This stirs up opposition on both the
left and right, at home and abroad. Why should America take on the
thankless task of policing the globe, critics wonder?
To answer that question, start by
asking, does the world need a constable? That is like asking whether
London or New York needs a police force. As long as evil exists, someone
will have to protect peaceful people from predators. The international
system is no different in this regard from your own neighbourhood,
except that predators abroad are far more dangerous than ordinary
robbers, rapists and murderers. They are, if given half a chance, mass
robbers, mass rapists and mass murderers.
There are, to be sure, lots of
international laws on the books prohibiting genocide, land mines,
biological weapons and other nasty things. But without enforcement
mechanisms, they are as meaningless as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928,
which outlawed war as an instrument of national policy.
The hope of idealistic liberals for more
than a century has been that some international organisation would
punish the wicked. But the League of Nations was a dismal failure, and
the UN is not much better. It is hard to take seriously a body whose
human rights commission is chaired by Libya and whose disarmament
commission will soon be chaired by Iraq.
The UN provides a useful forum for
palaver, but as an effective police force it is a joke, as shown by its
failure to stop bloodlettings in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere. It is
almost impossible to get a consensus among the UN's member states, even
when it comes to a threat as well documented as that posed by Saddam
Hussein.
The best multilateral alternative is
probably Nato. Unlike the UN, Nato has the advantage of being composed
exclusively of democracies that share a common heritage and, presumably,
common interests (though the French, Belgians and Germans seem to have
forgotten this for the time being). But even before the current contretemps
over Turkey, it was already obvious that the alliance is too large and
unwieldy to take effective military action. As Kosovo showed, targeting
by committee does not work very well. The European Union is even less
effective, since it can neither field an effective military force nor
agree on a common foreign policy.
So who does that leave to be the world's
policeman? Belgium? Bolivia? Burkina Faso? Bangladesh? The answer is
pretty obvious. It is the country with the most vibrant economy, the
most fervent devotion to liberty and the most powerful military. In the
19th century Britain battled the "enemies of all mankind",
such as slave traders and pirates, and kept the world's seas open to
free trade. Today the only nation capable of playing an equivalent role
is the US. Allies will be needed but America is, as Madeleine Albright
said, "the indispensable nation".
Sceptics will reply that America has an
isolationist past and no desire to play Globocop. Congressman Jimmy
Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, complained recently: "It is a
traditional conservative position not to want the United States to be
the policeman of the world."
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But rumours of American isolationism are
much exaggerated. Since the earliest days of the Republic, American
traders, missionaries and soldiers have penetrated the farthest corners
of the world. America even has a long history of military action abroad.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt declared: "Chronic
wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the
ties of civilised society, may ultimately require intervention by some
civilised nation, and in the western hemisphere the adherence of the
United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States,
however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence,
to the exercise of an international police power."
When Roosevelt wrote those words, the
western hemisphere was the only place where the US exercised military
hegemony. In the rest of the world, America could count on the Royal
Navy to defend "civilised society". Today, America exercises
almost as much power everywhere around the world as it once had only in
the Caribbean. In fact, it has more power in both relative and absolute
terms than any other state in history. Thus, by Roosevelt's logic, the
US is obliged to stop "chronic wrongdoing", for the simple
reason that nobody else will do the job. That is what the US has been
doing for the past decade in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan,
and now Iraq.
Unfortunately a cop's work is never
done. Even after Mr Hussein is gone, other tyrannies, such as North
Korea and Iran, will continue to threaten world peace. Taking on all of
them is a big commitment, but as Kipling warned America, "Ye dare
not stoop to less."
The writer is Olin senior fellow at
the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Savage Wars of Peace:
Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
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