Before the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration already felt unduly constrained by treaties and international law. Fancying themselves 21st-century Bismarcks, the members of Bush's team with real clout were eager to pursue a kind of vulgar Realpolitik. For them, it wasn't even worth pretending to have respect for the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Geneva Conventions, or other constraints on the full, muscular sovereignty of the world's only superpower. The 9/11 attacks only deepened this antipathy.
Now, the White House is feeling the backlash from this approach. In Iraq, the "coalition of the willing" proved far less enduring than, say, the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. The backlash is also undermining the Administration's Iran policies.
Case in point: several Central Asian countries, including Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and and Turkmenistan, are now defending Iran's nuclear program. While no diplomatic pronouncement from Turkmenistan is likely to stop a US military strike against Iran, the unwillingness to base American forces, or grant overflight permission, is a kink in any serious military campaign against Iran:
No Caspian Sea country should let its territory be used by other countries "for aggressive or military operations against another Caspian state," said Putin, who is attending a meeting in Tehran of the leaders of the five countries that border the inland sea. The leaders jointly made a similar statement, signaling the opposition of Iran's neighbors to any military action by the United States or its allies.
Imagine now an alternate history in which the United States had used the 9/11 attacks not to dismantle its treaty obligations, but to strengthen them; in which it did not go out of its way to insult the UN, but tried to make it easier for the UN to respond to threats like the Iranian nuclear program. This announcement might never have happened, or it may have stopped at expressing sympathy for Iran. ("You're on your own" would have been the obvious subtext, in that case.)
Now, having said that, I'll tell you that I don't get dewy-eyed over international law. I've known people whose earnestness about the UN and international law has blinded them to the realities of international politics. These true believers (you meet quite a few of them in academia, by the way) didn't notice that, at some point, they crossed the border from pragmatism into idealism. Now, they argue for policies that make perfect sense in a world that does not exist.
My favorite example of this sort of true believer: the presentation I attended around 1990, in which the speaker argued that the reason why the Israelis had a nuclear weapons program was the US government's lack of enthusiasm for the Test Ban Treaty. Huh? I thought the reason the Israelis wanted nuclear weapons had something to do with the Arab-Israeli wars, not the bad example the United States might be setting.
Still, treaties and obligations have a constructive purpose. Your allies can always bail out of a collective endeavor, such as the first Iraq war, but only at a much higher political cost. Military agreements, such as NATO, give the allies a great deal of experience working with one another, and also increase the understanding about their respective security concerns. And so on.
On the same day that the Central Asian countries made their announcement, our European allies--the Administration's foils before the 2003 invasion of Iraq--are still debating how to deal with Iran. Even though any Iranian nuclear weapon will have a far easier time reaching Berlin or Paris than New York or Washington, the Europeans don't see the threat quite the same way as the Bush Administration does:
Britain and France, which initiated the call for joint European action, back tough new multilateral sanctions outside the U.N. Security Council. But other countries, notably Italy and Austria, want significantly less serious steps. Germany fell somewhere in between, said European and U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the debate is not public.
The US government can't even get the Europeans to back any sanctions on Iran's meddling in Iraq:
But there are already cracks across the Atlantic. While the United States is considering a package of actions that will effectively punish Iran for its intervention in Iraq as well as for its suspected nuclear program, the Europeans do not want to "confuse" the two issues, said a well-placed European official familiar with the debate. Bush administration officials, for example, want to designate Iran's elite Quds Force as a supporter of terrorism under a presidential executive order. But in European eyes, the Quds Force is linked mainly to arming, training and funding militant factions in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. "We want to keep our eyes on the nuclear file," said a second European official.
It's easy to understand the Europeans' position. While the sanctions might have merit, they also might bolster the US case for military action. In other words, they don't want 2007 to be a repeat of 2003.
Our wannabe Bismarcks should study the Iron Chancellor a bit more carefully. True, Bismarck did say, "All treaties between great states cease to be binding when they come in conflict with the struggle for existence." He also said, "Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war." Another quotable quote has special relevance for the Bush Administration's problems rallying support: "When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice."
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