The Unilateralist Temptation in American Foreign Policy

David Skidmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780415885409
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136886621
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The pattern of multilateral engagement and unilateral retrenchment in American foreign policy from the Cold War through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years presents a puzzle. What accounts for the unilateralist turn? Is it a passing aberration attributable to the neoconservative ideology of the Bush administration? What then of the disengagement evident earlier during Clinton's presidency, or its continuation under Obama? Was the U.S. investment in multilateral institutions following World War II an anomaly? Or is the more recent retreat from international institutions the irregularity?

Skidmore traces U.S. unilateralism to the structural effects of the end of the Cold War, both domestically and abroad, to argue that the United States was more hegemonic than multilateralist—a rule-maker, not a rule-taker. An "institutional bargain" existed under the Cold War threat from the Soviets, but absent those imperatives the United States has been less willing to provide collective goods through strong international institutions and other states are less willing to defer to U.S. exemptions. On the home front, the post-Cold War political environment has made it more difficult for presidents to resist the appeals of powerful interests who are threatened by multilateral commitments.

This book demonstrates that American unilateralism has deeper roots and more resilience than many expect. The unilateral temptation can only be overcome through new political bargains domestically and internationally that permit multilateral engagement, even the absence of great power rivalry.

1

The Unilateralist Turn in U.S. Foreign Policy

In the wake of Barack Obama’s historic election to the presidency of the United States, Venezuelan bookkeeper Armando Diaz echoed the sentiments of many people around the world with his simple declaration that “It is kind of nice to feel good about the United States again” (Cowell, 2008). Similarly, Brazilian filmmaker Ryan Steers observed: “Obama is someone the world can trust. That is the most important thing for America right now: regaining its trust in the world community” (Associated Press, 2008). The good feelings toward America’s new president and the trust that he has inspired abroad are symbolized most dramatically by the bestowal of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Barack Obama only seven months into his first term of office.

Barack Obama’s dramatic election victory stimulated such hopes due in part to widespread disillusionment, at home and abroad, with the unilateralist foreign policy direction pursued over the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency (Maynes, 2000; Spiro, 2000; Boniface, 2001; Nye, 2002; Hoffman, 2003; Prestowitz, 2003).¹ In recent years, the United States has rejected a series of major international treaties and agreements, including the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the International Landmine Ban Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and a new protocol designed to verify compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention. The U.S. decision to launch war against Iraq despite the lack of an explicit mandate from the United Nations Security Council and without the support of many key allies was the most dramatic manifestation of American unilateralism (Carter, 2003).

The frustration that this unilateralist turn in U.S. foreign policy has occasioned across the world was pointedly on display at a 2007 United Nations conference on climate change when Kevin Conrad, a delegate representing Papua New Guinea brought cheers from the world’s assembled diplomats with his plea to the United States: “We seek your leadership … But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way” (Fuller and Revkin, 2007).

Global warming indeed offers a good illustration of what is at stake. Without strong multilateral cooperation, scientists warn that human-induced climate change could produce catastrophic consequences for many societies. Yet, international efforts to reach agreement on what to do and how to share the costs of adjustment have so far brought tepid results.

On a host of issues, in fact, the inadequacy of existing international institutions is glaringly apparent. Older institutions, such as the United Nations (U.N.), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have failed to adapt to new challenges and often seem adrift despite the pressing needs that they confront. The IMF, for instance, lacked the mandate, the resources or the institutional tools necessary to cope with the global financial crisis of 2008–09 (Elmendorf, 2009). The U.N. Security Council has shrunk from decisive steps to cope with humanitarian crises in places such as Darfur, the Congo, Somalia, or Myanmar. The Non-Proliferation Regime has proven incapable of preventing states such as Iran or North Korea from mounting determined efforts to develop nuclear weapons. And the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) current efforts to conclude trade talks, now in their ninth year, appear stalemated.

While older institutions have shown signs of decay, a surprising variety of new international agreements and institutions have arisen to address issues once largely ignored or overshadowed during the Cold War-era by so-called “high politics.” The international community has launched efforts to curb the spread and use of landmines and small arms, to bring war criminals to international justice, to regulate the new world of biotechnology, and expand the scope of human rights protections. Yet, these newer institutions have been hampered by the non-participation or even outright hostility of the world’s only remaining superpower.

In short, global politics today suffers from a deficit of institutional capacity. Multilateral cooperation has failed to keep pace with the deepening of globalization. Although the end of the Cold War provided an opening for great power cooperation in updating and strengthening the institutional architecture of global cooperation, the United States—the one country with the capacity to lead in providing the vision and resources for such a task—largely retreated into a unilateralist posture, leaving both new and old institutions to hobble along and allowing global public goods to remain underprovided.

This failure of American leadership and the divide between the United States and much of the world community raises a number of significant questions for analysts of U.S. foreign policy: How sharp a break from past practice is the “new unilateralism?” What factors account for growing U.S. isolation from international institutions and multilateral cooperation? To what degree has the behavior of other states played a role in America’s changing foreign policy orientation? Are recent unilateralist policies a passing anomaly, or do they presage a long-term retreat from multilateralism? Is the election of a president better attuned to the need for international cooperation sufficient in itself to insure renewed U.S. engagement with international institutions? Or does the unilateralist temptation spring from deeper structural sources?

This book takes a frankly skeptical view on the prospects for a genuinely multilateralist turn in U.S. foreign policy. The highly conditional U.S. embrace of multilateral institutions after World War II stemmed from the international and domestic consequences of the Cold War. The altered strategic environment of the post-Cold War world favors a more narrowly self interested, short-term and unilateralist approach to U.S. foreign policy. This does not rule out the possibility of renewed American leadership in creating a stronger and reformed global institutional order. But it does mean that any president seeking to do so must struggle against daunting structural constraints at home and abroad. More likely, the United States will continue to impede and weaken efforts to reinvigorate global institutions, even if it does so in ways less brazenly unilateralist and openly hostile than were common under the Bush administration. Whatever the prospects for American leadership in bolstering the institutional architecture of international cooperation, any such effort must be based upon a clear understanding of the sources of the recent unilateralist turn in U.S. foreign policy.

The arguments put forward in this book can be summarized as follows:

• The United States has never pursued a genuinely multilateralist foreign policy. Rather, U.S. strategy in the post-World War II period is best characterized as hegemonic. While the United States embraced the creation of international institutions as an effective means for exercising U.S. power and maintaining international order, the rules and procedures of these institutions bound other states far more than the United States itself.

• The growing conflicts between the United States and its major allies in recent years are the result of two shifts: the waning willingness of the United States to invest in strong international institutions and the growing insistence by other states that America conform to the same international rules as the rest of the international community. These dual challenges to the two principal pillars of U.S. hegemony have resulted in an increasingly unilateralist American foreign policy; one that rests more upon the raw application of power and less upon the willingness of other states to follow the United States as a legitimate international leader (the latter constituting the essence of hegemony).

• This move from hegemony to unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy can be traced to domestic and international consequences of the end of the Cold War. Internationally, the demise of the Soviet Union removed an important constraint on U.S. power while reducing the dependence of allied states on U.S. protection. At home, the removal of the Soviet threat weakened the authority of the president to pursue broad national interests while empowering parochial interests that generally oppose multilateral commitments.

• The foreign policy differences between Bill Clinton and George W. Bushwere not as stark as many have perceived. The preferences, ideology, and rhetoric of the two presidents were indeed quite different. But structural forces at home and abroad played more important roles in driving both presidents (Clinton reluctantly and Bush enthusiastically) toward a pattern of unilateralist behavior in U.S. relations with the world. The appropriate contrast is not between a multilateralist Clinton and a unilateralist Bush, but between two unilateralisms—one a product of converging international and domestic constraints (Clinton) and the other a default preference (Bush).

• The transfer of executive power from George W. Bush to Barack Obamahas resulted in significant shifts in the rhetoric and, to a lesser degree, the substance of U.S. foreign policy. But expectations that a change in the presidency will alone be sufficient to produce self-binding U.S. behavior with respect to multilateral rules and institutions are likely to be disappointed. Rather, the prospects for multilateral leadership on the part of the United States rest upon the willingness of American and allied leaders to reconfigure the institutional bargain among them to meet the altered strategic realities of the post-Cold War world. In addition, Barack Obama and future presidents who seek to make binding U.S. commitments to international institution-building must devise a domestic political strategy for overcoming entrenched opposition at home. Neither task will be easy, and success is not a foregone conclusion.

Continuity or Aberration?

Many commentators have treated the unilateralist turn as a short-term aberration associated with the presidency of George W. Bush (Daalder and Lindsay, 2003; Judis, 2004; Busby and Monten, 2008). G. John Ikenberry (2004: 10), for instance, characterizes the Bush administration’s global strategy following the 9/11 attacks as a “radical” reorientation of American foreign policy. Ikenberry contrasts President Bush’s willingness to act alone and to risk serious breaches in relations with traditional allies with the institution-building heyday of U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II period. He (2004: 7) traces this “strategic wrong turn” to the influence of neo-conservative ideas on the President and many of his top advisors.² In Ikenberry’s (2004: 7) estimation, the Bush administration’s reliance upon “the bold unilateral exercise of American military power” and “gradual disentanglement from the constraints of multilateralism” brought enormous “damage to the country’s international position.” Attributing this unilateralist departure to “[t]he passing views of highly placed administration elites” (Ikenberry, 2003b: 539). Ikenberry argued that only a few short years after its debut and halfway through the two terms of the Bush administration, “the neo-conservative moment is over” (2004: 7)—implying a return to the longstanding multilateral traditions of post-World War II American foreign policy after Bush’s costly detour.³ From this perspective, the principal task facing the Obama administration is straightforward—to steer American foreign policy back toward the well-trod path of multilateralism abandoned by its predecessors.

Lisa Martin (2004: 34–35) offers a similar analysis. Following World War II, she points out, the United States resisted the temptation to use its enormous power to seek immediate and narrowly self-interested gains. Instead, America’s wise and far-sighted leadership practiced a form of self-abnegation: “… it is striking that this immensely powerful state championed principles and norms that served to bind itself; it created institutions premised on the notion that even the United States would play by the rules it asked others to accept.” This investment in multilateral order-keeping “paid off handsomely” as “Selfbinding has proven to enhance American economic and military power, not to diminish it.”

The unilateralism of the Bush administration, Martin (2004: 35) contends, constituted an inexplicable break with past practice: “The contrast between U.S. behavior after World War II and at the turn of the twenty-first century is stark … the country has distinctively turned away from the self-binding strategy at the heart of multilateralism.” This judgment is shared by Stewart Patrick (2009: 332), who characterizes the Bush administration’s relationship to international institutions as “a profound break from six decades of American history.”

Yet, these are oversimplifications of a complex reality. While it is clear that something has changed in America’s relationship to the international institutional order in recent years, the widely accepted interpretation outlined above is flawed in characterizing the antecedents of unilateralism as well as the timing and underlying causes of the unilateralist turn. I suggest an alternative account that traces the growing unilateralism of U.S. foreign policy to the structural effects, at home and abroad, of the end of the Cold War.

The highly conditional U.S. commitment to international institutions and multilateral cooperation that followed World War II depended crucially upon an environment of sustained threat from a major power rival. With the removal of the Soviet threat, American presidents have gained greater scope to act independently of international opinion abroad combined with lesser freedom to resist the influence of parochial, anti-multilateralist interest groups at home.

Consequently, the structural sources of unilateralism in American foreign policy have deeper roots than the ideological complexion of the Bush administration (Mastanduno, 2008). As demonstrated in later chapters, the unilateralist turn began under the Clinton administration, despite Clinton’s initially multilateralist leanings. Moreover, while the foreign policies of the Obama administration represent a corrective to the extreme unilateralism of the preceding Bush years, domestic and international constraints continue to mitigate against a shift to full-fledged multilateralism. As documented in chapter 6, the Obama administration’s rhetorical support for multilateralism has thus far not been matched by comparable deeds. Indeed, none of the international agreements listed at the outset of this chapter had been ratified through the first eighteen months of Obama’s tenure in the White House. U.S. reengagement with global institutions, if possible at all, will require—on the part of the president and supporters of multilateralism both at home and abroad—a set of strategic political adjustments designed to counterbalance the forces that have so often tilted U.S. policy in unilateralist directions.

Theoretical Perspectives

The two major theoretical traditions in international relations offer contrasting perspectives on the relationship between hegemonic power and multilateral institutions. Yet neither fully fit the broad patterns that have characterized American attitudes and policies toward international institutions over time. Institutionalism focuses on the benefits that flow from institutionalized cooperation among states and, in some variants, on the crucial role that hegemony plays in overcoming the collective action problems that can otherwise stymie such cooperation. This perspective helps to explain America’s embrace of multilateralism as a tool for strengthening international order after World War II. But institutionalism cannot explain America’s waning commitment to multilateralism in the post-Cold War era.⁴

Realism stresses the autonomy costs of multilateral commitments. States in general will be wary of commitments that restrict their freedom of action, but hegemonic states in particular will view institutions with suspicion. Weak countries rely upon institutions as mechanisms for nullifying the advantages enjoyed by more powerful states (Krasner, 1985). For this reason, a hegemonic state will prefer a unilateralist approach that allows it to exercise the full range of its power resources with minimum inhibition. Realism may help to explain the recent unilateralist turn in U.S. foreign policy, but it cannot account for the heavy investment in international institutions that characterized American grand strategy during the Cold War period.

As a corrective to the inadequacies of these two theoretical approaches, I offer an alternative that focuses on the ways that changes in the strategic environment, in particular the end of the Cold War, have altered the dual structural constraints, international and domestic, that drive the foreign policy behavior of the United States and its principal allies. Prior to laying out this alternative theoretical and historical account briefly in this chapter and at greater length in later chapters, it is worthwhile to explore why institutionalist and realist approaches each fall short in explaining America’s changing relationship to international institutions.

Institutionalism

Institutional theory suggests that international institutions facilitate inter-state cooperation on issues where interests overlap but do not perfectly coincide. Specifically, institutionalized cooperation offers a number of advantages over ad hoc bargaining: transaction costs are lower; cross-issue linkages and tradeoffs are easier to arrange; information is both more abundant and shared more equitably; the shadow of the future provides reputational incentives to forego short-term gains from defection in favor of long term payoffs from playing by the rules; focal points for cooperation can more easily be identified; preferences are revealed more readily; compliance with deals can be monitored with greater assurance and penalties or retaliation for cheating gain legitimacy (Keohane, 1984; Abbott and Snidal, 1998). Institutional theory thus provides a compelling rationale for why states value international institutions.

Nevertheless, creating new institutions can be both difficult and costly. Collective action problems encourage free-riding and uncertainty over the risks of defection induce caution about making mutual commitments...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• 1. The Unilateralist Turn in U.S. Foreign Policy
• 2. The International and Domestic Sources of Unilateralism
• 3. Structure and Ideology in U.S. Foreign Policy: Clinton and Bush Compared
• 4. The United States and International Public Goods
• 5. Reconfiguring the Terms of U.S. Engagement with International Institutions
• 6. Barack Obama and the Unilateralist Temptation
• Notes
• References
• Index