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Welcome to USAGOLD's "Gilded
Opinion" pages.
We invite you to browse our index
of outstanding gold-based commentary.
(Back to Holger Jensen Index)
While we find Mr. Jensen's columns particularly informative with respect to foreign affairs, his opinions do not necessarily represent those of Centennial Precious Metals, USAGOLD, its management and clientele.
INSIDE FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Has Bush really moderated
his unilateral view of the world?
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
Sept. 11, it is said, dramatically altered President Bush's foreign policy. Or did it?
Prior to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush had pursued a unilateral, even isolationist, course on the principle that the United States should act alone in what it saw as its own best interests.
He tore up treaties he didn't like, distanced himself from Middle East peacemaking and dismayed friend and foe alike with his dogged determination to build a missile defense system. Russia and China were angry and our European allies unnerved by what Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden called Bush's "splendid indifference to the rest of the world."
After Sept. 11 he no longer seemed indifferent.
One of Bush's first acts was to fast-track the payment of dues owed the United Nations, a constant source of friction with the world body. He mended relations with Russia and China, adopted a more even-handed stance between Israel and the Palestinians and skillfully built up international support for his war on terrorism.
But Bush remained opposed to the Kyoto treaty on global warming, the nuclear test ban treaty, the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention, the creation of an International Criminal Court and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. His abrupt withdrawal from the ABM pact signaled that his foreign policy had not changed much.
In hindsight, said Anatoli Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "the supposed commitment to multilateralism was purely tactical."
While conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer crowed about "Unilateralism's Worthy Return," Biden warned that scrapping a 30-year-old arms control agreement for a quarter-trillion-dollar, not-yet-invented missile defense system was a "serious mistake."
"Terrorists determined to do this nation harm," he wrote in The Washington Post, "can employ a wide variety of means, and weapons of mass destruction -- chemical, biological or even nuclear -- need not arrive on the tip of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a return address.
"That's why the Joint Chiefs of Staff argue than an ICBM launch ranks last on the threat spectrum, while terrorist attacks constitute the greatest potential threat to our national security."
Russia has enough offensive weapons to overwhelm any Star Wars defense we can devise, Biden said. China does not, but will increase its nuclear capabilities tenfold if we build a missile defense sytem. Thus, the system's cost includes "not only dangerous neglect of the real threats we face but the likelihood that we will unleash a new arms race that will create a nuclearized Asia."
Unilateralism will also make it more difficult to pursue Bush's global war on terrorism.
Though American military power needed no allied backup in the Afghan campaign, that was just one of many fronts. The United States still needs the cooperation of other nations in gathering intelligence on terrorist groups, shutting off their finances and extraditing those it wants to prosecute.
Bush will also have to extricate the United States from what Britain's Economist magazine called a "cat's cradle of failed engagements in the Middle East."
These include: economic sanctions and no-fly zones in Iraq, which have not brought down Saddam Hussein "but poured fuel on the anti-American fire"; U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, which make America "seemingly cozy with an often brutal regime"; U.S. support of Israel, which gives America "guilt by association in Arab eyes for Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands"; and U.S. financial support of Egypt, which associates America with another authoritarian regime "without persuading that regime to moderate the anti-Western views that pervade even the state-controlled media."
A strong lobby of Washington hawks wants to wage war on Iraq. That would please the unilateralists, who say we should go it alone, but it would ruin whatever relations we have left with the Arab world -- our chief oil supplier.
December 29, 2001
Send your questions to international editor Holger Jensen, who will answer one each day. E-mail: hjens@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 The E.W. Scripps Co. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by USAGOLD with permission of Mr. Jensen. No further reproduction without permission.
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