Posted on: Sunday, July 22, 2001

Commentary
America's foreign policy, cowboy style

By Thomas Plate

The Russian-Chinese friendship pact and global wariness of U.S. national missile defense should alarm the White House.

In Moscow and Genoa last week, the faint outlines of a reactive global containment policy toward America emerged.

In Russia, Beijing and Moscow signed a ''friendship and cooperation'' treaty. While not unexpected, the pact, with no less than 25 articles, draws the two powers closer together on the tinderbox Taiwan issue (Russia will support China's sovereignty claim) and on the divisive U.S. missile defense plan (surprise, both hate it). The White House, understandably, downplayed the event, but it surely does not bode well for America.

And in Italy, at the weekend summit of the G-8 group of industrialized nations, of which Japan is the sole Asian member, strong objections again surfaced over the so-named U.S. national missile defense. ''I do hope the discussions will continue,'' said Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, diplomatically. ''Russia is prepared for a constructive dialogue.'' As are many concerned nations, including China.

But is George W. Bush's America? Or is his mind made up?

In the past, U.S. internationalists worried about the possibility of a creeping American isolationism. Now the worry is about a creeping American unilateralism: If America can do it (build a vast missile defense), then, by golly, let's do it (why care what anyone else thinks?). It's certainly not an irrational worry: After all, the Bush administration has already trashed the international arms control process (who needs it? doesn't work for us!), including, shockingly, the valuable Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and, in effect, the venerable Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

This inward-looking psychology, or pathology, is especially alarming to U.S. allies. They count on U.S. military security guarantees in the context of our explicit alliances with them. But the Bush administration's security philosophy seems to be more like the game of solitaire than bridge or mah-jongg.

This gun-slinging-cowboy mentality is reflected in the administration's warmth toward the obscure Pentagon doctrine officially known as RMA. These are initials for the Revolution in Military Affairs theory that proposes to transform America's military posture from being capable of fighting two wars simultaneously (the policy to date) to relying mainly on a futuristic Star Wars approach. ''The RMA isn't overtly ideological,'' wrote the New Yorker magazine's Nicholas Lemann recently, ''but it makes for a good fit with a foreign policy that is suspicious of international alliances and prefers to see the United States act mainly alone and mainly to protect itself.''

Unsurprisingly, RMA is the theoretical framework for NMD (national missile defense). So while the Bush administration may be prepared to downsize its initial phase in order to thread the requested appropriation through a skeptical Congress, it will absolutely fight to preserve this keystone of its defense posture. After all, lots of campaign contributors will not be unhappy if RMA causes NMD to take off.

To be fair, even Bill Clinton bowed to the well-heeled domestic missile lobby and backed the National Missile Defense Act of 1999. That was months after the North Koreans shot a satellite missile over Japan that failed to orbit but succeeded in terrorizing the Japanese. By so doing, Clinton and the North Koreans handed Bush hawks (notably, top-tier Defense officials Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz) an awesome inauguration gift.

Even with the best of U.S. intentions (meaning that the Bush administration really thinks it'll work, will make the world safer for everyone except the rogues, etc.), a large-scale missile defense, born from the RMA doctrine, could well emerge as the international icon for America's new unilateralism.

''We are, in the eyes of many,'' says U.S. super diplomat Thomas Pickering in the current issue of Foreign Policy, ''the hegemon. Our friends in Russia and China are strong advocates of multipolarity, which is a code name for finding ways to constrain the United States.''

The world worries that Bush's creeping unilateralism is in fact a search for even greater military advantage than we already have. So, an informal containment policy against America? The benevolent, democratic superpower? Yes, that's what they're saying.

Sure, the perceived American abrasiveness and bullheadedness are probably as much a matter of the Bush administration's style as substance. To coin a phrase from the prior Bush president, what's urgently needed now is a ''kinder, gentler'' international profile. And so what son George W. should craft is a foreign policy that relies less on defensive missile rattling and more on old-fashioned, considerate diplomacy. He must mount a worldwide charm offensive and cage those hawks.

U.S. foreign policy is starting to look less and less benign.

Thomas Plate, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, is a columnist for The Advertiser and the South China Morning Post.