The national interest

No one should be surprised that the Bush administration is following a go-it-alone policy in foreign affairs. His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, whose desk is near the Oval Office and who meets daily with the president, signaled as much more than a year ago.

Ms. Rice, then a political science professor at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, was already Mr. Bush’s foreign policy adviser. Her article in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, told it all in the title: “Promoting the National Interest.” She argued that many Americans had always been “uncomfortable with the notions of power politics, great powers, and power balances.” This discomfort, she wrote, led to a “reflexive” reliance on international institutions like the United Nations and a belief, especially in the Clinton administration, “that the United States is exercising power legitimately only when it is doing so on behalf of someone or something else.”

She was careful to soften her knock against humanitarianism: “To be sure, there is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect. America’s pursuit of the national interest will create conditions that promote freedom, markets, and peace.”

With that as a basis, we have seen the following actions by an administration that tries to deal with a disorderly post-Cold War world – and seemingly insists on being non-Clintonesque:

. In one of his first actions in foreign affairs, Mr. Bush managed to rebuff both North and South Korea. He closed the door, at least temporarily, on the Clinton negotiations with North Korea, which had been headed toward an agreement to stop making and exporting nuclear missiles. And the administration returned to branding North Korea as a “threat” and a “rogue state,” a justification for its missile defense program.

. The administration has revived the old Star Wars project, but with a sweetener. Where Star Wars called for an impenetrable shield against incoming missiles, raising fears that the United States could start a nuclear war without fear of retaliation, the Bush plan allows for some loopholes and aims at protecting all countries against the few missiles that might be fired by rogue states such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea. These assurances have not yet persuaded Russia, China or most of the West European allies that the National Missile Defense would serve anyone but the United States.

. The administration dismissed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union as an outmoded impediment to U.S. missile defense.

. It quickly adopted Ms. Rice’s line on the Kyoto treaty. She wrote in that article that, “whatever the facts on global warming, a treaty that does not include China and exempts ‘developing’ countries from tough standards while penalizing American industry cannot possibly be in America’s national interest.” So the Bush team announced it would drop it.

Such moves, as well as a refusal to go along with an international moratorium on the death penalty and an expensive new international campaign against AIDS, may well have helped lead normally friendly nations to join in kicking the United States off the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Alister Sparks, the eminent South African journalist, writes in the current Wilson Quarterly that the United States regards itself as “a mighty power that is also a benign hegemon” but is often seen abroad as increasingly arrogant and isolationist. Mr. Sparks notes “a persistent dominance in foreign policy of the ‘national interest’ over ‘humanitarian interests'” and sees the trend advancing under President Bush.

At the extreme, these actions would point toward a “fortress America” policy or even a Roman-style pax Americana. But for the present, the term suggested by Gerald F. Seib in The Wall Street Journal probably will suffice: “aggressive unilateralism.” The Bush administration is still young, and can deftly change its ideological course when it sails toward the shoals of political reality. Ultimately, policies closer to those of the first President Bush may grow out of these early starts.