WASHINGTON - Two weeks after compromising with
its traditional allies on the wording of a key United
Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq, US foreign
policy under George W Bush appears to be moving further
toward the more realist policies of his father in other
areas as well.
Few pretend to know whether the
move is tactical for electoral reasons or strategic, in
the sense that it would continue if Bush won
re-election. But the notion that the president is indeed
trying to soften the harder edges of his foreign policy
agenda is now widely accepted.
The latest solid
indication of this trend came Wednesday as US
negotiators in Beijing outlined for the first time the
possible benefits that North Korea would gain in
exchange for its commitment to disclose and dismantle
nuclear weapons programs.
While the
presentation, which came during the opening of three
days of multilateral talks involving South Korea, Japan,
China and Russia, as well as North Korea, amounted to a
repackaging of the administration's position, it was
nonetheless seen as a major victory of State Department
realists over right-wing hardliners in the Pentagon and
Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Indeed, the
New York Times, whose reporter, David Sanger, had been
given a private briefing about the move by none other
than Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice,
the day before, called the presentation "a turning
point" in the three-year struggle over Korea policy.
At the Security Council, meanwhile, US envoys
sheepishly withdrew a proposed resolution to extend the
immunity of US troops and officials serving in
UN-authorized peacekeeping operations from the
jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC)
for one more year. Two years ago, the administration
considered a similar resolution so important that it
threatened to veto all UN peacekeeping operations if the
council did not approve it, as it subsequently, albeit
resentfully, did.
But on Wednesday, the latest
version, which had already been watered down from an
earlier draft, was quietly taken off the agenda by the
deputy ambassador, James Cunningham, who explicitly
declined to reaffirm Washington's threats to retaliate
if it did not get its way. "The United States has
decided not to proceed further with consideration and
action on the draft at this time in order to avoid a
prolonged and divisive debate," Cunningham politely
explained.
"This is a victory for international
justice and the rule of law," crowed Irene Khan,
secretary general of Amnesty International, in a
statement that must have caused much gnashing of teeth
at the Pentagon and Cheney's office.
In fact, it
was another victory for administration realists who,
while not enamored with the ICC by any means, have long
argued that the unilateralism of administration
hardliners would end with the rest of the world turning
against the US in ways that ultimately Washington could
ill afford.
While that fear was long derided
with contempt by the neo-conservatives and right-wing
nationalists who dominated the administration's foreign
policy after September 11, 2001, now, with 140,000 US
troops bogged down in Iraq and still no clear exit
strategy (let alone "victory") in sight, it has become
the overriding reality that confronts the White House on
a daily basis.
"The Bush administration has
gotten America into its worst foreign-policy debacle
since the Vietnam War, the kind of crisis that creates a
moment when you realize you can't continue this way,"
said John Ikenberry, professor of politics and
international affairs at Princeton University.
"We are as close to an open rebellion against
American leadership in the world as we've seen since
after World War II," he told IPS. "The costs of a
unilateral, hardline, go-it-alone approach are much
greater than those who championed that style have
anticipated."
Indeed, the tilt to the realists
has been driven by the convergence of Washington's
steadily growing diplomatic isolation and its patent
failure to cope by itself, or with its dwindling number
of allies, with the situation in Iraq.
In order
to begin to redress that situation, the administration
was forced to accept a UN resolution that substantially
diluted its ability to control Iraq's future - the kind
of resolution that would have been dismissed
contemptuously by the administration just three months
ago but which has long been seen as desirable by the
realists in the State Department, whose sense of the
limits of US power was always far more acute.
The same logic now applies elsewhere, as in the
ongoing negotiations in North Korea about which Cheney
reportedly said last December in vetoing precisely the
kind of repackaging of US proposals that US Assistant
Secretary of State James Kelly put forward Wednesday.
"We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it."
But the administration's game plan of isolating
North Korea in the six-party talks by insisting that all
negotiations, including the discussion of possible gains
Pyongyang might expect by cooperating, be preconditioned
on its commitment to the "complete, verifiable and
irreversible dismantlement" of its nuclear arms
programs, was ultimately rejected as both unrealistic
and counter-productive by Washington's partners.
Associated Press has subsequently reported that
the North Korean envoy told Kelly during a bilateral
exchange that Pyongyang would test a nuclear weapon if
the North's proposed package was not accepted. The
dispatch originated from Washington, not from Beijing,
which suggests that the report's source probably lies
with the hawks, and specifically with the office of
Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security John Bolton. The fact that it
would leak the report at this moment appears calculated
to wreck the current meeting and return to the status
quo ante.
The quagmire in Iraq further weakened
Washington's position by reducing the credibility of
both its military threats and its intelligence on
nuclear weapons programs. Nor did it help that the
administration's increasingly desperate need for troops
from Japan and South Korea - and for Chinese diplomatic
support at the UN - gave those three governments far
more leverage in negotiations over North Korea than when
Bush was celebrating victory in Iraq on the deck of the
USS Abraham Lincoln.
Over the past month,
unusually frank public statements of impatience from
Beijing, Seoul and finally Tokyo with Washington's
refusal to discuss carrots as well as sticks made it
clear that Washington had succeeded only in isolating
itself, precisely as the State Department had predicted.
Just as Iraq has badly weakened Washington's
military credibility, so the global outrage over the Abu
Ghraib prison abuses has weakened its moral and
political authority at the UN, making what the White
House described as a routine "technical rollover" of the
ICC immunity resolution an insurmountable hurdle,
especially after secretary general Kofi Annan denounced
it. To the extent that the administration now relies on
him to help bail it out of Iraq, his leverage over Bush
has also increased, again just as the realists
predicted.
The next arena is almost certain to
be Iran. There, too, signs of realism have been budding
since last December as the administration has both muted
its threats to retaliate if Tehran intervenes against US
interests in Iraq and moved ever closer to its European
allies in dealing with Tehran's nuclear program.
General Brent Scowcroft, Bush Senior's national
security adviser and mentor to both Rice and Secretary
of State Colin Powell - proposed in the Washington Post
Thursday a plan whereby the US, Britain, France, Germany
and Russia offer to help Iran build and equip nuclear
reactors in exchange for verifiable commitments that it
will not attempt to enrich uranium or reprocess spent
fuel that can be used in a weapons program.
Scowcroft, who was chewed out privately by Rice
for an August, 2002, Wall Street Journal column in which
he opposed the drive to war in Iraq, has generally been
careful since then to publish articles that he has
reason to believe would be well received in the White
House. One well-placed neo-conservative wrote recently
that Rice, chastened by her dalliance with the hawks, is
now in frequent contact with her former patron.
The proposal - the heart of which is similar to
a 1994 deal negotiated between the Bill Clinton
administration and North Korea - is certain to be highly
provocative to administration hardliners who remain
committed to "regime change" in both of the remaining
members of the "axis of evil".
