A brutal civil war that has raged off and on for nearly half a century in Sudan is putting the Bush administration just where it does not want to be–under domestic political pressure to try to affect the outcome of a seemingly intractable African conflict. Congressional action may force the issue.
Once again, with critical global interests at stake, the Bush administration has blocked action by the rest of the world, this time on a vital treaty to monitor the ban on biological weapons. After nearly seven years of negotiations, what was intended to be the final session to complete the treaty ended last week in disarray. The Bush decision reverses a bipartisan drive to augment international biological weapon controls beginning with President Nixon and running through the Ford, Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations. The reversal comes at a time when biotechnology is pouring forth powerful discoveries that could be misused to tailor new diseases for deliberate spread as weapons.
In the coming weeks, Congress will begin to debate the wisdom of sending a billion additional dollars to the Andes region of South America. According to the Bush administration, this money–added to the $1.3 billion the Clinton administration sent–will help the U.S. in its war on drugs.
When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came to Washington in June to meet President Bush, it was his second visit to the White House in less than six months. Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat has yet to meet with Bush; nor is he likely to do so. For all intents and purposes, Arafat has been effectively isolated as a credible party to the peace talks.
Guatemala today finds itself in the midst of a deep social, economic, and political crisis after the failure to meet the expectations raised by the 1996 signature of the Peace Accord. The peace process, once heralded by the United Nations as a “success story” because it ended 36 years of internal armed conflict, is at the point of stagnation. On July 12, 2001, the UN Under-Secretary General Iqbal Riza, upon completing his visit to the country, called for a dialogue among all social and political forces to save and reactivate the peace process.
Entitled The United States and Southeast Asia: A Policy Agenda for the New Administration, the report was drafted by Dov Zakheim, Reagan-era Pentagon planner and now one of Bush’s Under-Secretaries of Defense. The president will soon receive similar advice from Zakheim’s boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who in mid-June set out defense principles that refer to “allies” and “adversaries” but not much to countries in between.
The growth of anti-Americanism is obvious not just in the Middle East and other third world conflict areas, but even within Western European countries long considered to be among America’s strongest allies. This is reflected in public opinion polls as well as through anecdotal evidence by those of us who frequently travel abroad.
The first Bush-Putin meeting will not take place in a vacuum. Their one-day summit in Slovenia will come after Bush concludes a swing through Spain, Belgium, Poland, and Sweden (which currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union). President Vladimir Putin will have already assessed the new U.S. president personally through psychological profiling and consultations with European leaders who have met him. He already has his agenda, which is to use the meeting to influence European elite and public opinion, which is already skeptical about Washington’s plans for National Missile Defense (NMD).
When a country violates fundamental principles of international law and when the UN Security Council demands that it cease its illegal behavior, one might expect that the world body would impose sanctions or other measures to foster compliance. This has been the case with Iraq, Libya, and other international outlaws in recent years.
Current U.S.-UN policy regarding Iraq has failed and has largely lost credibility. It is widely viewed internationally as reflecting U.S. (and, to a lesser degree, British) insistence on maintaining a punitive sanctions-based approach regardless of the humanitarian impact and it is increasingly regarded as having failed to bring about either democratic changes in Iraq or security for the Persian Gulf region. Numerous countries are challenging, if not directly violating, the sanctions regime, and international support has largely eroded.