A Mighty Arrogance

Today’s scheduled vote in the House on a bill to pay $582 million in dues owed the United Nations threatens to be anything but routine. Conservatives, angry that the United States last week lost its seat on U.N. Human Rights Commission, want to withhold a further planned U.N. payment of $244 million unless the seat is restored next year. It’s hard to conceive of anything more foolish than making payment of a legitimate debt conditional on action by a subsidiary U.N. body. If it insists on that linkage, the House would simply be reinforcing a perception of the U.S. as a country so dazzled by its own importance that it feels free to behave however it chooses.

The Human Rights Commission vote of course reeked of hypocrisy. The 54-nation panel is loaded with states notorious for their religious and political persecution, support for terrorism, even--as in the case of Sudan--for condoning slavery. But human rights records have little to do with how commission membership is decided. The U.S. was one of four Western countries competing for three seats. It lost partly because European states stuck together to vote for France, Austria and Sweden. It lost because China, stung by repeated U.S. efforts to have its human rights abuses condemned, lobbied hard and with reported promises of future favors to have Washington dropped from the panel. But it lost too because a growing number of states, including longtime allies and supporters, increasingly perceive and are alarmed by growing signs of an administration ready and even determined to go it alone.

George W. Bush spoke often during his run for the White House of the need for the U.S. to exercise its power humbly. His administration’s post-inaugural actions have been marked by anything but humility. Its abrupt rejection of the Kyoto global warming pact, its move to scrap the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty and this week’s seeming hint by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about eventually putting weapons into outer space all point to a shift toward unilateralism that Americans, no less than America’s friends, should find disturbing.

Sole superpower status invites envy and resentment. It also imposes obligations because, for all its power and importance, the U.S. can’t do without friends. Last week’s secret votes on the Human Rights Commission and on the lesser International Narcotics Control Board were signals that friends have to be respectfully cultivated and not taken for granted.