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America's blocked
message
By Stephen Blank
Many
years ago the American brokerage firm E F Hutton
produced a television commercial whose punch line was
"When E F Hutton talks, people listen".
Normally
in world politics when a great power, not to mention the
leading power, speaks, people listen and understand what
has been said. However, today it is very clear that
Washington has a failure to communicate with other
states. Yet the fault is not only Washington's as
undoubtedly many American policies are quite unpopular
around the world, whether or not this dislike of US
policy is justified. But whether or not these policies
are justifiable is a separate question. Nevertheless the
failure to be heard and comprehended signifies a
sufficiently dangerous policy failure as to capture our
attention.
Consider the situation in Iraq.
Earlier this month, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
publicly stated his view that the security situation in
Iraq was deteriorating. He did so in response to reports
that the British military wants more troops there and
after the bombings of a major Shi'ite mosque, United
Nations headquarters in Baghdad and the Jordanian
embassy, to cite only the major terrorist activities.
Yet US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at
the same time that the situation in Iraq was improving
from day to day. Clearly, Rumsfeld's message did not get
through, even to American allies. Neither did Paris or
Berlin support the US draft of a resolution to give the
UN greater authority there because they felt it did not
go far enough to give Iraq sufficient self-government or
the UN greater authority over developments. Thus they,
too, spurned Rumsfeld's remarks. Arguably they did so
because the very fact of the circulation of this draft
resolution testified to Washington's awareness that
things were not going well in Iraq and that America
needs help from abroad. Thus statements to the contrary
would clearly not be accepted as accurate by other
capitals.
That said, this reaction was
unfortunate because it is not or should not be in these
governments' interests that America fail in Iraq, for
obvious reasons. At the same time, it is not clear to
many what the UN can effectively do in Iraq, even under
American command of its troops. It refused to enforce
its own resolutions before the war. It not only failed
to provide adequate security to its staff in Baghdad it
actively refused to accept US offers of such help.
And finally, its record in many, though not all
cases of peace enforcement and state reconstruction, is
a decidedly checkered one. Neither can we accuse France
and Germany of altruism here as it is clear that France
still seeks to restrain US power for its own
self-interest reasons and to gain access to contracts
for Iraqi reconstruction. In this regard, French
economic interests, like American ones, such as
Halliburton and Kellogg Brown and Root, the major US
contractors in Iraq, hide behind external controls over
Iraq to gain contracts in a way that bears no
resemblance to the normal procedures of competitive
bidding. Certainly France has also never been shy about
bypassing the UN when it perceived its interests to be
on the line.
Therefore, few governments listen
to Washington because they have competing interests and
because reality does not fully jibe with many statements
coming out of Washington. But a third motive, and one
that is the result of the poisonous relations among the
trans-Atlantic allies in the past year is the clear
schadenfreude, joy at America's problems and an
all too human gloating of "we told you so".
Nevertheless, it is hard to see how France and Germany
benefit from America's problems, even if they are
self-imposed. Unfortunately in this case a rather
unenlightened approach to the definition of national
interests has captured all the main players and,
therefore, made it impossible for them to communicate
accurately with each other.
The Korean case, on
the other hand, is quite different. North Korea left the
Beijing talks with the statement that further
discussions were pointless and with threats to test a
nuclear bomb. We might add that if they did so it would
probably be the last one they ever tested. China's
Deputy Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the "chairman" of these
talks, also said that America's refusal to negotiate was
the main problem. Yet from American press reports it is
clear that not only did the US negotiators actually make
offers to North Korea conditional on the ending of the
nuclear project, they are sufficiently concerned that
their North Korean audience did not understand them that
they went public with that concern.
Here,
obviously again, there is a clash of interests. North
Korea clearly does not want to be in a multilateral
forum where everyone else insists that they forego
nuclear weapons because "they lose more than they gain"
as foreign observers pointed out. These negotiations are
a matter of compulsion or duress for Pyongyang and since
a government reshuffle took place there immediately
after the negotiating round in Beijing it is unlikely
that these diplomats, who, one surmises, must have known
what was coming, would offer anything innovative or any
concessions. Here what appears to be the case is a
combination of China's ambivalence about supporting
Washington over North Korea and North Korea's own rather
more fluid domestic situation than we might have
imagined. These factors seem to have interacted to block
the reception of the American message.
But this
is no grounds for complacency regarding North Korea. The
fact is that in Iraq American diplomacy hit a brick wall
with the war and in the Muslim world generally it is
overwhelmingly clear that US public diplomacy has been a
resounding failure. Whereas we cannot say the same about
Korea it is still true that the multilateral
negotiations there do not show signs of leading to a
cohesive front against Pyongyang's nuclear project,
however justified that is, given its recent behavior.
All these facts point to a signal US failure to
translate military and economic power into lasting
political achievement, ie, failure to achieve strategic
goals. In view of the fact that America, whatever its
faults, is still the main guardian of international
order in actuality, if not in rhetoric, the failure of
its diplomacy and its strategy is not an occasion for
rejoicing.
Stephen Blank is an analyst
of international security affairs residing in
Harrisburg, PA.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
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