BY JIM GREEN & SEAN HEALY
In just six months as "globocop", United States President George W. Bush has pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, sabotaged the Biological Weapons Convention, sped ahead missile "defence" plans which will scupper the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, stymied international action to clamp down on money laundering, torpedoed further international debt relief, signalled opposition to a proposed UN treaty to control the global small arms trade, banned support for aid agencies which provide abortion services or even family planning, threatened to boycott a UN conference on racism if it discusses reparations for slavery or Zionism, backed out of an agreement to ban land mines, appointed the man who ran the contra war against Nicaragua as his ambassador to the United Nations and thumbed his nose at the world.
He has also escalated military attacks on Iraq, undermined talks on Korean reunification, intensified the dirty war in Colombia, maintained the blockade of Cuba and done everything possible to aid and cover Israeli aggression against the Palestinians.
And he's just getting started.
Not feeling bound by any geo-political counterweight, any international convention, any manifestation of global public opinion, any moral code other than pushing its own "national interest", the United States is the world's number one rogue nation — and proud of it.
It's true that Bush is merely following the long-established pattern of US imperialism — his predecessor, Bill Clinton, followed a similar, if smoother, policy on many issues.
But Bush's foreign policy performance in the first six months of his four- (or perhaps eight-)year term also reflects a reinvigorated unilateralism by the world's only remaining superpower.
The political incarnation of US big business, particularly Big Oil, George W Bush is determined to meet head-on any threat or obstacle to greater corporate power — he is determined to "crash through or crash".
Bush himself may not be the best spokesperson for the stance his administration has taken: on foreign policy, he says simply "I know what I believe, and I believe what I believe is right" and argues for a "foreign-handed foreign policy".
But other figures in or close to the White House are more articulate about the shift in foreign policy.
He is now Bush's assistant secretary of defence for security, but last year, as a scholar for the Nixon Center, Peter Rodman wrote: "Most of the world's other major powers — even our friends — have made it a central theme of their foreign policies to build counterweights to American power. In fact, their efforts in this direction constitute one of the main trends in international politics today."
This is known as the "balancing effect": lesser powers coalesce to restrain an emerging hegemon. These counterweights, says Rodman, included the integration of the European Union and the new co-operation between Russia and China. The new unilateralism is the US administration's policy response.
Conservative US commentator, and cheerleader for Bush foreign policy, Charles Krauthammer has written gleefully in the Washington Post, "Rather than contain US power within a vast web of constraining international agreements, the new unilateralism seeks to enhance US power and unashamedly deploy it on behalf of self-defined global ends."
"Sure, there would be consultation — no need to be impolite," he added. "Humble unilateralism, the oxymoron that best describes this approach, requires it: Be nice, be understanding. But, in the end, be undeterred."
The latest example of this approach came on July 25, when the US announced its intention to reject a compliance supplement to the Biological Weapons Convention.
The treaty, which bans the development, production and stockpiling of bacteriological and toxic weapons, entered into force on March 26, 1975, but is regarded as largely ineffectual in stemming the proliferation of germ warfare weapons as it lacks a verification process to check suspected violations.
Diplomats have been negotiating for six years on a compliance protocol to fix this. The protocol would tighten control on exports of biological weapons technology and establish the means to verify that countries are in compliance with the treaty. They had hoped to conclude the protocol by November.
Rejecting a protocol text drawn up by Tibor Toth, the chairperson of the 55-country negotiating group, ambassador Donald Mahley, the US's special negotiator for chemical and biological arms control issues, said "The mechanisms envisioned in the protocol would not achieve their objectives and ... trying to do more would simply raise the risk to legitimate United States activities."
Mahley has indicated that the US will not pull out of the convention altogether, even though it is ineffective without the protocol, and said that the administration was instead seeking "alternative" compliance mechanisms.
Secretary of state Colin Powell claims that some agreements do not serve either US interests or the purpose for which they were intended: "That is the case with the protocol to the Biological Warfare [sic] Convention. When the BWC was originally signed a number of years ago, it was known at that time that it would probably never be verifiable, because it is too difficult to verify that kind of technology. Since then, it has become even more difficult to try to verify it, with the explosion of biotechnology and biotechnology facilities all across the world, and especially in the United States, the most developed nation with respect to biotechnology."
At the heart of US opposition to the protocol is its own "national security" interests and the proprietary secrets of US biotechnology companies.
"We are not prepared to undermine, weaken, or otherwise compromise our overall approach to countering proliferation of biological weapons capability through any protocol", said Mahley, signalling the administration's opposition to an international verification regime which would have included on-site inspections of US defence plants and corporate research facilities.
Another, unnamed, official, speaking to Reuters, was even more blunt, saying the US would not allow itself to be "subject to the same sort of transparency and inspections procedures as the Iranian ministry of health, a case of false symmetry that provides us no upside and substantial downside risk".
Mahley also expressed support for the concerns of US biotech and pharmaceutical companies about sharing their proprietary information: their research and development costs were "enormous" and inspection requirements would expose them to "unfair competition" and commercial piracy, he claimed.
The US pharmaceutical industry, which controls 40% of the world market, has long been opposed to the compliance protocol, being unwilling to submit its operations to any kind of outside scrutiny.
Speaking to a congressional subcommittee on June 5, Gillian Woollett, the associate vice-president of the industry's powerful lobby group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, claimed the protocol "not only compromise[s] our industry's ability to research and manufacture but also establishes mechanisms to expose confidential business information".
Woollett also complained that the protocol's "emphasis on capability also unduly targets the US — the undisputed world leader in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology ... Our global leadership is a credit to the US and not something to be intruded upon in the search for biological weapons".
The pharmaceutical industry has close ties with the Bush administration: during the 2000 election cycle, it gave US$14.6 million to the Republicans. Bush's defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has served as both a CEO and a director of several prominent US pharmaceutical firms.
(Meanwhile, claims that Iraq has put obstacles in the way of far more intrusive inspections than those specified under the protocol are at the centre of US justifications for the blockade of the country and for continued bombing raids.)
A similar pattern — aggressively extend US "national security" and corporate interests at all costs — is clearly identifiable in nearly all other instances of Bush administration unilateralism.
The March 29 announcement that the US would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, was both aimed at shoring up US control of world energy sources and defending the major contributor to climate change, Big Oil, which donated US$10 million to the Republicans in 2000 and which Bush himself, his vice-president Dick Cheney and other administration figures have close personal and financial ties with.
The go-ahead for the National Missile Defence scheme, which had its latest test on July 14, was both intended to extend the US's already extreme global military dominance and provide a lucrative (US$8.3 billion in 2001) subsidy to the US arms manufacturers, which again administration figures have close personal and financial ties with.
Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's unexpected May announcement that the US believed long-in-the-pipeline guidelines on reforming the offshore banking system were "too broad" and unsupportable was likewise motivated, according to Jack Blum who wrote a 1998 UN report on offshore banking, by the fact that "hot money from the rest of the world [fuelled] one of the greatest booms in the [US] stock market" and that big brokerage firms "find it profitable to run private banking operations for rich people all over the world who don't want to pay taxes". He estimated that at least US$70 billion in US taxes is evaded annually through offshore accounts.
The Bush administration's unilateralist foreign policy might feel like a throwback to Ronald Reagan and the Cold War. And in a sense it is. But, then again, for the US's rulers, the Cold War never ended — because it wasn't a war against the Soviet Union, it was a war against everyone on the planet.