How can the US “we don’t care” policy make the UN more useful? Because what we’ve seen is that one strong nation essentially said to the UN, “Talk all you want, we’re going to do what we want.” It may actually reduce the usefulness of the UN (which may be a secondary goal of the US Administration/PNAC).
Can’t find it on-line now, but around the start of the Iraq invasion, a representative of the NK government said (to the effect of) there was no point in co-operating with the UN if you were going to be attacked anyway by the US in the role of “rogue state”.
I think the “we don’t care” policy puts the world on a dangerous path away from diplomacy, and I don’t think that’s a good thing (and I’ll even give you that the US Administration may have the best intentions, at least from a US viewpoint.
“If”??? Did you post this message before January 2001 and it only just showed up? It depresses me that the Bush approach to foreign policy all along has been “we don’t care”. Or “you will do as we say and we will do as we say”. Or “**** you”.
OK, so maybe I’m not contributing to a “great debate”, but how anyone can describe this approach as a “new policy” as december does is beyond me. I will at least go along with “more honest naming of existing policy”.
I agree with this, except that, as others have noted, we have to do a much, much better job explaining, in advance, the kinds of things we don’t care about. And the list has to be really, really short.
For example, in the Iraq situation, we should never been sidetracked to the U.N. at all. We should have said, “we promised to make any government that supports or sponsors international terrorism an ex-government. We are about to keep our promise as it regards Iraq. As it happens, they also never got around to complying with all those resolutions the U.N. passed – if you guys want in, we’ve got a spot on the roster. Got a problem? We don’t care.” The fight against global terrorism clearly rises to the level of a "we don’t care"policy.
A big problem is where else wouldn’t we care? Human rights? That would be a good (if optimistic) start. Nuclear non-proliferation? Heh. Kind of a can of worms this week, eh? Money? Eww. Non-terrorist dictators? That’s a pretty tall order, no?
And if we’re shifting to such a policy, we owe it to the world to announce it – a major policy speech at a university by the President would do nicely. This half-announce by word, half by deed, all by underlings is a poor way to go about it.
Hell, I would have thought this would be exactly what the world wanted from the U.S.
It seems to me that this kind of policy is Bush’s implicit admission of the new bipolar geopolitical reality of two (unequal) superpowers: America and “public opinion.”
To put it in a grossly simplistic way…
Public opinion (by various stances via various languages) seems to be communicating to America:
“Jesus Christ, man, you’ve gotten way too powerful. You’re omnipresent because you can project so much power and influence and dollars. You arrogantly throw your weight around the world with impunity. We reject the idea that one country can have this much power. You’ve ignored international opinion to carry out this war. We want to see and hear a lot less of you, and we want you to adhere to international organizations that will harness your influence. You’re a hegemonic, imperialistic oil glutton that doesn’t give a shit about the rest of the world.”
“We don’t care” is a response that hoists public opinion on its own petard, in a weird sort of way. Some things that may happen as a result of “we don’t care” may be:
Pull troops out of Saudi Arabia, since our presence in that country provokes such outrage (hell, we barely used the base in the Iraq war anyway, and the reason for us being there has now been rendered moot. Plus, we’re seen as protecting an immoral, corrupt autocracy loathed by many in the Saudi population).
Muslims - isn’t this what you want?
Since France so objects to our hyperinfluence in NATO, we cheerfully say OK, we’ll take a lesser role and share power more equally. Of course, that means we’ll pay dues that are commensurate with our diminished influence and watch as NATO withers away.
France - isn’t this what you want?
Withdraw our troop presence from Germany. After all, I don’t think we have to worry about the Russkies storming Berlin any time soon, seeing as how Putin and Schroder are newest best buddies. Besides, maybe an Eastern European country (maybe Poland, perhaps Bulgaria or Romania), grateful for America’s role in freeing them from tyranny, might prove to be a more eager host (especially with some juicy trade agreements). Seeing as how Germany so objected to our recent militarism, now they won’t have the war mongering Americans on their precious soil anymore.
Germany - isn’t this what you want?
Reward the hell out of our friends. Yes, we will eventually allow France, Russia, and Germany to share the post-war spoils, and yes, we will do our best to push the roadmap to Pal/Israel peace, because this was the price of Mr. Blair’s support. We will bestow much gratitude to countries such as Australia, Poland, Bulgaria, etc. with aid and access to markets.
In short, “we don’t care” means we will pay much less attention to entangling formal alliances that have let us down. We will engage in less formal alliances, but the ones we retain will be deeper and more real.
We do enough to ensure that polite relations with those countries that opposed us diplomatically continue. Personally speaking, as an American, I have no interest in gaining any more enemies than we already have. But I also feel that America needs to fundamentally reassess who its friends really are, and acknowledge the fact that many of our former friends, well, aren’t anymore.
If these actions serve to alleviate other countries’ fear and loathing of America, terrific.
If these actions just piss them off more, well, at least we’re doing what you said you wanted.
The beauty of Tit for Tat is that it often elicits the same strategy from the folks with whom you interact even if it is not made explicit. The catch is that you have to be consistent. It’s too easy for so-called realpolitik to get in the way. Assuming this is actually the Bush agenda, I guess we’ll see just how consistent they will be. A major policy speach will just be demonized. I think Bush has made it pretty clear what his intentions are, in his own folksy way: “You’re either with us or against us”.
Good God, what kind of morals does this attitude betray? “If someone criticizes you it’s because you’ve been doing something to reward them for doing so.” Who was that fella that Bush said he admired the most?
By using the good parts of the UN, but not playing along with some of the nonsense. E.g., look at France and Russia and the UN trying to maintain sanctions and the Oil-for-Food program, even though Saddam is overthrown. This selfish and cynical position doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. Or, consider the UN Human Rights Commission, headed by Libya and including Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Sudan. They don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
World War III would soon follow – not that I think we’re in the clear now, what with your Klutz has already done to international relations.
Pardon? That’s right, you "don’t care". But hey, at least you’ll know why the mushroom clouds are popping-up all over your cities. Some consolation. :rolleyes:
Amazing the things one has to read – and worse, that some people actually agree with this kind of crap or think this is actually something debatable.
What a pathetic display of wishful thinking and spin: dangerous diplomatic incompetence and lack of understanding portrayed as a “policy” that will solve the problems this kind of behaviour causes in the first place.
December, you have outdone yourself. When you learn to make a point in an honest manner and are able to support it adequately, come back and try again.
I think those folks who are getting all blustery red in the face in this thread are those who also vastly overestimate the capabilities of America’s potential rivals, and vastly underappreciate just how powerful the US is now.
Somebody mentioned China’s “naval fleet” Hur de hur hur.
On the other hand, the article does acknowledge that more countries might turn to nuclear weapons as the only possible deterrent against overwhelming American power. That hardly equates to hysterical visions of “mushroom clouds . . . popping-up all over [our] cities”, but it does complicate the diplomatic and tactical landscape when dealing with future rogue states. Not so much for fear of what they would do, but what we would do. Any country that actually tried using nuclear weapons on our country or our troops would find itself paved with glass from border to border.
Forgive me, because I do agree with the basic thrust of the article in a military sense. BUT, I can’t help but be reminded of the many articles lauding the “new economy,” where high tech would just go up forever.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to anger people who already have nuking us rationalized in their minds.
What exactly was obnoxious? It’s looking more and more that he was right: the U.S. used him and his inspection team as pawns, and sought to actively discredit their work.
I’ve already rebuked december on this once, but trying to simply apply tit-for-tat to political cooperation is extremely questionable. First of all, tft is a strategy for the two person non-communicative prisoners dilemna (the italics are key), not a general strategy for all games. Furthermore, nothing in situations like this equate to “cooperating,” especially when you simply define “cooperating” as doing whatever the U.S. pleases.
Indeed, this attitude seems more than anything a simple expression of U.S. domination, not a prisoner’s dilemna strategy. We win by playing our favored option, and other countries can either play along and get our largesse, or diagree and face our wrath.
Somehow the suggestion that more unilateralism is better is beyond me. If we really wanted to adopt the “we don’t care” policy I think we should just focus our efforts inside our boundaries including Israel and Palestine. Sure the problems of the rest of the world will be worse but we’ll be better off. Anti-Americanism isn’t like some sort of Pavlovian reaction that gets used for some sort of benefit. It is an actual feeling based on the sense of injustice that people feel against a unilateral “we don’t care” policy. Well, what if Israel felt like this? Oh yeah, I forgot, they already do. See where it got them? Take a look at the state of Israel and see if terrorism stops when you stop rewarding the terrorists. Ideas like this are really dangerous.
Sorry december, its impossible to tell how people will react, but basing on the reaction so far, it isn’t promising. The Iraqis basically don’t care that we got rid of saddam anymore. The number of US lovers in Iraq is dwindling by the day. There is a fundemental divide between what the rest of the world wants and what the US thinks is good for them. And we don’t have the time nor the credibility to proove that our idea was good in the first place. That’s why the “we do care” policy works, because it gives credibility.
In a way, I think the only way for America to rid itself of these insane notions is to learn the hard way. But when will people learn? When you drop a bomb on somebody’s house under the message of we don’t care, do you think they will say:
Hmm… You know Anti-Americanism is a bad thing because they’ll drop bombs on us.
or:
This isn’t fair, and if we stick to our guns we can get our way, because America won’t be able to control us for that long. All we need are a few suicide bombers and that will be it. They can’t bomb us forever.
This kind of logic creates a world that America rules by might. And we can’t rule the world by might. Not that I want America to rule the world, but if it will ever happen, it will be through cooperation.
I wish these ideas could be discredited without all of the bloodshed and violence that it will breed, but I don’t see it as long as people think things like this will work.
Just judging from Israel, I don’t think any amount of force can overpower the sense of injustice that breeds terrorism. Even if it does work, the resentment will only linger until we aren’t paying attention anymore, and then the violence will ensue again.
Furthermore, i’d like to see the we don’t care policy applied to China or Russia. There it doesn’t seem so smart. We can bully the little guys for a while, but when you start talking about punishing China for something, then I don’t see the benefit.
Yeah, so don’t nobody f*** with us, or we’ll kick your sorry foreigner ass back to yesterday! You all better start doing what we say unless you want to get a fistfull of American military might. And get the hell out of the crosswalk or I’ll run you down in my Humvee. Cuz America RULES!!! We’re Number 1!!! And don’t you forget it, you French pussies, or we’ll dump all your crappy wine down the gutter. USA!!! USA!!!:rolleyes:
Exactly what benefit would the US gain from better relations with Europe? It’s not like trade is going to stop, or even be much constrained since both the US and Europe benefit from commerce, and talking about open warfare is just absurd. All that better relations with Europe would provide is less whining from countries like France and their support via votes in bodies that are irrelevant anyway.
Although I didn’t vote for Bush in 2000, I’m strongly inclined to vote for him in 2004 because of his foreign policy. I don’t think I’m alone in that, it appears that a lot of people are glad to see the US stop trying to appease countries like France and Germany who constantly demand that we work for them (former Yugoslavia) and sabotage our efforts when we’re trying to do something (Iraq). For all of the rambling about “diplomatic incompetence” and how much “damage” has been done to Amercia’s relations, I haven’t seen anyone explain how what was incompetent about our diplomacy and what the cost of the ‘damage’ is. Sure, France and Germany and some other countries whined and fussed a bit, but what bad effects actually happened to the US? What will the US not be able to do in the future?
Let’s take a closer, non-decembrist look at one of the items in “some of the nonsense” quoted so briefly and with so little comprehension by December as he drew his biased and partisan conclusions regarding the UN. I shall have to make this quick as time is short.
A point delivered with trademark dishonesty and distortion. Firstly, the UN is acting in accordance with the rules. Secondly, the UN is composed of member states, and is not “trying” to do anything other than what is in its mandate and charter. But to get to your accusations, a correct version of the decembrist perversion quoted above is that France and Russia are willing to go along with the Bush administration’s intentions of lifting sanctions, but they want to link the lifting of sanctions to the return of weapons inspectors in Iraq.
The above position is technically correct according to the text of UN resolutions that state sanctions cannot be removed until UN weapons inspectors provide certification that Iraq’s weapons have been destroyed (not that Saddam has been removed).
What’s the big issue, you may wonder? Bush and cronies refuse to allow Blix and UNMOVIC to resume inspections because of two main points: firstly, they accuse Blix of “derailing” diplomacy before the war, an accusation so empty that it could well have come from certain die-hard eaters of propaganda on these boards; secondly, the US is worried that Blix may declare Iraq free of WMD (which would allow for the lifting of sanctions, but would be a PR catastrophe for the US since the incontrovertible existence of WMDs was the argument used to rush to war) or that inspections may require a considerable time.
In other words, the US seems reluctant to want to share control of the results of the search for WMDs in Iraq.
In the light of the above conflict of interest (an American one, not French or Russian), French Ambassador to the UN De La Sabliere suggested that the Security Council suspend sanctions temporarily as an interim measure and wrangle over the details later. This approach, referred to as “pragmatic”, did not (yet?) win favour with Bush & co. One wonders why, until one remembers that Bush and similar neocon pinheads are interested more in America uber alles than in pragmatic compromises.
Is it unreasonable to have an independent and objective body to establish and/or verify claims regarding WMD in Iraq? Of course not, it’s perfectly normal and the scientifically correct thing to do. Instead, we now have a situation where the same entity has:
-made a claim (Iraq and dire danger as well as possession of WMD)
-failed to support that claim
-provided a number of instances of clearly falsified evidence to support its claim, and also employed alarmism as a substitute for evidence
-justified a war based on an unsupported claim and fake evidence
And now the same entity is proceeding to look for WMD on its own, with no independent verification or monitoring, meaning that it is opening itself once again to the criticisms of dishonesty levelled at it in the past. No wonder at all that some nations should express misgivings.
The US position may seem perfectly normal to the average layman, but it is not a good process under any point of view, scientific or political. To be perfectly blunt the argument goes: “the US have faked evidence in the past, so we have zero reassurance they will not do so again, especially since so much rides on this missing evidence”. Note that whether the US approaches the search for WMD honestly or not (and it may do so, I am not saying it won’t), the process employed opens it up to criticism regardless. Insisting on making a claim and verifying it while actively excluding independent verification by independent experts is, given the recent history of false evidence, likely to suggest to the world that should the results not be favourable they will be influenced accordingly. Which is precisely what many other states in the UN would like to avoid seeing.
“We don’t care” is just about the only possible attitude to take when assuming such a shameful and counter-productive position, so perhaps you do have a glimmer of a point.
That’s precisely the kind of bluster a policy such as this one originates. See, hard as it might be for you to comprehend, Americans are not Marvel Comic Superheros. They live and die like anyone else, and while there’s no doubting your military superiority – which is the point of this whole proposed policy – in a nuclear scenario, there are no “winners.” Just hundreds of thousands of really dead people on all sides. I have no idea what makes you think you wouldn’t have much to fear.
Further, you used the words ‘rogue state’ and if you stay on present course and beyond – by applying the policy of the OP – just how long do you think it would take to turn the US in a rogue state itself? Because “not caring” would mean just that, ignoring anything and everything that makes a state legal in the eyes of the world – mutual cooperation within International Law. Again, I see no benefits nor a long term future for any nation that decides to act unilaterally. Yes, as the sole remaining hyperpower, you’re in a better position to try, however, least you forget, the world has gone global already. Meaning your ultimate survival is tied into many a different nation.
So, keep scoffing at the size of China’s navy, Russia’s Air Force, France’s fighting spirit, what have you, but any one of those countries – and as the arms race is bound to pick up even faster with this “policy” in place – and quite a few more in the near future, are capable of inflicting the kind of damage that would give any sane human being pause regardless of whether you could pave them, “in glass border to border.”
As it stands now, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find out that there are quite few more nuclear heads pointing at your country right now than there were before the Iraq invasion.
Tread lightly, you might think you own the world, but that just isn’t so. I’m originally from Spain, and I’ve begun to see some parallels between your current sense of invincibility and that of the Spanish Armada. In fact, there’s a bit of a parallel in the way both of our countries came into prominence. No need to tell you what happened to our Armada…but it might do you well to pay heed.
Step off the gas, take a deep breath, and start talking to other countries like they are your partners, not your vassals. Otherwise, you are going to have to care…like it or not.
I’m still having a hard time believing this topic was put up for serious debate!
Just a short note to let you know that you have an insane amount of patience when dealing with these issues and for that, you’re a better man than I. I do wonder just how many times you’ve had to go over the same “clean up” procedure to counter all the false claims and allegations that are so in bogue now in order to “justify” what is nothing more than inflated jingoism.
It’s gotten to the point that you’d think most everyone posting on these issues would know these things by heart. Or at the very least, you’d hope they’d do a bit of research before posting what can only be called gross distortions of fact.
Pehaps you could even write one comprehensive post containing most of these falsehoods and misconceptions and ask to have it made into a sticky for as long as these issues are being discussed? That might also make it easier for the rest of us to reference.
Anyway, keep on trucking. Your efforts are admirable.