Four recent events shared something in common; they illustrated America's habitual reliance on its unilateral reflex in foreign affairs. The first three were concerned with spy activities of various sorts, only one of which, the ES-3E affair off the China coast, received wide attention. The second incident, the downing of a plane carrying a missionary family over Peru, also involved elements of American intelligence. A surveillance plane with a crew of three CIA contract employees, on a mission monitoring drug-trafficking air traffic, apparently mis-cued the Peruvian air force, which shot down the plane, killing two Americans on board.
The third event, which scarcely received any attention in American media, was the revelation of an Anglo-American (U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain) spy system, dubbed Echelon, in Europe. It first came to light in April, when it was decried by Jean-Claude Martinez, a French member of the European Parliament following a debate on eavesdropping by English-speaking countries on continental Europe. All the three spy-related events attest to the fact that the United States does not only unilaterally play the world's policeman, but also its great detective.
The fourth event was America's ouster from the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which, as we will argue, was in effect a price Washington paid for its unrestrained unilateralist foreign policy. At the triennial election held by the U.N Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to choose three states to fill the seats up for election among the 16 seats allocated to the West on the 53-member Commission, the United States (with 29 votes received) trailed behind France (52), Austria (41), and Sweden (32). The question is why?
While reactions by American officials were understandably bitter and outraged, speculations were varied as to why it had happened. The most common temptation, again understandably, was to look for villains, conjecturing a China-Cuba coterie masterminding an anti-U.S. effort by the human-rights abusers on the 54-member ECOSOC. But, critics succumbing to this temptation blatantly ignored a logical deduction. As Senator Jesse Helms correctly noted, the ECOSOC traditionally is dominated by Third-World states or their sympathizers. The trouble with this line of reasoning is that the same Third-World slant in the ECOSOC is a feature that dates back to 1971. In that year, the Council saw its membership expanded from its previous 18 to 54, to include more members from the developing world, modifying the pre-existing regional distribution formula that had given industrial countries a permanent edge. But, how come the United States managed to be continuously re-elected until this year?
The U.S. defeat this time, thus, must be due to a variable. And that variable was clearly tied to the possible reason why, as was alleged, the other 22 of the 23 Western members on the ECOSOC, departing from a prior tacit understanding, changed their votes in the secret balloting. The reason becomes clearer when one recognizes that France leads the pack of three elected in the Western column. Coincidentally or not, France is known as the most avid leader among the European members on the Commission in opposing the annual U.S. ritual of sponsoring resolutions condemning China for rights violations. France's aversion does not come from its support for China so much as its general opposition to U.S. hegemonic unilateralism, as is generally known on the Commission.
It may not be a coincidence that European resentment to U.S. unilateralism is at its post-Cold War peak following the change of guards at the White House since January 20. A number of foreign-policy decisions by the new Bush Administration, ranging from the announced unilateral U.S. withdrawal from Kosovo and, for that matter, reduced U.S. commitment to the NATO, to the unilateral withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol of 1998 when global warming has since become a more pronounced threat to humanity, and to a nonetheless unilateral decision (despite perfunctory, cursory "consultations" with European leaders) to scrap the 1972 ABM treaty with Russia, clearing the way for an equally unilateral National Missile Defense (NMD) system. This scheme, furthermore, goes against a common chorus of opposition even among America's close allies in Europe and in Asia (Japan and South Korea). The ground of their common opposition is that the NMD may elicit new rounds of destablizing arms race not seen since the Cold War.
True, unilateralism is not a monopoly of any Administration, nor any particular session of Congress. In 1999, the U.S. Senate unilaterally rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CNTBT), which the Clinton Administration had signed three years earlier along with 154 other countries. The United States, under Reagan, had unilaterally held out joining the 119 states that signed the epochal 1982 Law of the Sea Convention after seven years of diligent negotiations. The ostensible official reason was that the United States would have no part to legislating socialism by treaty. The real reason, however, was that Washington wanted to have a permanent seat on the governing council of the International Seabed Authority, an agency to be created under the United Nations with the authority to issue licenses to national mining companies bent on exploiting seabed resources. Having finally won such an exclusive concession following 12 more years of talks, the United States then signed the treaty in 1994.
But, the truth is that unilateralism has only been carried to new heights unknown before under the Bush Administration. It has irked America's allies. Hence, any sensible person can readily infer a correlation between this unprecedented pitch of unilateralism and America's ouster from the Human Rights Commission after it lost the May 3 election.
Unilateralism and After
Unilateralism may take different forms. Withdrawal from collective action in producing collective goods (such as environmental control) takes the form of omission. It may, on the other hand, take the form of commission, such as in the U.S. invasion of Panama, in December 1989, under the senior Bush. In the latter event, the example thus set may have encouraged copy-catting, such as in Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait scarcely nine months later.
A most common form of unilateralism is to set different rules for itself, as from those for others. In the EP-3E spy plane case, the United States asserted it had the right to spy on another coastal state from the airspace over the latter's 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ). When pressed, the Bush White House might claim, on the ground of non-ratification, that America was not bound by the 1982 treaty's provisions establishing the rights of a foreign coastal state, thus freeing America from the duty to observe the "due regard" rule for the latter's rights (including the right of privacy) while flying a spy plane over its EEZ. Nor, in this view, is the United States bound by the rule that the high seas are reserved for "peaceful purposes" only.
We need not belabor the point that these rules are or have become customary rules in general international law binding on all nations. The fact is that the United States in 1983, under President Reagan, established a 200-mile EEZ of its own by [unilateral] proclamation. One wonders what would happen if any foreign nation should send spy planes, on routine missions, into the airspace over America's EEZ so established.
The consequences from such hegemonic unilateralism may vary. The recent troubles the Bush Administration has encountered in the four events above are but a reminder of what kinds of bitter fruits are likely to result from America's unilateralist approach to foreign affairs. The twenty-first century is one characterized by the rise of what is known as "comprehensive security," comprising environmental security, economic security, and human security. Remedies require collective action, not unilateral self-help. The ultimate lesson from these recent events is that they are a wake-up call that the time has come for America to shift gears toward greater use of collective action, on security matters as in foreign relations in general – or else, be prepared to face rejection even by America's own allies.
May 7, 2001
