Journal of Military Ethics (2003) 2(2): 107
/121

The Port of Mars: The United

States and the International
Community
Carl Cavanagh Hodge
Department of Political Science, Okanagan University College, Kelowna, BC, Canada V1V 1V7
Tel: /1 250 762 5445 ext. 7321, Fax: /1 250 470 6001, E-mail: [email protected] or
[email protected]

The United States is at a critical crossroads in its foreign policy and its
relationship to the international community. Indeed, the very existence of
an international community, rooted in the authority of the United Nations
and capable of enforcing its resolutions, is from Washington’s contem-
porary perspective an issue of contention. The foreign policy of the
administration of George W. Bush has demonstrated, both before and
after the tragic events of 11 September 2001, a willingness to undertake
major initiatives unilaterally when these are deemed to be in the vital
interest of the United States specifically or of international order
generally. In light of the inability of the United Nations to exercise
collective will in the effort to disarm the aggressive regime of Saddam


Hussein in Iraq, 1991 /2003, Washington’s determination to act alone or
in coalitions-of-the-willing to secure international order is a welcome
alternative to the international community as it is presently constituted.
KEYWORDS: international community, multilateralism, war, hegemony, imperialism.

The United States finds itself at a critical phase in determining its future as the
world’s preeminent power. The nation faces less a test of its preeminence */that is
assured for the foreseeable future */than a series of choices concerning the moral
authority American preeminence will command and the price it will exact. So that
there be no misunderstandings about the spirit of this paper, it is best to state
explicitly the thrust of its argument before proceeding with the details. The author
believes American preeminence to be of unquestionable benefit to global peace and
prosperity in and of itself and is concerned above all with how, not whether,
preeminence should be preserved and consolidated. Additionally, the paper will
argue that in the present circumstances the government of the United States must
be prepared to act unilaterally in defense not only of American interests but also for
the greater good of the family of nations of the liberal democratic tradition many of

ª 2003 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/15027570310000171

108 C. C. Hodge

whom have been openly critical of the conduct of recent US foreign policy. These
states, for the most part the Western European and British Commonwealth
democracies, have on occasion claimed to speak for an ‘international community’
the size and cohesion of which is at best questionable and at worst an impediment to
the long-term prospects of a civil international order. While the Bush administra-
tion’s foreign policy is by no means beyond reproach, its declared willingness to act
independently of an international consensus is an overdue corrective to the
ambiguous course of American diplomacy during the 1990s. Yet it has provoked
a reaction which, by revealing the want of consensus even among traditional
friends of the United States, has done more vindicate than to indict American
unilateralism.

The International Community

In a symposium on September 11 Paul A. Rahe, Professor of History at the
University of Tulsa and author of the magisterial Republics Ancient and Modern ,
remarked that the time had come to admit to ourselves that the specter of war is not
about to disappear from global affairs and that only lazy thinking would conclude
otherwise. He then came to the crucial point and stated explicitly a contemporary
heresy:

There is no international community. The phrase is an empty rhetorical

gesture that conceals the worst of all wishful thinking. We rely for our
security, as we always have, on our capacity to defend ourselves. In apparently
choosing to deny the gravity of the threat, our cousins on the other side of the
Atlantic are allowing the provisions we have made on their behalf over the last
decades to lull them into an almost childish self-indulgence. Should we retire
from the scene, they would confront the harsh reality of their vulnerability and
rediscover the capacity for self-defense. Otherwise they would not last long
(Rahe 2002: 148
/149).

This is strong stuff, perhaps too strong. For there is an international community of
sorts, most evident among the Western liberal democracies and based on an ancient
political heritage, common values, conventions, and institutions */as well as in the
common memory of the mutual bloodletting in achieving and maintaining them.
Still, Rahe’s central point is all the more refreshing for being overstated, and the
fragility of even the family of Western democracies has indeed been apparent in the
self-indulgence of America’s cousins and the ostentation of their moral critique of a
number of the Bush administration’s responses to the national and international
trauma of 11 September 2001. This is all the more discouraging because it features
a repetition of the perceptions and calculations behind Europe’s fatal errors of the
1930s.
It was in his classic study of interwar diplomacy that E. H. Carr posed the
question ‘is there an international community?’ as a point of departure for
discussing the limitations of institutionalized cooperation among sovereign states.
Carr’s answer was really that the question was wrong. It was self-evident that a
 The Port of Mars 109

community existed ‘for the reason (and for no other) that people talk, and within
certain limits behave, as if there were a world community’ (Carr 1939: 162). For
Carr the critical issue had to do with the capacity of such a community to impose a
degree of order and justice among nations that at least approximated the sense of
community within nation-states. The world community of the interwar years fell
short on two fundamental criteria. First, the principle of equality between members
of the community was not applied and was indeed not easily applicable. Second, the
principle that the good of the whole takes precedence over the good of the part, a
postulate of any fully integrated community, was not fully accepted (ibid.). These
two qualifications to community among states remain in place, although the
community elaborated since the end of World War II is indisputably more
comprehensively and effectively institutionalized than that which centered around
the League of Nations. On the matter of trade and commerce specifically,
furthermore, Carr comes off today as hopelessly dated in his concluding assertions
about the hope of eliminating or limiting the profit motive and ‘the frank acceptance
of the subordination of economic advantage to social ends’ (ibid.: 238
/239). We
have journeyed far from there. There is today a grudging acknowledgement that the
profit motive must itself be nurtured and regulated so that its wealth-producing
capacity can be harnessed to, rather than eliminated by, the pursuit of social ends.
Where Carr retains particular contemporary relevance is in his appreciation of
the international community as a Parthenon of words. ‘Politics has always been
three-quarters talk’, Michael Oakeshott’s most-quoted essay reminds us, ‘and not to
know how to use the current vocabulary of politics is a serious hindrance to
anyone, who, either as an amateur or professional, wishes to participate in the
activity’ (Oakeshott 1991: 206). Insofar as semantic infiltration has always been
part and parcel of the art of politics and diplomacy, the ‘international community’
has been talked into existence, because it appeals to the angels of our better natures.
While Carr was happy to welcome the idea that we can act better than we are in
part by talking ourselves into it, he cautioned us against coming to believe our most
ambitious half-truths. He quotes Anthony Eden in full moral flight with the
assertion that international peace can be maintained only ‘when each nation makes
its own contribution because it recognizes that therein lies its own enduring
interest’ (1939: 169). The fallacy present in this kind of statement Carr denounces
as ‘fatal to any workable conception of ‘‘international morality’’ in its failure to
recognize that the give-and-take of international politics must also apply to
challenges to an existing order and that states which profit most from the that
order must make concessions to those who profit least’ (ibid.).
During the two decades separating the truce of Versailles and the Danzig crisis
of 1939, the notion that dominant powers would make sacrifices for the greater
good was not altogether fiction. British concessions to the Dominions could be
explained in terms neither of British interests nor of submission to the stronger;
concessions to Germany were often not motivated by fear of German strength but at
least in part by a belief in ‘some conception of international morality which was
independent of British interests’ (ibid.: 168). Indeed, until appeasement was
discredited by its failure to avert war in the 1930s, it had been considered integral
to British diplomacy since the mid-19th century and was thought to further
international justice and morality through the pacific settlement of disputes ‘by
admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise’
110 C. C. Hodge

(Kennedy 1976: 195). In both the Conservative and Labour parties of the interwar
years, however, the companion of British efforts to accommodate Germany was a
constant effort to avoid any commitment to France, Britain’s natural ally on the
continent. By the 1930s France had its own appeasers, but intermittent spasms of
political courage in Paris were routinely undermined by London. After the
successful conclusion of the Locarno conference of 1925, in which France’s border
with Germany was ostensibly guaranteed, London viewed the League of Nations as
a ‘chance to avoid specific security commitments in favor of the much vaguer
commitments of the League covenant’ (Salmon 1997: 146). Even as the League
failed the test of collective security, it remained Britain’s alibi for holding France at
arm’s length while thwarting any French action against the growing German
menace which might prove precipitous. It is important to note too that this policy
was popular. In June 1935 results of a non-official referendum organized by the
League of Nations Union revealed a widespread national support for the abstract
principle of international disarmament over Old Testament judgments concerning
what was afoot on the continent (Stewart 1999: 220).
Central to the whole logic of the League was that it represented the clearest
expression of the ‘organised opinion of mankind’. Yet from the 1920s onward
organized opinion consisted increasingly of empty slogans implying cause-and-effect
relationships, such as ‘peace and disarmament’, which ‘were capable of universal
appeal precisely because they meant different, and indeed contradictory, things to
different people’ (Carr 1939: 140). Historically, the balance of weapons between
politically antagonistic communities has been a subordinate factor in determining
whether they go to war, and arms control agreements have often been a hindrance
to the ability of democracies to provide for national defense and international order
(Posen 1984, Glynn 1992, Gray 1992). Returning from a trip to Germany in 1932,
Winston Churchill said that if Britain pressured France to disarm, Germany would
take advantage of superior population to seek revenge. He added that ‘I cannot
recall any time when the gap between the kind of words which statesmen used and
what is actually happening in many countries was so great as it is now. The habit of
saying smooth things and uttering pious platitudes and sentiments to gain applause
without any relation to the underlying facts is more pronounced than it has ever
been in my experience’ (Gilbert 2000: 511). Platitudes were only the most audible
form of ‘League procedure’, the flurry of multilateral busyness convened in response
to Berlin’s successive gambits as a substitute for genuine countermeasures. In 1936
League procedure permitted France to save face in the challenge of German
reoccupation of the Rhineland when British support for military action could not be
assumed (Jordan 1992: 72
/76).
Admittedly, institutionalized international negotiation and its accompanying
tedium of procedure have more than once averted international conflict. Yet
negotiation cannot succeed without at least a grudging will to peace from both
parties to a quarrel, no matter what the merits of their respective cases, and the
point at which the mechanisms of conflict-resolution turn into hollow procedure is
difficult to determine. Precisely when did the ‘the peace process’ repeatedly invoked
during the Clinton administration’s efforts in the 1990s to mediate a settlement
between Israel and the Palestinian Authority degenerate into ritual? Certainly, the
use of the term outlasted its descriptive value by several months. It has yet to
recover its precision. At a press conference dealing with the wave of suicide
 The Port of Mars 111

bombings directed against Israeli civilians in March and April 2002, US Secretary of
State Powell observed that ‘we had a process moving forward’ only to concede later
in the session that ‘nothing can get done, no political process can take hold, in the
presence of this kind of continued terrorist activity’ (United States Department of
State 2002).
The common language of international conflict resolution has a respectable
academic pedigree. Inis Claude Jr explains that ‘international organization is a
process; international organizations are representative aspects of the phase of that
process which has been reached at a given time’. He noted further that ‘scholars
with a sociological orientation have looked upon international organization as a
phase of the secular community-building process, regarding its institutions as
outward expressions of the nature of the world situation and as instruments for
influencing the development of basic patterns of human social behavior’ (Claude
1964: 4
/5). The abstraction, nonetheless, is clear. ‘Process’ implies something with
a life of its own; by contrast, ‘negotiation’ calls for active human agency. The world
of multilateral diplomacy has been accustomed for so long to the somnolent effect of
its words that a supposedly independent reporting media employs them uncritically.
Indeed, it is the use of alternatives which is questioned. In a briefing on the Bush
administration’s early responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11 Secretary
Powell was asked whether the administration’s use of the ‘language of war’ carried
with it any specific guidelines concerning what the United States was about to do.
Powell responded that ‘the President is speaking about war as a way of focusing the
energy of America and the energy of the international community’. He added that
under the label of ‘war’ the administration would feel free to take a variety of
political, diplomatic, economic, financial, and military actions and to use every
‘tool’ and ‘weapon’ at its disposal (United States Department of State 2001). What
was taking place was a shift in the normative dialogue of international affairs. The
vocabulary of the normative dialogue was being forced to cohabit a sentence with
words that articulated more accurately both the mood of the administration and the
policy to which it now felt compelled (Jackson 2000: 1
/25).
That policy was and is based on a growing awareness that Professor Rahe’s
dismissal of the international community is only a particularly unapologetic
statement about the true condition of the relationship of the United States to the
world around it. A political community requires of its members a higher unity of
fundamental values and goals*/underpinned by a considerable degree of ideolo-
gical conformity and loyalty */than that which has emerged among nation-states
over the past half-century. The term ‘international community’ is employed
routinely to suggest a greater consensus on common values than much of the
available evidence supports and occasionally on behalf of a ‘doctrine’ of interna-
tional community, according to which the trajectory of international affairs is
toward an ever broader consensus on liberal values of democracy and human rights
(ibid.: 330
/360).
To the extent that an international community exists, the United Nations is
rightly regarded as its core institution. The United Nations was constituted, after all,
in such a way as to deal more systematically and in-the-round than did the League
with what are carelessly referred to today as the ‘root causes’ of friction and conflict
(Claude 1964: 356
/336). The increasingly ahistorical */to a considerable degree,
postmodern and anti-historical*/discussion of contemporary international affairs is
112 C. C. Hodge

often conducted with no acknowledgement that the United Nations, its member-
ship, and its affiliated international organizations have for more than half a century
struggled incessantly, and often successfully, against the root causes of conflict.
Many of the states among the United Nations’ vastly increased membership would
hardly remain viable without the aid of the United Nations’ array of functional
organizations. A good many states less advantaged than the societies which bred Al
Qaeda have struggled with UN help against famine, civil war, disease, and the
whims of the global market. It is through the United Nations that challenges to the
existing order are, in principle, regulated rather than fought out. And yet the United
Nations remains an institution where consensus is often elusive and collective
determination to adhere to resolutions crafted in the face of grim experience
remarkably transitory.
Moreover, we live in a world where the number of sovereign states has
increased manifold since 1945; more of them are democratic than ever before; and
the sovereign states remain the fundamental guarantor of their peoples’ security
and freedom */yet there is little recognition that a viable nation-state is itself a
moral achievement. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw speculated in the wake of
September 11 that, ‘if the main challenge before the collapse of the Soviet empire
and throughout much of the 20th century consisted of states with too much power,
the problems of the twenty-first century may be states with too little power’ (Straw,
2001). There is today almost no awareness that the nation-state is itself a political
achievement of civilization rather than a way-station on the road to something
grander. Inherent in the spirit of multilateral diplomacy is an unexamined prejudice
against the old devil of the sovereign state, assumed to be the principal obstacle to
international civil society (Claude 1964: 389). Yet it was the Westphalian system
which made an international civil society imaginable in the first place, not in a leap
of intellectual and moral commitment but rather as a truce and modus vivendi after
the exhaustions of three decades of inconclusive war. One of the tragic errors of the
European middle classes at the turn of the 20th century was their casual embrace of
the conventional wisdom that the nation-state was being transcended by interna-
tional commercial exchange and cooperation */in the contemporary parlance,
‘interdependency’ */to an extent which had made a general war nearly impossible
(Keegan 1998: 10
/18, Howard 2000, Philpott 2001: 123
/149).
In the 1990s the apparent decay of the effectiveness and legitimacy of the
sovereign state was accompanied and conditioned by the aggressive promotion of
international human rights standards by governments, international organizations,
and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The zeal of human rights NGOs
abetted a growing skepticism for the very principle of national sovereignty and a
tendency to regard any ethnonationalist secessionist cause as the expression of a
legitimate right to self-determination. Responsible only to their own memberships,
the human rights NGOs of the 1990s acted as self-appointed spokespersons for the
international community and dedicated enemies of the sovereign state, intrusive in
principle where international trade institutions were intrusive by coincidence. Yet
by the end of the decade a good deal of scholarly opinion on the trajectory of
international affairs doubted that we were moving toward anything like a global
community and wondered whether Hedley Bull’s vision of a ‘new medievalism’*/
featuring the regional integration of states; disintegration of individual states;
restoration of private international violence; transnational organizations; techno-
 The Port of Mars 113

logical unification of the world*/was not closer to the mark (Bull 1995: 254
/266,
Gentry 1999: 95
/112).

A Distinctly American Internationalism

It was into this international environment that the presidency of George W. Bush
was borne. Under Bush, the United States has become the principal skeptic among
major democratic states concerning the international community’s vitality and
virtues. In celebration of President Bush’s call for the ouster of Yasser Arafat as the
spokesman of Palestinian aspirations, Max Boot, op-ed editor of the Wall Street
Journal , anointed the president a Wilsonian and asserted that his policy ‘represents
the triumph of */for want of a better term */Wilsonians over realpolitikers, a
development of considerable consequence’ (Boot, 2002). But the president is
emphatically not Wilsonian. Woodrow Wilson was a great president whose legacy
to the conduct of international relations in the 20th century is enormous, but the
United States has outgrown Wilsonianism as a political creed appropriate to a power
with the burdens and responsibilities of the United States (McDougall 1997: 213
/
214, Ninkovich 1999: 288
/289, Mead 2001: 264
/309). Neither does the
spectrum of American foreign policy break down into two opposed camps of
‘Wilsonians’ and ‘realpolitikers’. The dichotomy is comprehensively false and lives
mostly in the imagination of international relations theorists, many of whom
conduct a debate of infinite tedium in a professional cottage industry largely
divorced from useful observation about the conduct and content of foreign policy.
Certainly, the Bush administration’s foreign policy fits neither category. As a
candidate for the Oval Office President Bush outlined the vision of a ‘distinctly
American internationalism’ in which he stressed that the goal of his administration
would be ‘to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic
peace’ (Bush 1999). He then pledged that this would be achieved by concentrating
on enduring national interests and by working with democratic allies in Europe and
Asia to ‘extend the peace’. The international community made no appearance,
except where Bush noted the need for reform of the United Nations’ bureaucracy,
the World Bank and the IMF. The NATO Alliance was mentioned only once. The
speech conceded that in order to be relied upon when needed, ‘our allies must be
respected when they are not’. He cautioned, however, that the United States needs
strong European allies who recognize ‘that sharing the enormous opportunities of
Eurasia also means sharing the burdens and risks of sustaining the peace’ (1999).
Bush devoted much more attention to the future of American relations with China,
India and Russia, a logical switch in priorities to great power diplomacy for a
candidate unconvinced of the inherent benefits of multilateralism. The evidence was
that under Bush the United States would eschew the old temptations of isolationism
but that a responsible internationalist foreign policy could not in all instances
permit itself to be constrained by multilateral institutions.
It would be strange indeed if candidate Bush’s approach to foreign policy had
not been pitched as an alternative to that of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, but
stranger still if President Bush’s foreign policy did not seek after 11 September 2001
to pick up the unfinished work of American arms in the Middle East dating to the
114 C. C. Hodge

presidency of his father. Apart from a near flawless performance in the liquidation of
the cold war and the reunification of Germany, that administration set the tone for
the 1990s with two military actions: the prosecution of Operation Desert Storm in
1991 to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the dispatch of the US military in
late 1992 on a humanitarian mission to Somalia, Operation Restore Hope. Both
actions were Wilsonian services to the international community. The 1991 war
against Iraq came at a unique juncture in global affairs which itself facilitated the
senior Bush’s extraordinary and successful efforts to fashion an international
coalition against Iraq which in another time would have been dubbed ‘the
organization of world opinion’. Washington secured a series of resolutions from
the UN Security Council, including Resolution 687 authorizing the use of ‘all
necessary means’. In fact, the White House accorded higher priority to the
succession of UN resolutions than it did to congressional approval for going to
war (Freedman & Karsh 1993: 228
/295). At the point of Iraqi military collapse,
moreover, Washington adhered to the mandate it had been given and resisted the
temptation to drive on to Baghdad to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. The
resulting paradox */that ‘an enormous military effort had been undertaken, and yet
there was Saddam, still thumbing his nose at the international community’ */was
entirely the result of a campaign waged on behalf of the United Nations and
according to its standards. It violated the American tradition of unconditional
surrender and the removal of the political source of aggression (Weigley 1973). The
United States, at the moment of its ultimate triumph after 40 years of cold war had
willingly abandoned its own military tradition and subordinated its policy to the
greater good.
In Somalia, where a humanitarian intervention undertaken at the request of
UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in the dying weeks of the first Bush
administration ended disastrously in the first term of the Clinton years, the United
States again looked well beyond its national interest and attempted to burnish the
prestige of the international community. Had the first Bush administration survived
for a second term, it might have given hard edges to its vaguely defined ‘new world
order’. Instead, the Clinton administration followed through on the more question-
able instincts of its predecessor, with the difference that the gap between its inflated
rhetoric the means to back it was ever wider. While US Ambassador to the United
Nations, Madeleine Albright, coined the term ‘assertive multilateralism’ and
described the mission in Somalia as one aiming at ‘the restoration of the entire
country as a proud, functioning and viable member of the community of nations’,
critics of the Clinton White House noted that Washington seemed comfortable with
foreign interventions ‘only when vital U.S. interests were not at stake’ (McDougall
1997: 201
/202). The administration appeared to regard multilateralism as
inherently wholesome to an extent that obscured the true nature of actions the
United States took officially in league with other states but which were in substance
overwhelmingly dependent on American capabilities and commitment. This
rejection of ‘power politics’ and greater reliance on the United Nations, officially
at least, was not accompanied by an articulation of priorities in international
security policy. Instead, the Clinton administration struggled to find a middle course
between intervening everywhere and intervening nowhere, often tossing collective
security, humanitarian interventions, and economic sanctions into the same policy
 The Port of Mars 115

basket as if foreign policy were international social work (Hendrickson 1993, Clark
1995).
Certainly, the most spectacular episode in multilateral humanitarian inter-
vention was NATO’s war for Kosovo. But by the time of the Serb province’s descent
into anarchy, through 1998 and early 1999, the Clinton administration’s
enthusiasm for armed intervention had long since waned. Additionally, the
administration committed the potentially disastrous error of consenting to a
NATO air campaign while publicly ruling out the deployment of ground forces.
Robert Jackson has noted that in the case of Kosovo it was Prime Minister Blair who
articulated the more robust version of interventionist liberalism, often as not in a
language dating to the flush of the Clinton administration’s earlier days. At times
Blair’s statements were reminiscent even of the Kennedy era (Jackson 2000: 356), a
period in American diplomacy now widely assumed to have been dangerously
messianic, and at times it was obvious that the prime minister was speaking to a
primary audience in the United States. In this he could congratulate himself. Blair’s
efforts succeeded, after all, in securing American firepower to cope with a European
security crisis. While European unity chalked up a number of achievements in the
1990s, among them was not a measure of substantive security independence. In
NATO’s Operation Allied Force in Kosovo, the collective effort of the major European
states represented a supplementary contribution. The United States supplied more
than 700 of the total 1055 aircraft deployed and flew more than 29,000 sorties.
Former chairman of the NATO military panel, Klaus Naumann, confessed in
testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘as a European, I am
ashamed we have to ask for American help to deal with something as small as
Kosovo’ (Naumann 1999: 32); for his part, retired RAF Air Vice Marshall R. A.
Mason noted that ‘we fear that we will end up as spear carriers to the U.S.’ and
‘burden-sharing will become no more than a hollow shell’ (Mason 1999: 252).
And yet it is from the narrower horizons of the Atlantic community that some
of the more pious second-guessing has emanated in criticism of the Bush
administration’s foreign policy, before and after September 11. Some of the criticism
has been altogether justified, above all in the realm of trade protectionism. But
much of it has also stressed the symbolic over the substantive on issues which now
seem trivial, such as the Kyoto accord on greenhouse gases and Washington’s
declared intention to abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in order
to commence the construction of an anti-ballistic missile system. On the occasion of
Bush’s first trip to Europe prominent dailies worried about the possible long-term
damage to transatlantic relations done by Bush’s perceived arrogance and
unilateralism. President Chirac and Chancellor Schroeder made public statements
about the ABM as a ‘pillar’ of the ‘architecture’ of the international strategic
balance which testified above all to their own outdated assumptions about that
balance (Chirac, 2001, Kornelius 2001: 4). The stern warning that Washington
risked a new arms race was ultimately misplaced. After a year’s work in attempting
unsuccessfully to dissuade the Bush administration from developing missile
defenses, President Putin felt politically compelled not to expand Russia’s offensive
arsenal but rather to make sweeping reductions according to the terms of the Treaty
of Moscow signed with President Bush in May 2002 (Milbank 2002: A1).
The initial European response to September 11 temporarily broke the pattern.
Germany’s parliamentary debate over support for US military operations in
116 C. C. Hodge

Afghanistan was especially revealing, both of the sense of German obligation to the
United States and of Germany’s multilateralist instincts. To the assembled
parliamentarians Chancellor Schroeder argued that the preliminary steps in
Germany’s military engagement had already been taken in UNSC Resolution
1368 , acknowledging the American right of self-defense based on Article 51 of
the UN Charter, as well as in the NATO Council’s invocation on 4 October of Article
V, the collective defense article of the North Atlantic Treaty. The decision to place
German troops at the disposal of the war effort flowed as a natural material
consequence of those principles and commitments. He observed further that alliance
solidarity, of which the Bonn republic had for decades been a principal beneficiary,
was not a one-way street and heaped scorn on critics of the American effort in
Afghanistan who implied that European support ought to be conditioned on the
chances of success. Schroeder also denied a direct relationship between Al Qaeda’s
terrorist activities and the decades-long Middle East conflict (Deutscher Bundestag
2001). Schroeder’s Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, reiterated this view and
uncorked stronger rhetoric in defense of Israel, the favored whipping-boy of
apologists for Islamic extremism. He went on to say that the critical investment
Germany had now to make was in a multilateral diplomacy of responsibility for
Afghanistan’s future, the first installment of which would necessarily be military.
German non-participation, he maintained in the time-honored tradition of
articulating national policy in Europe’s name, could only weaken Europe’s
collective influence. But more important still was the fact that, whereas the Bush
administration had been on a ‘step by step’ course of unilateralism before September
11, the war against terrorism had shunted Washington back on to a multilateralist
track. ‘For me’, said Fischer, ‘one of the great lessons of September 11 was that we
cannot permit the United States to be pushed back toward unilateralism’ (ibid.).
Germany, in other words, had an obligation to the United States that could not be
shirked, but the crisis was also an opportunity for Europeans to steer the Bush
administration away from the unilateral temptations of American hegemony.
With the exception of the Blair government, the European drive to do so has
intensified in proportion to the Bush administration’s increasing support of Israel’s
right to self-defense and the evidence that the United States may widen the war on
terrorism to preemptive military action against states such as Iraq. The primary
mission of European diplomacy in 2002, in fact, has been constraining the United
States. In the effort, government spokesmen have been joined in a rhetorical
onslaught on the Bush administration by the elite of European journalism. Josef
Joffe of the German weekly Die Zeit laments the tendency of ‘the Bushists’ in
Washington to assume that they can put together ‘coalitions of the willing’ to
match the mission rather than working through time-honored structures. He
cautions that American foreign policy has always been more successful when it has
taken into account the needs and vulnerabilities of others (Joffe 2002, Stokes 2002:
1803). The comment is a variation of the journalism Joffe produced during the
darkest days of the cold war, when he noted the inclination of America’s West
European allies to crave both the protection of American arms and their own
freedom of action in national and regional concerns */combined with maximum
insulation from the stormier weather of superpower relations. In 1984 Joffe wrote
that unless Americans and Europeans ‘restore a sense of balance and moderation in
their affairs, unless they resist the growing temptations of neutralism and
 The Port of Mars 117

unilateralism, the most benign alliance in history will continue to unravel’ (Joffe
1984: 590). At the time it was the unilateralism of the ‘Reaganites’ which so
endangered Europe’s equilibrium. As Europeans inveighed against American
excesses in order to preserve détente, Reagan ultimately kicked over the equilibrium
entirely with a foreign policy which ended the cold war peacefully and almost
entirely on Western terms. A primary concern of a body of serious academic
commentary in the 1980s, meanwhile, was not that Germany would again seek a
military path to power but rather that, under the influence of the peace movement
and a post-1945 diplomatic tradition which had made a religion of multilateralism,
Germany would in the future ignore hard international realities and shirk the
responsibilities of a major power (Schwarz 1985, Baring 1988). As it turned out,
the alliance did not unravel. But it has since become far less relevant.
The reason, notes veteran Social Democrat foreign policy consultant Egon
Bahr, is that Turkey is now more critical to US geostrategic calculations than either
Germany or Europe. Indeed, China, India, and Japan concern Washington more
than the Old Continent (Bahr 2002). It has now been more than a decade since the
end of the cold war opened up the possibility of a full flowering of the European
project, but nobody now talks of ‘The New Europe’ in partnership with the United
States without blushing. Instead, Washington has heard from European govern-
ments, separately and in chorus, expressions of concern over the treatment of Al
Qaeda prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay; an insistence that the war on terrorism
and the resolution of Israeli
/Palestinian conflict are necessarily linked; a call for a
return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq; and the demand that the Bush
administration seek a UN resolution mandating the use of force against Iraq */
above and beyond the series of Security Council resolutions dating to 1990
/1991.
Yet the administration’s response, a new round of UN diplomacy in pursuit of a new
menu of resolutions mandating military action in the event of continuing Iraqi non-
compliance, did not yield greater European support for Washington’s initiatives.
In Germany, in fact, the opposite occurred. Chancellor Schroeder, caught in an
unusually close electoral contest for the survival of his coalition government,
intensified his public opposition to US military action against Iraq, with or without
UN support in an effort to consolidate pacifist electoral sentiment behind his
government. In so doing, he referred to the prospect of an American-led action in
Iraq as an ‘adventure’, while stressing that on issues of ‘existential’ importance
neither Germany’s European partners nor the United Nations but rather ‘Berlin
alone’ would determine national policy (Fried 2002: 2). Thus, a scant 10 months
after Foreign Minister Fischer’s lecture to the Bundestag about Germany’s duty to
save the United States from its unilateralist instincts, Schroeder abandoned for
electoral convenience 40 years of German multilateralist tradition and staked out a
position at odds with those of London, Paris, and Washington */and implicitly
contemptuous of both the European Union and the United Nations. The result was
that the major states of Western Europe, states with whom the United States could
rightly assume a community of interest and outlook established during the cold
war, came up neither with unified support for the Bush administration’s efforts nor
with a common menu of alternatives. Rather, the episode demonstrated yet again
that ‘Europe’s three big powers nationalize foreign policy when hard choices
confront them’ (Dempsey 2002).
118 C. C. Hodge

Alone among European leaders, Prime Minister Blair defended the prudence of
a preemptive war against the regime in Baghdad against strong opposition from
within his own Labour Party and British public opinion. In a 90-min press
conference, Blair responded to criticisms of American unilateralism and bellicosity
by reminding the assembled journalists of the nature of the Iraqi regime and its
continuing efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction, a threat the United
States shouldn’t have to tackle alone. ‘Some of the talk about this in the past few
weeks I have to say has astonished me’, Blair said, ‘You would think that we were
dealing with some benign little democracy out in Iraq’ (Frankel 2002: A16). The
bellicosity cited by the European press is no doubt best exemplified by US Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who in defending action against Iraq, compared
Washington’s stance to that of Churchill in the 1930s (Gilmore 2002). Admittedly,
far too much of this comparing-the-incomparable is done. Still, with wars of
aggression against Iran and Kuwait plus a campaign of experimental slaughter
against the Kurds of Northern Iraq on his record, the case against Saddam Hussein
by 2002 was more damning that that compiled against Hitler before 1 September
1939. Until the invasion of Poland, Hitler’s every conquest had the acquiescence of
the international community.

Conclusion
‘Any international moral order’, wrote Carr, ‘must rest on some hegemony of
power’ (1939: 168). Like the hegemony of a ruling class within a society, that
hegemony depends on give as well as take, on obligation as well as authority.
Unique among the Great Powers, the United States has traditionally made the
compromises of multilateralism a cornerstone of its diplomacy; no state has invested
more diplomatic capital in the legitimacy of international organization and formal
recognition of the rights of the weak than has the United States since 1945. As the
calling card of American internationalism, multilateralism is a tradition which
should not */indeed cannot */be jettisoned by a single administration in Washing-
ton, regardless of its definition of national interest. The United States is bound to the
world around it by a thousand diplomatic, institutional, and organizational
ligatures (Nau 2002: 57).
Those ligatures, however, are under considerable strain, and the Bush
administration is struggling to find a new balance between vital US interests,
Washington’s inherited obligations to the world, and the objections of America’s
traditional friends on how to meet them. A common criticism of its efforts is that
they are preponderantly unilateral and, in their way, a form of isolationist
abdication; isolationism and unilateralism are deemed to be ideological twins, the
latter being more politically acceptable yet fundamentally selfish, because ‘it does
not accept the encumbrances of the international system’ (Hirsch 2002: 30
/31).
While multilateralism is intended to create obstacles to cavalier international
behavior, its more important historical mission was to strengthen the collective
hand of peaceful states in the worst scenario against the predations of aggressors.
But when the multilateralist route consists mostly of encumbrances which serve
primarily to thwart, restrain or delay decisive action by the world’s leading
 The Port of Mars 119

democracy against a growing threat to international order, it becomes an errand

boy for appeasement. When world opinion deems American unilateral action
against Iraq a greater threat to the delicate construct of international law than
Baghdad’s repeated flouting of the same, it has chosen process over policy.
Because of their liberal democratic tradition and revolutionary roots Amer-
icans experience acute ideological embarrassment in being seen to wield imperial
power. But the body of scholarship and policy formulation now arguing that the
United States risks repeating the errors of the interwar years by shyness rather than
the crime of arrogance */and that the unfinished business of Iraq specifically is a
test case */is growing (Ferguson 2001: 390
/418, Kagan & Kagan 2001: 98
/217,
Mallaby 2002: 2
/7, Pollack 2002). The same sentiment that gave us Munich in
1938 would today deflect the United States from responsible great power leadership
in the defense of civilization. That defense has only just begun. Colin Gray has
rightly observed in light of September 11 that ‘at present the civilized world is
trapped somewhat in a time warp of arguably obsolescent political, ethical, and
strategic assumptions and practices’ (Gray 2002: 10). The war against terrorism,
support for Israel, and regime change in Iraq are at present mixed together in the
Bush administration’s thinking, primarily because of the sheer political and
diplomatic burden of coping with all of them simultaneously. It will likely be the
work of decades, involving a vast international intelligence effort and the patient
cooperation of governments and international organizations, to make serious
headway against the cancer of terrorism.
But the evidence of the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of the
United States of America, released just a year after the deadliest attack on Americans
in history, is that enormous progress has been made. The spirit of the document is
not one of arrogance; it expresses a willingness to act unilaterally and preemptively
rather than a policy of doing so. But its intention to arrest the drift toward a new
medievalism is put clearly where the text cautions that ‘in an age where the
enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive
technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather’ (White
House 2002: 15). The greatest threat to effective multilateralism is in the idleness of
the international community in facing squarely its collective obligations. In
carrying its campaign from Afghanistan to Iraq the United States is not the ‘self-
proclaimed’ defender of civilization but the defender of civilization by default. In
assuming the Port of Mars, the Bush administration has repeatedly said that it takes
on a responsibility it will happily share with like-minded governments. Like-minded
governments seem to be in short supply. In a choice between an international
community as presently constituted and a frankly imperial United States, therefore,
it is a comfort to think that the latter might be on offer.

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Biography
Carl Cavanagh Hodge is a professor of political science at Okanagan
University College in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. His books include
Shepherd of Democracy? America and Germany in the 20th Century (Greenwood,
1992); Social Democracy in Britain, France and Germany (Greenwood, 1994); All of
the People, All of the Time: American Government at the Turn of the Century (Peter
Lang, 1998); Redefining European Security (Garland, 1999); and NATO for a New
Century (Praeger, 2002). He was Senior Volkswagen Research Fellow at the
American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at The Johns Hopkins
University, Washington, DC, and a NATO/EAPC Research Fellow, 2000
/2002.