Powell Puts U.S. on Pedestal, Observers Say

On his first official workday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was treated to a rousing surprise welcome from staffers who packed the flag-draped State Department lobby. “This is so marvelous I think we ought to do it again tomorrow,” he teased, to peals of laughter.

But by week’s end, Powell had served up his own set of surprises--to both U.S. diplomats and foreign governments--that suggests just how different the new Bush administration’s foreign policy will be in both style and substance.

The message to his staff last week was widely welcomed. Promising not to send in “strike teams” to race around the Truman Building and “rip up everything” State Department employees had done, Powell pledged to streamline a cumbersome diplomatic bureaucracy, win badly needed resources from Congress, hire more minorities, modernize an outdated computer system--and listen.

“I’m going to be asking so many of you to come up and tell me directly what you think,” he said, promising a departure from predecessors who listened first and foremost to an elite inner circle of political appointees rather than career diplomats. Powell said he planned to defer to “the experts.”

But Powell’s more subtle message to foreign governments may not be so welcome. The former four-star general has not been shy about advocating what he views as the United States’ superiority and rightness as the basis of policy.

“Other systems do not work,” he bluntly told his staff. “We are going to show a vision to the world of the value system of America.”

Although the Bush administration intends to listen, it’s also fully prepared to disregard opposition from other nations--even friends, and even on issues of mutual concern.

Powell’s approach already has generated anxiety among foreign policy specialists about a doctrine variously dubbed “unilateralism” or “exceptionalism.” The premise of the new doctrine is that the U.S. can do pretty much what it wants because its sophisticated democracy makes it politically and morally superior to the rest of the world--and sometimes even exempts it from international norms and treaties.

“Exceptionalism is also the view that the United States is playing such a unique role in guaranteeing global peace and security that it has to be given a pass on some of the norms it proscribes for others, such as testing nuclear weapons or preemptive military strikes. Because it’s the United States, it’ll be the right decision,” said Joseph Cirincione, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“In other words, nuclear testing by the United States is good, but if India tries it, it’s bad.”

The concept may represent the new fissure in the deepening debate over the goals and tactics of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War world. In the past, the dividing line was between activists and isolationists. Now it is becoming unilateralists and multilateralists.

Missile Defense Is ‘Right Thing to Do’

During Powell’s Senate confirmation hearings, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) warned of a “troubling new ism” emerging in U.S. policy. “And that is unilateralism,” Biden said, “a belief that America can better protect its interests by going it alone.”

The doctrine has been most visible--and controversial--with regard to national missile defense, a program still in an embryonic technical stage that proponents say would protect the U.S. against long-range missiles. Its cost is already estimated to be $60 billion or more.

Biden warned against the Republican insistence on deploying missile defense “without concern for the legitimate security interests of our European and Asian allies” that oppose its deployment, often vehemently. He called the administration’s position on missile defense the “shield of dreams” approach.

“In other words, build it and they’ll come along with our ideas,” Biden said, adding that proceeding unilaterally would leave the U.S. as “the lonely superpower.”

But Powell, in a telling indication of the administration’s new attitude, shot back: “If it’s the right thing to do, then you do it anyway.”

The new secretary of State ascribed such opposition to nervousness about change: “People see something come along and they are terrified. It’s going to shake old patterns of behavior. It’s going to be terrible. Everything is going to be blown apart.” Sometimes, he added, leaders have to “go through these barriers.”

At the same time, Powell acknowledged that “for every action you take, every weapon you develop,” there is a danger that some nation “will try to respond in due course” if it feels threatened.

On national missile defense, he said the issue was not whether the Bush administration is willing to push through the barriers, but “how fast we can move forward.” And he cast aside concern among many U.S. arms control experts about the fate of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, long described by Moscow and both Republican and Democrat administrations in Washington as the cornerstone of strategic stability. Deploying a missile defense system would in effect nullify the ABM treaty.

In the Senate hearings Jan. 10, Powell dismissed the ABM as “no longer relevant.”

But the undercurrent of exceptionalism or unilateralism extends far beyond missile defense.

“The United States has a special role in the world and should not adhere to every international convention and agreement that someone thinks to propose,” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote last year in Foreign Affairs magazine.

Rice was scathing about the Clinton administration’s “attachment” to many largely “symbolic agreements.” Its pursuit of “illusory norms” of international behavior had become “an epidemic,” she added.

She cited both the Kyoto treaty on global warming and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as examples of pacts that President Clinton had signed even though she contends they are not in America’s interests. Clinton had done so because he was “so anxious” to find multilateral solutions, she said.

“That is not leadership,” she charged.

Foreign policy experts are concerned that the new strategy will produce resentment rather than eventual acceptance. “The danger is that other countries will decide that their situations also require exceptional consideration,” Cirincione said.

Washington also may pull out of one treaty too many and bring down the entire framework of disarmament over the past half century, he added.

Unilateralism Seen as Unworkable by Some

As the U.S. begins turning away from treaties, as well as from new forms of disarmament and the very idea of common security arrangements, the Russians, Chinese and even some Europeans may perceive the new approach as an effort “to enshrine American global dominance for another century, and act accordingly in their own interests,” Cirincione said.

Other foreign policy experts say unilateralism or exceptionalism is unworkable in a globalizing world. “Even if we wanted to work unilaterally, we would fall flat on our face on many issues,” said Pauline Baker, president of the Washington-based Fund for Peace.

“In the post-Cold War world, problems with the environment, terrorism, Iraqi sanctions and humanitarian crises can’t be solved alone,” Baker said. “That’s not a liberal position. From the perspective of realpolitik today, the lone ranger approach is not going to work and it could well backfire.”