Be a Friend, Mr. Bush

Eager to show that its approach to foreign policy would not simply echo Bill Clinton’s, the Bush administration quickly announced some notable departures. Most prominently, it turned its back on the Kyoto environmental treaty to reduce the threat of global warming and gave notice of its readiness to opt out of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow. America’s major European allies decried both steps as shifts toward unilateralism, a view that public opinion in Britain, France, Italy and Germany overwhelmingly endorses, according to a new poll. Administration officials, while denying that the United States is taking a go-it-alone approach, insist they will do what suits U.S. interests. That’s fine, so long as they recognize that effective pursuit of those interests often depends on help from others.

President Bush said he planned to read a new biography of John Adams during his Texas vacation. He would do well to add to his list “A World Transformed,” written by his father and Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush’s national security advisor. Especially pertinent is the section on how the first President Bush organized the coalition that was vital politically and to a lesser extent militarily in liberating Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991. That achievement would have been all but impossible if anger and resentment over earlier U.S. policies had left allies unwilling to join a U.S.-led stand against aggression.

The humbling lesson is that even a country as powerful as the U.S. needs friends to conduct a successful foreign policy, and friendships have to be based on mutual respect for others’ interests and concerns. A country that thinks it can go it alone could find itself all alone, just when it needs help the most.