[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 16 (Wednesday, January 29, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1729-S1731]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER'S ``AMERICAN UNILATERALISM''

  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, In a December 2002 speech delivered by the 
commentator, Charles Krauthammer, at the Hillsdale College Churchill 
dinner entitled ``American Unilateralism,'' Mr. Krauthammer superbly 
articulates the necessity of American action to confront today's 
challenges in the international arena, most notably Iraq. He makes a 
compelling case against the two kinds of multilateralist thinking that 
are common today: that of the liberal internationalists and that of the 
pragmatic realists.
  Liberal internationalists, Krauthammer shows, cling to 
multilateralism as a shield for their real preference--in this case, 
inaction. He aptly points out that those most strenuously opposed to 
U.S. military action in Iraq are also the strongest supporters of 
requiring U.N. backing. The reason, Krauthammer concludes, is that 
``they see the U.N. as a way to stop America in its tracks.'' The 
liberal internationalist fails to take into account that there is no 
logical, or moral, basis for depending upon the member of the U.N. 
Security Council to confer legitimacy on U.S. actions.
  Pragmatic realists, Krauthammer explains, understand the absurdity of 
the liberal internationalist's arguments, but believe that, 
nonetheless, the U.S. needs from a practical standpoint, international 
support to act. They believe that shared decisionmaking will result in 
good will, improved relations, and greater burdensharing. But, as 
Krauthammer demonstrates, our experiences in the gulf war prove 
otherwise.
  It is important to note that Krauthammer does not see unilateralism 
as a first choice. Rather, he advocates taking actions that are in the 
best interest of the United States, bringing others along if possible. 
What he wisely cautions against is allowing ourselves ``to be held 
hostage'' by the objections of countries that don't have America's 
interests at heart. He describes unilateralism as ``the high road to 
multilateralism.'' This may sound paradoxical, but it makes sense. It 
is American leadership, asserting a firm position and committing to 
take whatever actions are necessary to see if through, that enables a 
solid coalition to be built.
  Charles Krauthammer's remarks are both timely and insightful as the 
United States discusses Iraqi noncompliance with members of the U.N. 
Security Council and contemplates military action in Iraq. I highly 
recommend them to my colleagues in the Senate.
  I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Krauthammer's December 2002 speech 
be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                         American Unilateralism

                        (By Charles Krauthammer)

       American unilateralism has to do with the motives and the 
     methods of American behavior in the world, but any discussion 
     of it has to begin with a discussion of the structure of the 
     international system. The reason that we talk about 
     unilateralism today is that we live in a totally new world. 
     We live in a unipolar world of a sort that has not existed in 
     at least 1500 years.
       At the end of the Cold War, the conventional wisdom was 
     that with the demise of the Soviet Empire, the bipolarity of 
     the second half of the 20th century would yield to a multi-
     polar world. You might recall the school of thought led by 
     historian Paul Kennedy, who said that America was already in 
     decline, suffering from imperial overstretch. There was also 
     the Asian enthusiasm, popularized by James Fallows and 
     others, whose thinking was best captured by the late-1980s 
     witticism: ``The United States and Russia decided to hold a 
     Cold War: Who won? Japan.''
       Well they were wrong, and ironically no one has put it 
     better than Paul Kennedy himself, in a classic recantation 
     emphasizing America's power: ``Nothing has ever existed like 
     this disparity of power, nothing. Charlemagne's empire was 
     merely Western

[[Page S1730]]

     European in its reach. The Roman Empire stretched farther 
     afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a 
     larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.''
       We tend not to see or understand the historical uniqueness 
     of this situation. Even at its height, Britain could always 
     be seriously challenged by the next greatest powers. It had a 
     smaller army than the land powers of Europe, and its navy was 
     equaled by the next two navies combined. Today, the American 
     military exceeds in spending the next twenty countries 
     combined. Its Navy, Air Force and space power are unrivaled. 
     Its dominance extends as well to every other aspect of 
     international life--, not only military, but economic, 
     technological, diplomatic, cultural, even linguistic, with a 
     myriad of countries trying to fend off the inexorable march 
     of MTV English.
       Ironically, September 11 accentuated and accelerated this 
     unipolarity. It did so in three ways. The first and most 
     obvious was the demonstration it brought forth of American 
     power. In Kosovo, we had seen the first war ever fought and 
     won exclusively from the air, which gave the world a hint of 
     the recent quantum leap in American military power. But it 
     took September 11 for the U.S. to unleash, with concentrated 
     fury, a fuller display of its power in Afghanistan. Being a 
     relatively pacific commercial republic, the U.S. does not go 
     around looking for demonstration wars. This one being thrust 
     upon it, it demonstrated that at a range of 7,000 miles, with 
     but a handful of losses and a sum total of 426 men on the 
     ground, it could destroy, within weeks, a hardened fanatical 
     regime favored by geography and climate in a land-locked 
     country that was already well known as the graveyard of 
     empires. Without September 11, the giant would surely have 
     slept longer. The world would have been aware of America's 
     size and potential, but not its ferocity and full capacities.
       Secondly, September 11 demonstrated a new kind of American 
     strength. The center of our economy was struck, aviation was 
     shut down, the government was sent underground and the 
     country was rendered paralyzed and fearful. Yet within days, 
     the markets reopened, the economy began its recovery, the 
     president mobilized the nation and a unified Congress 
     immediately underwrote a huge worldwide war on terror. The 
     Pentagon, with its demolished western facade still 
     smoldering, began planning the war. The illusion of America's 
     invulnerability was shattered, but with the demonstration of 
     its recuperative powers, that sense of invulnerability 
     assumed a new character. It was transmuted from 
     impermeability to resilience--the product of unrivaled human, 
     technological and political reserves.
       The third effect of September 11 was the realignment it 
     caused among the great powers. In 1990, our principal ally 
     was NATO. A decade later, the alliance had expanded to 
     include some of the former Warsaw Pact countries. But several 
     major powers remained uncommitted: Russia and China flirted 
     with the idea of an anti-hegemonic alliance, as they called 
     it. Some Russian leaders made ostentatious visits to little 
     outposts of the ex-Soviet Empire like North Korea and Cuba. 
     India and Pakistan sat on the sidelines.
       Then came September 11, and the bystanders lined up. 
     Pakistan immediately made a strategic decision to join the 
     American camp. India enlisted with equal alacrity. Russia's 
     Putin, seeing a coincidence of interests with the U.S. in the 
     war on terror and an opportunity to develop a close relation 
     with the one remaining superpower, fell into line. Even 
     China, while remaining more distant, saw a coincidence of 
     interest with the U.S. in fighting Islamic radicalism, and so 
     has cooperated in the war on terror and has not pressed 
     competition with the U.S. in the Pacific.
       This realignment accentuated a remarkable historical 
     anomaly. All of our historical experience with hegemony 
     suggests that it creates a countervailing coalition of weaker 
     powers. Think of Napoleonic France, or of Germany in the 20th 
     century. Nature abhors a vacuum and history abhors hegemony. 
     But in the first decade of post-Cold War unipolarity, not a 
     single great power, arose to challenge America. On the 
     contrary, they all aligned with the U.S. after September 11.
       So we bestride the world like a colossus. The question is, 
     how do we act in this new world? What do we do with our 
     position?
       Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld gave the classic formulation 
     of unilateralism when he said, regarding Afghanistan--but it 
     applies equally to the war on terror and to other conflicts--
     that ``the mission determines the coalition.'' This means 
     that we take our friends where we find them, but only in 
     order to help us accomplish our mission. The mission comes 
     first and we define the mission.
       This is in contrast with what I believe is a classic case 
     study in multilateralism: the American decision eleven years 
     ago to conclude the Gulf War. As the Iraqi Army was fleeing 
     the first Bush administration had to decide whether its goal 
     in the war was the liberation of Kuwait or the liberation of 
     Iraq. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who was 
     instrumental in making the decision to stop with Kuwait, has 
     explained that going further would have fractured the 
     coalition, gone against our promises to our allies, and 
     violated the U.N. resolutions under which we had gone to war. 
     ``Had we added occupation of Iraq and removal of Saddam 
     Hussein to those objectives,'' he wrote, ``our Arab allies, 
     refusing to countenance an invasion of an Arab colleague, 
     would have deserted us.'' Therefore we did not act. The 
     coalition defined the mission.


                        liberal internationalism

       There are two schools of committed multi-lateralists, and 
     it is important to distinguish between them. There are the 
     liberal internationalists who act from principle, and there 
     are the realists who act from pragmatism. The first was seen 
     in the run-up to the congressional debate on the war on Iraq. 
     The main argument from opposition Democrats was that we 
     should wait and hear what the U.N. was saying. Senator 
     Kennedy, in a speech before the vote in Congress, said, 
     ``I'm waiting for the final recommendation of the Security 
     Council before I'm going to say how I'm going to vote.'' 
     Senator Levin, who at the time was the Chairman of the 
     Senate Armed Services Committee, actually suggested giving 
     authority to the President to act in Iraq only upon the 
     approval of the U.N. Security Council.
       The liberal internationalist position is a principled 
     position, but it makes no internal sense. It is based on a 
     moral vision of the world, but it is impossible to understand 
     the moral logic by which the approval of the Security Council 
     confers moral legitimacy on this or any other enterprise. How 
     does the blessing of the butchers of Tiananmen Square, who 
     hold the Chinese seat on the Council, lend moral authority to 
     anything, let alone the invasion of another country? On what 
     basis is moral legitimacy lent by the support of the Kremlin, 
     whose central interest in Iraq, as all of us knows, is oil 
     and the $8 billion that Iraq owes Russia in debt? Or of the 
     French, who did everything that they could to weaken the 
     resolution, then came on board at the last minute because 
     they saw that an Anglo-American train was possibly leaving 
     for Baghdad, and they didn't want to be left at the station?
       My point is not to blame the French or the Russians or the 
     Chinese for acting in their own national interest. That's 
     what nations do. My point is to express wonder at Americans 
     who find it unseemly to act in the name of our own national 
     interest, and who cannot see the logical absurdity of 
     granting moral legitimacy to American action only if it earns 
     the prior approval of others which is granted or withheld on 
     the most cynical grounds of self-interest.


                       Practical Multilateralism

       So much for the moral argument that underlies 
     multilateralism. What are the practical arguments? There is a 
     school of realists who agree that liberal internationalism is 
     nonsense, but who argue plausibly that we need international 
     or allied support, regardless. One of their arguments is that 
     if a power consistency shares rule making with others, it is 
     more likely to get aid and assistance from them.
       I have my doubts. The US. made an extraordinary effort 
     during the Gulf War to get U.N. support, share decision-
     making and assemble a coalition. As I have pointed out, it 
     even denied itself the fruits of victory in order to honor 
     coalition goals. Did this diminish anti-Americanism in the 
     region? Did it garner support for subsequent Iraq policy--
     policy dictated by the original acquiescence to that 
     coalition? The attacks of September 11 were planned during 
     the Clinton administration, an administration that made a 
     fetish of consultation and did its utmost to subordinate 
     American hegemony. Yet resentments were hardly assuaged, 
     because extremist rage against the U.S. is engendered by the 
     very structure of the international system, not by our 
     management of it.
       Pragmatic realists value multilateralism in the interest of 
     sharing burdens, on the theory that if you share decision-
     making, you enlist others in your own hegemonic enterprise. 
     As proponents of this school and argued recently in Foreign 
     Affairs, ``Straining relationships now will lead only to a 
     more challenging policy environment later on.'' This is a 
     pure cost-benefit analysis of multilateralism versus 
     unilateralism.
       If the concern about unilateralism is that American 
     assertiveness be judiciously rationed and that one needs to 
     think long-term hardly anybody will disagree. One does not go 
     it alone or dictate terms on every issue. There's no need to. 
     On some issues, such as membership in the World Trade 
     Organization, where the long-term benefit both to the U.S. 
     and to the global interest is demonstrable, one willingly 
     constricts sovereignty. Trade agreements are easy calls, 
     however, free trade being perhaps the only mathematicaly 
     provable political good. Other agreements require great 
     skepticism. The Kyoto Protocol on climate change, for 
     example, would have had a disastrous effect on the American 
     economy, while doing nothing for the global environment. 
     Increased emissions from China, India and other third-
     world countries which are exempt from its provisions 
     clearly would have overwhelmed and made up for what-ever 
     American cuts would have occurred. Kyoto was therefore 
     rightly rejected by the Bush administration. It failed on 
     its merits, but it was pushed very hard nonetheless, 
     because the rest of the world supported it.
       The same case was made during the Clinton administration 
     for chemical and biological weapons treaties, which they 
     negotiated assiduously under the logic of, ``Sure, they're 
     useless of worse, but why not give in, in order to build good 
     will for future needs?'' The problem is that appeasing 
     multilateralism does not assuage it; appeasement only 
     legitimizes it. Repeated acquiescence on provisions that 
     America deems injurious reinforces the notion that legitimacy

[[Page S1731]]

     derives from international consensus. This is not only a 
     moral absurdity. It is injurious to the U.S., because it 
     undermines any future ability of the U.S. to act 
     unilaterally, if necessary.
       The key point I want to make about the new unilateralism is 
     that we have to be guided by our own independent judgment, 
     both about our own interests and about global interests. This 
     is true especially on questions of national security, war 
     making, and freedom of action in the deployment of power. 
     America should neither defer nor contract out such decision-
     making, particularly when the concessions involve permanent 
     structural constrictions, such as those imposed by the 
     International Criminal Court. Should we exercise prudence? 
     Yes. There is no need to act the superpower in East Timor or 
     Bosnia, as there is in Afghanistan or in Iraq. There is no 
     need to act the superpower on steel tariffs, as there is on 
     missile defense
       The prudent exercise of power calls for occasional 
     concessions on non-vital issues, if only to maintain some 
     psychological goodwill. There's no need for gratuitous high-
     handedness or arrogance. We shouldn't, however, delude 
     ourselves as to what psychological goodwill can buy. 
     Countries will cooperate with us first our of their own self-
     interest, and second out of the need and desire to cultivate 
     good relations with the world's unipolar power. Warm feelings 
     are a distant third.
       After the attack on the USS Cole, Yemen did everything it 
     could to stymie the American investigation. It lifted not a 
     finger to suppress terrorism at home, and this was under an 
     American administration that was obsessively multilateralist 
     and accommodating. Yet today, under the most unilateralist 
     American administration in memory, Yemen has decided to 
     assist in the war on terrorism. This was not the result of a 
     sudden attack of Yemeni goodwill, or of a quick re-reading of 
     the Federalist Papers. It was a result of the war in 
     Afghanistan, which concentrated the mind of recalcitrant 
     states on the price of non-cooperation.
       Coalitions are not made by superpowers going begging hat in 
     hand; they are made by asserting a position and inviting 
     others to join. What even pragmatic realists fail to 
     understand is that unilateralism is the high road to 
     multilateralism. It was when the first President Bush said 
     that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait would not stand, and made 
     it clear that he was prepared to act alone if necessary, that 
     he created the Gulf War coalition.


                         America's Special Role

       Of course, unilateralism does not mean seeking to act 
     alone. One acts in concert with others when possible. It 
     simply means that one will not allow oneself to be held 
     hostage to others. No one would reject Security Council 
     support for war on Iraq or for any other action. The question 
     is what to do if, at the end of the day, the Security Council 
     or the international community refuses to back us? Do we 
     allow ourselves to be dictated to on issues of vital national 
     interest? The answer has to be ``no,'' not just because we 
     are being willful, but because we have a special role, a 
     special place in the world today, and therefore a special 
     responsibility.
       Let me give you an interesting example of specialness that 
     attaches to another nation. During the 1997 negotiations in 
     Oslo over the land mine treaty, when just about the entire 
     Western world was campaigning for a land mine ban, one of the 
     holdouts was Finland. The Finnish prime minister found 
     himself scolded by his Scandinavian neighbors for stubbornly 
     refusing to sign on the ban. Finally, having had enough, he 
     noted tartly that being foursquare in favor of banning land 
     mines was a ``very convenient'' pose for those neighbors who 
     ``want Finland to be their land mine.''
       In many parts of the world, a thin line of American GIs is 
     the land mine. The main reason that the U.S. opposed the land 
     mine treaty is that we need them in places like the DMZ in 
     Korea. Sweden and Canada and France do not have to worry 
     about an invasion from North Korea killing thousands of their 
     soldiers. We do. Therefore, as the unipolar power and as the 
     guarantor of peace in places where Swedes do not tread, we 
     need weapons that others do not. Being uniquely situated in 
     the world, we cannot afford the empty platitudes of allies 
     not quite candid enough to admit that they live under 
     the protection of American power. In the end, we have no 
     alternative but to be unilateralist. Multilateralism 
     becomes either an exercise in futility or a cover for 
     inaction.
       The futility of it is important to understand. The entire 
     beginning of the unipolar age was a time when this country, 
     led by the Clinton administration, eschewed unilateralism and 
     pursued multilateralism with a vengeance. Indeed, the 
     principal diplomatic activity of the U.S. for eight years was 
     the pursuit of a dizzying array of universal treaties: the 
     comprehensive test ban treaty, the chemical weapons 
     convention, the biological weapons convention, Kyoto and, of 
     course, land mines.
       In 1997, the Senate passed a chemical weapons convention 
     that even its proponents admitted was useless and 
     unenforceable. The argument for it was that everyone else had 
     signed it and that failure to ratify would leave us isolated. 
     To which we ought to say: So what? Isolation in the name of a 
     principle, in the name of our own security, in the name of 
     rationality is an honorable position.
       Multilateralism is at root a cover for inaction. Ask 
     yourself why those who are so strenuously opposed to taking 
     action against Iraq are also so strenuously in favor of 
     requiring U.N. support. The reason is that they see the U.N. 
     as a way to stop America in its tracks. They know that for 
     ten years the Security Council did nothing about Iraq; 
     indeed, it worked assiduously to weaken sanctions and 
     inspections. It was only when President Bush threatened 
     unilateral action that the U.N. took any action and stirred 
     itself to pass a resolution. The virtue of unilateralism is 
     not just that it allows action. It forces action.
       I return to the point I made earlier. The way to build a 
     coalition is to be prepared to act alone. The reason that 
     President Bush has been able and will continue to be able to 
     assemble a coalition on Iraq is that the Turks, the Kuwaitis 
     and others in the region will understand that we are prepared 
     to act alone if necessary. In the end, the real division 
     between unilateralists and multilateralists is not really 
     about partnerships or about means or about methods. It is 
     about ends.
       We have never faced a greater threat than we do today, 
     living in a world of weapons of mass destruction of 
     unimaginable power. The divide before us, between 
     unilateralism and multilateralism, is at the end of the day a 
     divide between action and inaction. Now is the time for 
     action, unilaterally if necessary.

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