Sunday 22 May 2005

The following article is by Zia Mian, a Contributor to the US Program on Science and Global Security of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. 

The U.S. at the end of World War II attempted to create new international institutions, including the United Nations. It has run into problems with this as well.

The U.S. got its way. But here too success was not to last or to come easily. In the first phase of the post-Cold War, US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright claimed that the UN is a tool of American foreign policy. A few years later in trying to get UN support for the use of force against Iraq, the US President found himself with no option but to threaten its very existence, declaring to the UN General Assembly: “Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?”

Nevertheless, the threat was ignored and despite U.S. bullying and bribes the overwhelming majority of Security Council members refused to support the U.S. resolution authorizing an attack on Iraq.

It is not just governments. People around the world have been responding. A January 2005 Pew study on global opinion, based on polling in recent years in 44 countries, reported that “the rest of the world has become deeply suspicious of U.S. motives and openly skeptical about its word.” It observed that “Anti-Americanism is deeper and broader now than at any time in modern history. It is most acute in the Muslim world but it spans the globe--from Europe to Asia, from South America to Africa. This includes people in countries that have been close U.S. allies for over 50 years.”

The Pew survey found that these opinions were enduring, and this new hardening of attitudes amounts to something much larger than a thumb down on the current occupant of the White House. Pew reported, the decline in world opinion about America is the perception that the United States acts internationally without taking into account the interests of other nations.

Nowhere is the decline in the “global leadership” of the U.S. more evident than in its occupation of Iraq. The much unreliable “coalition of the willing” that the Bush administration claimed to have built in 2003 for the invasion of Iraq has all but collapsed.

George W Bush Bush’s leadership at home is in deep trouble too. He received 50.7 percent of the popular vote, while its Rival, John Kerry managed to get 48.2 percent. The last time a president was re-elected with such a small margin was almost 200 years ago, in the early 1800s. Bush now has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his second term, according to polls going back to World War II.

Domestic U.S. opinion is now uneasy about the war. “United for Peace and Justice”, a national network of anti-war groups, counted 583 towns and cities around the country that were planning events to mark the second anniversary of the war. This is up from 319 such events last year. A March Washington Post and ABC News poll found that 53 percent of Americans feel the war was not worth fighting. Fifty seven percent say they disapprove of Bush’s handling of Iraq and 70 percent believe that the number of U.S. casualties is an unacceptable price to have paid.

It is not just the Iraq war. The American public seems to be telling pollsters that they do not support a “global leadership” role for their country.

Asked the same question in another way: “Do you think that the U.S. has the responsibility to play the role of ‘world policeman’? ”The US people gave the same answer, overwhelming majorities over 70 percent were opposed.

A poll in March 2005 found that 57 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. should not have an absolute veto at the United Nations, and agreed that if a decision was supported by all the other members, no one member, not even the U.S., should be able to veto it.

Majorities also agree that the U.S. should join the International Criminal Court, even if that meant U.S. troops possibly being brought to trial there, should sign the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty, and should ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, as well as the convention banning landmines. There was even widespread public support for the U.S accepting and being bound by adverse decisions from the World Trade Organization.