Arjun -- Your basic premises aren't the least bit "unrealistic" First of all, the use of the network of international organizations (IOs) -- which has been constructed with significant efforts by the US itself -- doesn't strike me as unrealistic. "Multilateralism" is part of the international reality within which we operate.
What strikes me as unrealistic is to expect that we can treat IOs as mere instruments of our own power, resent any modest limits they may place on our scope of options, and blame the organizations themselves as somehow at fault when they don't deliver what we want. But equally unrealistic is to expect IOs to be independent actors in an international governance system.
Paul Kennedy (whose next book is apparently about the UN system, an interesting topic for a military historian) had a very good little essay in Monday's FT on the unrealistic expectations of both the Right and Left when it comes to the most prominent of the international organizations, the UN. Below is the part of his essay where he argues that a little historical perspective is essential to understand how we got to where we are today.
The right charges that the UN is soft on terrorism, tolerates dictatorial regimes, is prejudiced against Israel and still allows a country like France anachronistic veto rights. The left resents the domination of the world body by a mere five members of the Security Council, its incapacity to achieve greater global economic equity, the unchecked powers of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the failure to fulfil the visions so nobly expressed in the 1945 Charter. Neither side shows even the slightest understanding of why the UN is the way it is: because, 60 years ago, governments of the world decided to structure it along certain lines and deliberately made it difficult to change things afterwards.It's this last point -- that we are continuing to squander the huge international support the US previously enjoyed -- that I believe demonstrates the "unrealistic" unilateralism of the Bush Admin. As the military strategist Jeffrey Record argues in Dark Victory: America's Second War Against Iraq:
For brevity's sake, let us focus upon only two major resentments against today's UN system: the left's dislike of the veto powers of a mere five out of 191 member states, and the right's charge that countries like Sudan and Libya have been serving on (or chairing) bodies such as the Commission on Human Rights. Both seem outrageous decisions in today's world, but they are the result of deals which, in 1944-45 and after, the US government especially pushed for.
The right to veto Security Council resolutions was a non-negotiable demand of the US Senate and of Josef Stalin; neither would brook constraints on their freedom of action. In order to ensure that neither superpower bolted the stable, the British agreed (the French and Chinese played a smaller role in the 1945 negotiations). As it happened, the first Security Council veto was applied by the USSR in 1946, over a quarrel relating to French and British policies in Lebanon. What Moscow could do, so could Washington. And so could London, Paris and Beijing. All was well with the world. Those who still fume at Jacques Chirac's threatened veto in 2002 should think hard about what we have wrought.
Resolutions by the General Assembly were another thing, because they had no binding force. They were simply expressions of concern - or hypocritical nonsense and as such, America did not care about a majority vote. The General Assembly could pass resolution after resolution on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and it did not matter. By the same logic, we did not much worry about the composition of various international agencies and committees that reported to the General Assembly, or the UN's Economic and Social Committee. If they wanted to rotate the chairmanship, who cared? In any case, it was an era in which presidents such as Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy could count on the support of most countries outside the Soviet bloc. The US has, alas, squandered that advantage. According to polls by the Pew Trust in 30 or more countries, a large majority think that America is a danger to world peace. FDR would be astonished.
An embrace of a unilateralist foreign policy was a hallmark of the Bush administration from its very inception. It preferred "coalitions of the willing" to formal alliances, "understandings" to treaties, and military action over consultations and diplomacy.Record quotes the ultimate "realist" practitioner of 20th century American foreign policy, Henry Kissinger, from a September 2002 op-ed:
Unilateralism essentially repudiates the grand bargain the United States struck with its friends and allies after World War II. They accepted American power and leadership in exchange for American willingness to embed that power in international institutions for the purpose of reassuring friends and allies that American power would be used with restraint.
If successful, the Bush administration's unilateralism and policy of "anticipatory self-defense" could begin the breakup of the very international system that has been the basis of America's security policy for more than half a century. [emph added]
World leadership requires the acceptance of some restraint even on one's own actions to ensure that others exercise comparable restraint. In cannot be in either our national or the world's interest to develop principles that grant every nation an unfettered right of preemption against its own definition of threats to its security.And from the British historian (especially of things military) Sir Michael Howard:
[The United States] must cease to think of itself as a heroic lone protagonist in a cosmic war against "evil," and reconcile itself to a less spectacular and more humdrum role: that of the leading participant in a flawed but still indispensable system of cooperative global governance.So if IOs are an important part of the "realistic" landscape, what then should we expect of them, and how likely is it that they can be reformed to meet our expectations. As Paul Kennedy notes, Kofi Annan is waiting for the report of the "High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change" which he appointed a year ago to examine UN reform. Nothing revolutionary is expected, and the mechanisms by which any proposed changes can be approved and implemented are sclerotic at best.
Yet there have been, as you pointed out, new possibilities for changing the goals and methods of the IOs that have emerged with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the end to proxy wars and competitions, and the appearance of a number of independent countries strongly oriented toward democratic processes and principles.
Institutional change happens slowly over time, punctuated by occasional large, sharp shifts. Change can be driven from both the top and the bottom, with change coming from one or the other direction being more likely depending on the wider environment in which the institution operations.
I suggest we recognize that the time is not auspicious for a top-down driven major shift, given the damage to institutions and trust at the international level that have been produced by conflicts over the Bush Admin's policies. Instead, perhaps the US should focus on rebuilding its leadership at the grassroots. That is, trying to make the IOs work more effectively by expanding meaningful participation by the medium-size countries committed to liberal democracy and an open society -- open both within nations and across the global system.
A shift in orientation of US policy toward the grassroots would require not only reliquishing the fantasy that the US can act effectively in a unilateral fashion. It would also require the US to abandon its growing predeliction for bilateral sidebargains that undermine broader cooperative arrangements. The US has tended to use bilateral deals as a way to pick off the low hanging fruit. Or to obtain some specific objectives where we think we can leverage our economic or military power by influencing the specific agenda of an individual country while avoiding broader multilateral bargains that might place some limits on the our complete freedom of action. Where we've resorted to IOs in recent years -- whether the UN Sec Council, the G-7, or the IMF -- we've tended to be cynically (and transparently) manipulative, rather than keep the longer-term health of the IOs as one of our ongoing policy objectives. Finally, we need a better sense of how our actions in the various global governance mechanisms that aren't at the state-to-state level mesh with our policies for promoting democracy and prosperity around the world.
We should understand that the sorts of behavior we've indulged in (unilateral, bilateral, benign neglect) may appear advantageous on specific issues or in the near term. But it is often incompatible with leadership of the international political economy and system of cooperative governance. We have to remember that our prosperity and freedom is based on, or derived from, the successful operation of that system. It's the ultimate "realism" to recognize that we have, in effect, more at stake in its continued success than anyone else.
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