All Treaties Are Not Equal

Le Monde, September 08, 2001

Philip H. Gordon, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies
Justin Vaïsse, Visiting Scholar, Foreign Policy Studies

If President Bush manages to keep up his current pace of approximately one treaty per month, he could well finish his presidential term with more than 40 international treaties killed or weakened in four years. The now familiar list includes the ABM treaty, a "relic of the past;" the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), gathering dust in the Senate as the President tries to kill it; the UN small arms treaty, voided of significance by U.S. amendments to the text; the International Criminal Court; the Kyoto Protocol on climate change; and the OECD initiatives on money laundering and tax shelters. The withdrawal earlier this week of the American delegation to the UN Conference on racism, however warranted, only confirms the pattern.

Many of these agreements, including on land mines, had already been rejected during the Clinton administration, which makes clear that structural-and not only political-factors, are behind the American reluctance to make multilateral commitments. Indeed, it is not so much that the United States has changed-it has never been willing to abandon its sovereignty or its domination of international organizations-but that the rest of the world is changing. The post Cold War decade has seen an unprecedented proliferation of initiatives seeking to impose multilateral solutions on a wide range of problems.

Over the past several months, European observers have concluded that an incorrigibly unilateralist Bush administration was hostile to international cooperation as a matter of principle. Yet while the ideology of certain republicans is indeed one of the reasons for the recent policies, it would be wrong to overlook the administration's basic argument: it is irresponsible, and sometimes even dangerous, to accept a bad treaty. Signing an ineffective or insignificant text only because other countries have managed to agree on it, often at the expense of its initial objectives and common sense, only undermines the long-term legitimacy of the agreements.

Thus the real question: evaluated on their merits, are these treaties any good? The answer is mixed. Take the case of the biological weapons protocol. Its provisions were insufficient to prevent certain states from hiding their weapons programs, but sufficiently invasive to threaten industrial secrets of the developed countries. We should not forget how UNSCOM in Iraq revealed the weaknesses of the verification provisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. At a time when the Europeans put forward multilateralism-rather than missile defense-as the main means for fighting proliferation, we should not lower standards in order to reach an agreement at any price.

Take the case of the treaty on anti-personnel mines. It is the U.S. army that ensures South Korea's security, which no one is proposing that it abandon. Yet land mines are currently an indispensable means to protect these troops, which would have to be augmented in the absence of the mines. Should not the United States, then, have been given the temporary deferral that they were asking for?

And take the case of the ABM treaty. France is not opposed to antimissile systems per se, and is indeed developing its own theater missile defenses. For countries like Japan such systems are far preferable to an eventual nuclear option. But the ABM treaty bans testing of some promising missile defense technologies, notably boost-phase defenses, which are the least strategically destabilizing because they do not threaten the Russian and Chinese deterrents. Is Bush thus not right to seek to lift the constraints of this 30-year-old treaty?

In reality the problem is two-fold: On one hand, while the United States is right to point out the flaws of multilateralism, it is wrong to do so in such a cavalier and abrupt manner. The U.S. rejection of the Kyoto protocol is a perfect example: no coordination with allies, justification on the basis of domestic interests, and a complete lack of an alternative proposal. The last point is the most important: Bush is abdicating his leadership and resigning himself to isolation instead of leading the international community toward a more cooperative world.

At the same time, the administration seems determined to oppose certain treaties that pose no real danger or which, with U.S. participation, could be improved: CTBT, ICC, Kyoto, money laundering, small arms. The U.S. is wrong, in short, to take advantage of its preeminent international position to place domestic political interests (like support from the National Rifle Association or business lobbies) ahead of its international responsibilities (like slowing the trafficking of small arms in Africa).

In the long run, this development is disturbing, for at least two reasons. First because the United States is paying an increasing moral price for its behavior, as was shown by its failure to win election to the UN Human Rights Commission last May-it is America's "soft power" that is diminished. Second because the international system, led by its greatest power, risks moving toward a world of fewer and fewer constraints, less predictability, and thus less security. The irony of history is that the country with the greatest interests in seeing the rule of law develop internationally is the one that most refuses to contribute to it.