Informed Speculation

It didn’t take a genius to see that Russia and the E.U. would be falling all over themselves to find ways to weasel out of the Palestinian boycott, despite the fact that the unity government still doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist, a supposed precondition to such a lifting:

Fractures between the United States and Europe began to appear Wednesday over whether the new Palestinian unity government was likely to receive international economic support even as the Middle East peace negotiators officially continued their wait-and-see approach.

After the meeting here of representatives of the so-called quartet of Middle East peace negotiators — the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union — the group released a statement that “reaffirmed” its support for a Palestinian government that would recognize Israel and renounce violence.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said repeatedly that unless the new unity government meets those conditions, the United States will continue its economic boycott of the Palestinian government. So far, the Saudi-brokered government, which included the moderate president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, and the militant Islamic movement Hamas, does not.

But European officials appeared more willing to hold out the possibility of finding members of a new unity government with whom to work. “There are ways that we can be flexible,” one European official said.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who has said that the United States and Europe should look for ways to engage Hamas, was pointed during a news conference about not threatening to continue the boycott if the new government did not recognize Israel.

Strobe Talbott had harsh words today for the unilateralism of America under George W. Bush:

With the toll of the Iraq war mounting daily and the U.S. Congress gridlocked over how to extricate its troops from the quagmire, the questions that everyone asks are what went wrong, and how can the United States recover?

The answer to the first question can be summed up in one word: unilateralism. While the senior George Bush was an arch-multilateralist, his son has been an arch-unilateralist. Profoundly skeptical about the utility of international treaties, international institutions and international law, the current president annulled, un-signed or otherwise withdrew from a range of international agreements and mechanisms — the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the International Criminal Court, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

Those examples of unilateralism and numerous others were gratuitous. There was no pressing need to shatter or suspend the work of decades.

A blind preference for multilateralism, however, is no more intelligent that a stubborn unilateral intransigence.  In the case of Kyoto, a feel-good anti-global warming sentiment resulted in a treaty that is observed mostly in the breach (a treaty that leaves global juggernauts China and India in the ‘undeveloped’ category).  Our ’unilateralism’ in rejecting that treaty was simply good policy – and good politics.

On the larger point, though, of course, multilateral institutions have their place – but which institutions and what circumstances can make all the difference.  Consider the UN’s inept response to North Korean and Iranian nuclear provocations – or the complete sham that was the Lebanon ceasefire (in the case of Lebanon, Hamas did not disarm, and the kidnapped Israeli soldiers have STILL not been released – yet when was the last time you heard an EU, UN, or Russian official observe that the ceasefire is technically null and void, since its provisions have been blatantly ignored by all parties except the supposed aggressor Israel? The twelth of never, I wager).

In each case, weak-willed (and often corrupt) European and Russian officials have done material damage to the cause of global security in a misguided anti-Americanism or with a transparently cynical habit of putting profits before peace, as is the case with Russia and Iran.  Should the U.S. enslave its foreign policy to these corrupt non-leaders in the name of multilateralism?

It’s not a bit funny, but certainly ironic, that those who decry voluntary globalization of the sort that occurs when labor and capital is free to move towards its most productive use are suddenly ‘global citizens’ when it comes to signing over U.S. sovereignty over its foreign policy…