April 1, 2003
GEORGE BUSH OBSTINATELY REFUSES TO NEGOTIATE AWAY OUR SOVEREIGNTY!:
Obstinate Orthodoxy (Fred Hiatt, March 31, 2003, Washington Post)As the United States fights a war with few allies alongside it, one version of how President Bush alienated the world has jelled into a kind of
orthodoxy. Even before beginning his Iraq diplomacy last fall, according to this story line, Bush had doomed his chances by arrogantly thumbing his nose at the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. If he had maintained Clinton administration commitments to these and similar multilateral ventures, other nations would have accepted U.S. leadership on Iraq.It would be wonderful if that were the whole truth, because it would mean that ending America's isolation wouldn't be all that hard. Get a president who travels to Paris a little more, quotes scripture a little less and returns the nation to a mainstream acceptance of international law, and the problem would go away.
Unfortunately, the problem is deeper-seated. And nothing makes that clearer than to remember that -- the orthodox story line notwithstanding -- President Clinton in his way also thumbed his nose at the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and the ABM Treaty. He just didn't do it as arrogantly -- or, Bush partisans would say, as honestly. [...]
When it came to the International Criminal Court, Clinton was as worried as Bush about exposing American soldiers to international jurisprudence. He was dissatisfied with concessions his negotiators extracted in the final treaty; he complained about its "significant flaws." But again he signed it anyway -- to "reaffirm our strong support for international accountability," he said. Then he said he wouldn't submit the treaty for Senate ratification and would recommend that Bush not do so either.
Clinton was committed to the ABM Treaty with Russia, the primary purpose of which was to outlaw national missile defense. But Clinton also spent much of
the last two years of his presidency unsuccessfully trying to persuade the Russians to redefine the treaty precisely to permit national missile defense. "One way or another," Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, told his Russian counterpart, according to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, "NMD was almost certain to proceed."The Bush people entered office full of righteous indignation at these hedges. Signing treaties that you didn't believe in, salvaging treaties that you intended to undermine -- these struck the Republicans as classic Clintonian attempts to keep everyone happy, to offend no one, to kick problems into the future for someone else to deal with. They vowed to bring straight talk to foreign policy, and they did. Bush not only disavowed the ICC, he pressured other countries to follow suit. He junked Kyoto without bothering to offer anything in its place. He walked away from the ABM Treaty. And he made a lot of people angry.
One conclusion is that straight talk isn't always the wisest course in diplomacy. There may be times when fudging to avoid conflict and working toward consensus is better than forcing confrontation. Bush seemed at times to offend gratuitously, beyond what honesty demanded. He could, for example, have said that while he agreed with Clinton about the impracticality of the Kyoto Protocol, he also agreed that global warming was a concern. He hardly bothered.
Setting aside for the moment the notion that President Bush should declare himself "concerned" about a global warming that evenb the credulous are now admitting may be dubious, Mr. Hiatt is onto something here. No one ever accused Mr. Clinton of putting the interests of the nation ahead of his own personal
political advantage, while he is hailed, aptly or not, for his shrewd reading of voter sentiments. That tends to suggest that advocacy of all these transnational schemes is still a loser in American politics and Democrats are probably doing Mr. Bush a favor every time they mention his steadfast opposition to them. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 1, 2003 7:10 PM
Article III
Section 1. The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court . . . .
Section 2. The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;--to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;--to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction;--to controversies to which the United States shall be a party;--to controversies between two or more states;--between a state and citizens of another state;--between citizens of different states;--between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects.
If someone can explain to me how the government can constitutionally turn US citizens over to a court from which appeal does not lie to the Supreme Court, well, I still won't support the ICC, but at least we'll be having the right argument.
I wrote Bruce Ackerman and asked him why he thought the UN had authority over our going to war and he said that the UN Charter was a treaty whereby we'd assigned away that authority to some extent. Presumably, entering into the ICC pact would work similarly. One's flesh crawls...
Posted by: oj at April 1, 2003 8:25 PMOpen treaties openly arrived at. Has a
certain ring, don't it?
Clinton mastered the art of plausable deniability, whether it was in his latest legal entanglement domestically, or in agreeing to sign a treaty like Koyoto, which he knew would never gain congressional approval but would earn him the love of the Europeans and U.S. envornmentalists (both of whom were never going to call him on not going to the mat for the treaty, since to do that would play into the hands of the -- ugh -- Republicans.
It's also worth noting that the missus is also doing an excellent job playing the same game on Iraq. Hillary is making hit-and-run public statements against the war to prop up support with the left wing of the party, but casting votes in support of Bush's actions.
She's doing that because she knows (and as her husband has proved) people have short memories, and what she said in early 2003 will be forgotten by all but the hard-core political junkies before the next election -- and certainly by 2008 -- but the voting record will be there to tout if she runs for the presidency, just the way Al Gore touted his vote on the 1991 Guld War resolution. And the tactic is effective, because as with her husband, the people on the far left of the Democratic Party who should be the most enraged by the votes will never call her on it because in their eyes it plays into the hands of the GOP.
The article leaves out the Rome Treaty, which essentially says that signatories agree to abide by unratified treaties as if they were ratified, unless the national legislature specifically refuses to ratify. That used to be the gentleman's agreement-- sign a treaty with the honest expectation of ratification, but as Clinton showed, treatymaking has entered the realm of performance politics.
As for "open treaties openly arrived at"-- didn't that diplomatic philsophy lead to a series of increasingly larger wars in the 1930s and early 1940s? Shows what happens when utopian theory meets practice...
Considering Clinton's behavior, that's one treaty that the US should never even come close to ratifying.
Especially when signing treaties invariably (necessarily?) leads to this:
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Part of the French-German-Russian-Chinese iceberg, no doubt.
Open treaties openly arrived at was a slogan floated by Wilson. Nobody adopted it, although the bolsheviks did publish the secret clauses of czarist treaties.
Everybody thought that was a bad idea.
I guess, in theory, U.S. treaties could not have secret clauses, since they go to the Senate, which cannot keep secrets; but I wouldn't bet some don't have secret annexes the Senate never hears about.