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European perspective on US foreign policy consequences & the US political 
movements in favor of various alternatives

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AMERICA'S PLACE IN THE WORLD


The devastation wrought on September 11th will shape the debate about American
foreign policy for years to come

A TABOO has been broken. The attacks on New York and Washington, DC so dwarf
earlier examples of terrorism in the United States that they are, in effect,
the bombing of mainland America that even the Japanese and the Nazis did not
achieve during the second world war. For some time to come, most attention in
the United States will be focused on the most pressing questions. Who
perpetrated the attack? How to strike back at the culprits? How to protect
America from another such terrorist atrocity? But once these questions are
addressed, an even larger question will have to be faced: what is America's
proper role in the world?

Indeed, in a confused fashion, the debate on that question has already begun.
While the administration has been determined to present a united front, and has
largely succeeded, the very complexity of the task facing it has elicited
statements which seem to point in different directions. Both George Bush and
his secretary of state, Colin Powell, have emphasised that America is looking
to its allies for support in an effort to launch a global fight against
terrorism. They have spoken of the attacks on New York and Washington as
attacks on freedom-loving people everywhere, not just on the United States. And
yet, at the same time, they have made it clear that America will defend itself,
implying it will retaliate alone if necessary. Although the administration
would clearly like to build a Gulf war-style coalition to support its next
steps, America's allies are rightly nervous that they will have little
influence over an aroused and angered United States.

American television and newspapers have been full of commentators calling for
declarations of war or military intervention on the one hand, and calm
restraint on the other. Some have said that it is essential to look to
America's allies for support, others that America must take decisive action
soon, no matter what the concerns of its friends abroad. Some have claimed that
America's terrorist opponents can be crushed, and that any governments thought
to have harboured terrorists should be attacked, whether or not it can be shown
that they had anything to do with the assault this week. One NEW YORK TIMES
columnist absurdly insisted that Congress should make a general declaration of
war, even if it cannot say which country America is actually at war with.
Others have argued that dropping bombs elsewhere in the world can never make
America safe from another such attack, and that preserving civil liberties at
home and expanding diplomatic, as well as military, efforts abroad is the only
long-term approach.

A NEW WORLD OF DISORDER

What is clear is that the self-confidence which prompted George Bush senior,
the father of the current president, to speak boldly about a "new world order"
more than a decade ago, and which spawned such optimistic paeans to American
values and the triumph of liberal democracies as Francis Fukuyama's "The End of
History", will now look like the relics of a distant age. America may have won
the cold war, and just completed a decade of unparallelled prosperity. But it
evidently now lives in a much more dangerous and complicated world than most
Americans ever imagined. For many of its policymaking elite, if there is to be
any single text summoning up this darker vision, it is likely to be "The Clash
of Civilizations" by Samuel Huntington, an article published in 1993 (later
expanded into a book) which predicted that democratic countries led by the
United States would end up locked in violent conflict with Islamic extremism.

Opinions about how America should conduct itself internationally will be
diverse, and more contentious than ever. Nevertheless, views about how it
should now pursue its foreign policy are likely to run along well-worn paths,
and might usefully be categorised into three broad groups: isolationism,
multilateralism, and unilateralism.

Outright isolationists have not commanded broad political support in America.
There is a contingent in Congress which regularly argues the isolationist case,
scorning America's participation in international institutions such as the
United Nations and the International Monetary Fund and maintaining, in effect,
that the United States should draw in its horns. But national candidates such
as Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot or Jerry Brown, who have criticised troop
deployments, immigration policies, trade agreements and other policies from an
isolationist standpoint, have failed.

For isolationists, America has been foolish to think that it could help sort
out the intractable conflicts of others

And yet many Americans have little interest in the rest of the world, and do
view foreign entanglements with distaste or suspicion. At various points in its
history, such as the period between the two world wars, isolationism has played
a powerful role in American politics. The attacks on New York and Washington
seem bound to encourage some people to call for the United States to draw back
from its extensive military commitments around the world, to reduce its links
to multilateral institutions, and to concentrate on its own narrowly defined
interests and security. For isolationists, America has been foolish to think
that it could help sort out the intractable conflicts of others. Attempts at
peacemaking or peacekeeping in conflicts that do not concern it directly have
only stirred up the enmity which has led to horrific acts of terrorism. Osama
bin Laden, the prime suspect behind the attack on America, was once an American
ally against the Russians in Afghanistan. The more involved America becomes
abroad, the more unpredictably and often perverse the results. If such views
can be presented as reasonable, by a mainstream political figure, they could
yet win more support.

However, they are unlikely to prevail because true isolationism is no longer
possible for the United States. Its economy is too entwined with the world's
trading system, and international financial markets, for it to eschew any
interest in, or influence on, the rest of the world. There are practical, and
severe, limits to how isolationist America can become without gravely injuring
itself. Critics will also point out that an isolationist withdrawal is probably
exactly what the terrorists who planned the attacks this week are after, and
that responding this way and abandoning allies, especially Israel, would be
tantamount to admitting defeat.

Multilateralists will argue precisely the opposite case: that America must be
more engaged than ever in international institutions and acting in concert with
its allies. America can only find genuine security, in their view, in a world
where international law carries greater weight, democracy and stable government
is more widespread, weapons proliferation is controlled through international
agreement and governments co-operate much more closely in monitoring and
capturing the kind of terrorist groups which perpetrated this week's outrages.
According to this argument, it has been America's lack of consistency in its
relations with allies and foes alike, and its sporadic attention to places such
as the Middle East, that have allowed virulent anti-Americanism to fester.

For multilateralists, many of the Bush administration's recent
actions--marching out of the United Nations' conference on racism, indicating
that it is determined to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, spurning
the Kyoto Protocol--have been high-handed, and set exactly the wrong tone. It
is not in America's long-term interest to appear arrogant, or narrowly
self-interested, they will say. As the sole remaining superpower, America must
take on the mantle of leadership, but also show itself co-operative and willing
to compromise as well.

But critics of multilateralism will retort that it is naive, too theoretical,
and much the same as the now-derided "new world order" of the first Bush
administration, when the collapse of the Soviet Union made it seem as if the
world was safe for the spread of democracy. America should now know better. To
some critics, multilateralists will themselves appear arrogant, as if they
believe America can solve all the world's problems. Others will charge them
with being "appeasers", ready to deal with almost anyone in order to achieve
peace deals like that between the Israelis and Palestinians, which then fall
apart. Although a superpower, these critics will say, America has something in
common with all other countries: it must put its own national interests first.

The third competing doctrine, unilateralism, would aim to do this.
Unilateralists will argue that America must clearly define its national
priorities, rather than embrace the woolly abstractions of the
multilateralists, and then act to meet these goals, even if this sometimes
means ignoring allies, breaking international law or breaching past agreements.
America, they believe, should be wary of becoming embroiled in the quarrels and
conflicts of others. It should only use military force when its interests are
directly at stake. But, most of all, it should not be afraid to deploy those
forces when attacked. Only America can protect itself.

Eventually, the unilateralists themselves may come to seem naive. Can even
America rely solely on its own defences in such an interconnected world?

Unilateralism, tempered with diplomacy where possible, seems to be the approach
of the Bush administration, although statements by its top officials, including
Mr Bush himself, have sometimes been so contradictory that it is difficult to
discern a coherent philosophy. As America struggles to find a response to this
week's attacks, unilateralism will clearly hold sway. America's NATO allies
have pledged their full support. Even if they have reservations about America's
response--a bombing of Afghanistan for example--that is unlikely to weigh very
heavily with Washington. But bombing terrorists, or those who are thought to
harbour them, is unlikely to make America more secure from further attacks. In
fact, it is likely to have the opposite effect.

Eventually, the unilateralists themselves may come to seem naive. Can even
America rely solely on its own defences in such an interconnected world? Can it
define its national interests as distinct and separate from those of other
democratic nations? Can it expect allies always to stand shoulder to shoulder
with it in times of crisis if it ignores their advice whenever it likes? Can it
confine its interventions abroad to situations where its own interests can be
clearly identified and narrowly defined? The terrorist attacks in New York and
Washington seem to raise all these questions. Nevertheless, in response to
them, unilateralists seem bound to prevail for the time being. But they, too,
will have critics to answer.

See related content at 
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=786286

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