europe spent half a century persuading Germany to excise its military reflexes.)

  But as a general lament about NATO, the United States has a good case in arguing that Europe should not take the American contribution for granted, and should pay more of the cost for battles close to home.

  The United Nations

  The United States also has good grounds for some of its frustration with the United Nations, two words that send conservative Americans into a frenzy of exasperation, although the Bush administration went too far in its rejection of the principle of searching for common ground with other countries.

  There is a long history behind the United States’ irritation, reflected in its intermittent refusal to pay its dues to the United Nations (where it is the largest contributor). It certainly has a good reason to object to the actions of the General Assembly, the only UN body in which every one of the 192 member countries has an equal voice, and which sets the budget, makes resolutions, and appoints temporary members of the Security Council. It is one of the few arenas in which tiny countries can snub the superpower, and they take full advantage of it.

  In many of these countries, politicians find it so valuable to be seen to challenge America that their opposition to American initiatives in the United Nations is almost automatic. More than two-thirds of the members of the General Assembly are developing countries, and for the past twenty years, they have made north-south relations the dominant theme of debates. Their anti-American reflexes can lead to absurdity. In the 2006 vote against the deployment of weapons in space, which America lost by 160 votes to 1, many piled on against the superpower even though they had no direct interest or capability in space, a swipe that cost them nothing. The United States is also right to have dismissed as a politicized insult the vote in 2001 which threw it off the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (whose members included such champions of human rights as China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia). At the same time, again by countries eager to score points, America was voted off the International Narcotics Board by a subsidiary council of the assembly.

  The rise of the giants of the developing world —China, India, and Brazil —and their desire to express their new strength has moved the center of gravity farther away from the United States. They argue that the structure of the United Nations (including the site of its headquarters in New York) and the small size of the Security Council, where the only permanent members are those who had nuclear weapons soon after the end of World War II, are now out of date. They are right, and the United States would be wrong to think that the United Nations will ever return to the coziness of its first few decades, when the United States’ supremacy was unchallenged. But at the same time, the new voices have added to the anti-American tilt of the General Assembly in a way that vindicates the United States’ sense that it has become the target of wild political gestures.

  The United Nations Security Council

  The United States is on weaker ground in its impatience with the Security Council, especially in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The 1945 Charter of the United Nations, signed by every member country, says that countries have the right to take up arms in self-defense, but that any military action beyond that must be taken only with the authorization of the Security Council. That text, of which the United States was one of the prime authors in the wake of the Second World War, makes the council the cornerstone of any justification for war.

  The United States has an entirely fair point that the present structure and powers of the council present real problems in exercising that principle. Any one of the five permanent members —the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France —can veto a resolution authorizing military action, for whatever its own motives, however strong the support among other countries for action might be. American officials are eloquent in arguing that they should not be hostage to the self-interest of the other four, which only by coincidence will align with their own.

  The strength of that argument has been recognized in the past, albeit in a very few instances. In 1950, when Communist North Korea invaded South Korea, the Security Council did authorize military action against the North. Yet that agreement was achieved only because of two diplomatic accidents: the Soviet Union (a sure veto) was boycotting the council for unrelated reasons, and China’s seat was then still held by the Taiwan-based former regime, which was bitterly opposed to Communism. That said, anger among many countries at the invasion was so deep that there was a widespread feeling that the action would have been legitimate even if there had been a veto.

  In 1999, the United States and other leading NATO countries did not attempt to get a Security Council resolution authorizing action to stop Slobodan Miloševic´, Serbia’s president, from murdering and expelling Kosovo’s ethnic majority of Albanians. They reckoned that Russia would veto it out of sympathy for Serbia, and that China might, too, out of a general dislike for ethnic separatists who rebelled against their sovereign capitals. But again, widespread support, particularly from nearby countries, helped the NATO expedition to claim to be fighting a justified war.

  A year and a half later, in the Afghanistan invasion that began on October 7, 2001, the United States did have the council’s backing; it unanimously condemned the attacks of September 11 and recognized “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense.” Resolution 1368 passed by the council was not an explicit authorization to use force, but it put no obstacles in its way.

  But for Iraq, the United States failed to get a resolution explicitly authorizing the action, nor did it get the widespread support that would have enabled it to argue that it was acting in any case with the goodwill of the international community. The “coalition of the willing” stapled together by the United States included countries peripheral to the conflict, such as El Salvador and Singapore, that were pro
mpted, many thought, mainly by the preferential trade deals they expected to receive from the United States.4

  The United States never put as much weight on the legality of the action under international law as did Tony Blair, faced with passionate opposition from within his own party in the House of Commons. But to the extent that the United States made a formal case, it was based on the claim that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, in breach of United Nations prohibitions. As well as relying on intelligence now shown to be false, this argument relied on the doctrine of preemptive war —striking an enemy before it strikes —now part of the U.S. National Security Strategy, but one about which other countries are understandably queasy.

  Having failed to get the second resolution, the United States and Britain rested their case that the war was legal all the same on Saddam’s breach of United Nations sanctions, and on the “combined effects” of three earlier Security Council resolutions, 678, 687, and 1441, ordering Iraq out of Kuwait and forbidding it from acquiring weapons. As a practical argument, this had some force: the sanctions were unraveling as Russia and other countries sought ways of trading with Iraq. But as a legal argument, it was flimsy. American officials added horror stories about Saddam’s brutality, but as a legal justification for urgent military action, such claims would have had real force only in the late 1980s, when he had murdered Kurdish villagers, and again after the 1991 war, when he attacked those who had risen up against him.

  The reason Iraq has been so destructive for America’s reputation abroad is not just that the mission went wrong, but that the United States dismissed international laws and opinions in pursuing it. In its final two years, the Bush administration appeared to find more use for the Security Council and more value in international support. It used the council as one avenue through which to put pressure on Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions, working with Britain and France within the council to try to get tougher resolutions despite the reluctance of Russia and China. It also turned to the council to rally international help on Sudan.

  The United States is right that in many cases winning the unanimous backing of the Security Council will be impossible. The old problem is getting worse. Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, is increasingly hostile in relations with the West; China, while amending its traditional reluctance to take an active role on the world stage, has a keen eye for the allegiances it needs to secure energy supplies. But the United States would be wrong, both in principle and in its own interests, to attribute no value at all to the pursuit of international support and to the success of winning over some allies, even if not all.

  Arms Treaties

  Given the United States’ concerns about Iran, it is disappointing that it has not worked more consistently within the United Nations on proliferation of nuclear weapons, where it helped draw up one of the world’s most important arms control pacts, the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty restricted the possession of nuclear weapons to five countries: the United States, the Soviet Union (now Russia), China, Britain, and France. It offered other signatories, in return for not equipping themselves with these weapons, help with the peaceful use of nuclear energy and radioactive material. The United States played an irreplaceable part not just in bringing the treaty to life, but in making the bargain worthwhile for countries which might have been tempted to make a dash for the bomb. It offered them trade and extended over some of them its own security umbrella.

  The United States’ most damaging action toward the nuclear treaty, in 2006, was to offer India a nuclear cooperation pact that promised enormous help with civil nuclear work. It demanded far too little reassurance that this would not also help India’s weapons program, and it seemed to reward a country that had always refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty. But the United States would be justified in arguing that the current fragility of the treaty cannot be blamed on that action; it reflects the weakening of the original “bargain,” as countries’ desire to get nuclear weapons increases and as it gets easier to do so. That bargain will have to be redrawn if the pact is to hold, and in early attempts to explore whether that is possible, the United States has played a central role.

  The United States has also only a partial defense for its decision to leave one of the main arms treaties it struck with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and then to protest when Russia later made a similar move. The United States said that it had to quit the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to develop its controversial missile defense system, or “Star Wars,” even though there was no assurance that the huge technical difficulties could be overcome. Yet in 2007, when Russia notified other signatories that it intended to suspend participation in the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, there was uproar from the Americans.

  The treaty, signed in the last days of the Cold War, between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, limited the armed forces and weapons the United States and the former Soviet Union countries could have in Europe. Russia’s decision to leave, it said, was in retaliation for America’s decision to put new missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic. There is no question that Russia, under President Putin, took easy offense at such actions, but the United States had lost the high ground by its earlier action. America is right that these treaties are creaking, but it should not cast aside the products of its own efforts too lightly.

  International Criminal Court

  The United States is on stronger ground in its refusal to recognize the International Criminal Court, although it has conducted its attacks on the court with such hostility that it gives ammunition to those who argue that it is uninterested in any principles of international law.

  The court, first conceived by the United Nations in 1948 after the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, to try crimes of war, formally came into being only in 2002. The principle that there should be such trials is an honorable one, and those who oppose it are never going to seem heroic. But the United States has a good case that the court is inevitably open to accusations of arbitrariness, and to partiality, in its selection of cases, given how few cases it will actually try and the huge political resonance each will carry. The United States has a point, too, in arguing that its soldiers are in danger of being singled out for alleged war crimes, given the widespread antipathy in parts of the world to the United States and the desire to see it “brought to book” for alleged offenses.

  But it has made a poor job of justifying its objections. Instead, it conveys the sense that no one will hold its soldiers to account except American military courts —if then. When confronted with the evidence of the abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where American soldiers degraded and abused Iraqi prisoners, the Bush administration dealt with it slowly and with secrecy. The process did not help the credibility of the verdict, which blamed a few junior soldiers acting on their own, an account that remains deeply implausible.

  When a British soldier in Iraq was killed in 2003 by American “friendly fire” from an aircraft above, the Pentagon refused for four years to release the cockpit recordings to the family. They were eventually leaked in early 2007 to The Sun newspaper in Britain. There was an uproar in Britain, but the reaction of Pentagon officials privately was to say that they should never have shared the information with the British Ministry of Defence, which they suspected of leaking the tape.5

  This attitude of the United States —that its soldiers are beyond criticism other than its own, in private, at home —gives it a reputation for lawlessness and undermines acceptance of its role as the global policeman. It might feel resentful and complain that others should carry more of the burden, but to the extent that it does act in that role, it presumably wants acceptance and respect.

  The Green Villain

  The environment is the issue, of those on this list, that is going to give America the most trouble, because it resonates with ordinary people in so many countries. The United States does not easily see itself as the villain of the world’s environment, as so many others d
o. Americans look around and see a green and fruitful land, less polluted, less spoiled, and less populated than many areas of Europe or Asia, and they have a point.

  The problem is climate change. America emits more greenhouse gases per person than any other country in the world. Until it was overtaken by China (roughly at the end of 2007), it emitted more than any other country overall, even though its population is just a quarter of China’s. That underpins its reputation as greedy, consuming “more than its share” of the world’s resources, its people refusing to compromise the world’s highest standard of living to save those in poor countries from the effects of climate change. The cars two feet longer than anything you could park in London or Paris, the sport-utility vehicles managing only fourteen miles to the gallon, the huge houses and ferocious air-conditioning —all these are brandished as evidence of America’s moral failing. (Although critics never adjust for the smaller size of the American gallon, only 83 percent of the size of the Imperial gallon used in Britain.)

  Because of climate change the environment is not America’s strongest front. But there are still many points that can be made in its defense that are lost among the insults.

  The first is the depth of the environmental tradition in American culture. The American reverence for the wilderness goes back before even the explorers who pushed the frontier westward —back to Native American culture. Robert Hughes, the Australian-born critic known for his historical analysis of his native country and of American art since its origins, has described how early Australian settlers pushed into the interior and found desert, whereas the Americans found a land of plenty. That reinforced Americans’ sense of “manifest destiny” —of their special mission —and also their delight in their new territory. German immigrants to America at the end of the nineteenth century added their own strong flavor to the cultural mixture with their particular love of forests and nature.