William Pfaff International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times

Syndicate International

Thursday, October 3, 2002  
 http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=72
506

National Security Strategy
 
PARIS The new U.S. National Security Strategy document, issued on

Sept. 20, is an implicit American denunciation of the modern state
order that has governed international relations since the Westphalian
Settlement of 1648.

That agreement, which ended the Thirty Years' War, recognized the
absolute sovereignty and legal equality of states as the basis of
international order. These principles of sovereignty and equality have
been generally recognized ever since, if often in the breach. The
consensus among governments and jurists has been that without
acknowledging national sovereignty as the foundation of law, the world
risked anarchic power struggles.

The National Security Strategy statement is thus a radical document,
whether Condoleezza Rice, reputedly its main author, understands this
or not. There was another declaration of this kind, made 154 years
ago: the Communist Manifesto. It denounced the existing international
order of monarchies and "bourgeois" republics in the name of a new and
superior legitimacy, that of the proletariat. It claimed this to be a
universal and liberating legitimacy.

After the Russian Revolution, the new Soviet Union set out to put this
new principle into practice in its relations with other governments.
It declared all other governments illegitimate. This is why Soviet
policy so disturbed the international order. Its claim was absolute
and, in principle, nonnegotiable. Karl Marx's "scientific"
interpretation of historical processes - the intellectual foundation
of Communism - claimed that history is driven by the struggle of
classes, and that only workers' states were ultimately legitimate,
since the industrial worker embodied the productive forces of modern
industrial society.

There was only one workers' state, Bolshevik Russia. All governments
except the Soviet Union's usurped power that history had determined
should belong to the proletariat. Therefore, those other governments
sooner or later had to be replaced. Now the United States has stated
that it will no longer respect the principle of absolute state
sovereignty. It does not do so by substituting a new universalist and
allegedly liberating principle, but to achieve American national
security, to which it implicitly subordinates the security of every
other nation.

It says that if the U.S. government unilaterally determines that a
state is a future threat to America, or that it harbors a group
considered a potential threat, the United States will preemptively
intervene in that state to eliminate the threat, if necessary by
accomplishing "regime change."

We already have been given an initial list of such states: those of
the "axis of evil."

The administration says it is simple "common sense" to preempt
threats. It would seem common sense to agree, if it were not for the
principle of the thing. This initiative is meant to supersede the
existing principle of international legitimacy.

International law is not "law" at all. It is a system of treaties,
conventions, precedents and other commitments over many years by which
governments have attempted to limit war, keep the peace and adjudicate
their conflicting claims and interests to their mutual advantage and
security.

It is not law because no authority issues it. No one enforces it,
other than through cooperative action among nations. The United States
has, during its two and a quarter centuries of existence, been one of
the nations most active in building up the structure of international
law that the Bush administration now is engaged in knocking down. The
Charter of the United Nations is one of the principal existing
agreements making up international law and was drafted largely by the
United States. The "threat or use of force against the territorial
integrity or political independence of any state" is outlawed by the
charter, and "preemptive" war was specifically treated as a war crime
at the Nuremberg trials.

One can say that the most powerful states have always made the rules.
The United States has intervened in small countries many times.
However, in the past Washington always claimed some form of legal
justification. It acknowledged the principles of sovereignty and
nonintervention.

Now it jettisons those principles, substituting the claim that its own
perceived national security interest overrides all. It also asserts
its intention, and its right, by virtue of its own rectitude, to
military domination of the world. This all is very dramatic. It would
be better if Congress did not simply take it as decided. It needs
debate, as its consequences may in the longer run prove unpleasant.

International Herald Tribune Los Angeles Times Syndicate International
 
 

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