Disarmament Diplomacy

Issue No. 62, January - February 2002

The Law of The Jungle

By Rebecca Johnson

In the past two months, while proclaiming the importance of wide and unconditional support for its military actions in Afghanistan, the United States has i) boycotted the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty entry into force conference; ii) announced its intention to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; iii) pulled the plug on six years of multilateral negotiations to strengthen and verify the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention; and iv) flouted the Geneva Convention in its treatment of prisoners captured during the conduct of its self-defined "war on terrorism".

But John Bolton, US Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, objected to criticism portraying US policy as unilateralist: "trying to characterise our policy as "unilateralist or multilateralist is a futile exercise", he told the first Conference on Disarmament plenary of 2002. "Our policy is, quite simply, pro-American".

Hmmm... isn't that a bit like a bank robber objecting to being called a thief? "I'm pro-me-and-my-family," he'd say, as if that were a self-evidently admirable thing: "the bank is just an institution, and it is at fault for denying me access to what I want".

Before banks, we ourselves were responsible for keeping and protecting our money. We might hope to keep it safe as property or jewels or hide it in a sock under the bed, depending on our resources and inclinations. Some, but not all, would get robbed, in which case they might lose everything, including their lives if they got in the way. Instead of the relative anarchy of that situation, we've now chosen to trust banks (flawed though they may be), and they generally do a good job of holding and protecting money on behalf of many different people, small savers as well as big investors. Likewise, arms control treaties enshrine security norms and constraints on behalf of many different nations, weak as well as powerful. For the most powerful nation to pick and choose which treaties it likes is to steal security from the rest of the world and, ultimately, its own citizens.

Bolton listed various agreements that the Bush Administration liked, such as the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). He mentioned three treaties limiting nuclear testing: the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty and the 1976 Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty. The PTBT banned atmospheric testing. It was an important agreement at the time, but not even the Bush administration is contemplating a return to the days of huge mushroom clouds with radioactive fallout blowing across Nevada (or the Pacific). Even when they were signed in the 1970s, the other two were sham treaties, superpower public relations exercises intended to divert civil society pressure from a total test ban. They promised to limit yields to 150 kilotons when neither the US nor USSR had any reason or desire to go higher.

The CTBT was not on the list of favoured agreements. Bolton later told UN journalists that President Bush "opposes the CTBT" and would not seek Senate ratification. If international non-proliferation, arms control and disarmament are to have any collective meaning, then they have to impose credible legal and practical constraints on the armaments and force capabilities of the large nations as well as the small. Four thousand people dying violently in Afghanistan should be treated as a tragedy as appalling as four thousand people dying violently in New York - for their families and friends it no doubt is.

Once upon a time in the heyday of the British Empire, some rich aristocrats would get away with stealing from the state (by not paying taxes) and from tradespeople (by not paying their bills). Poor people were imprisoned or transported into semi-slavery for stealing bread. The practices of Enron and its ilk notwithstanding, the "civilised nations" (a concept employed frequently by Bolton and his President) are supposed to have moved away from such corrupt inequality before the law. Yet that appears to be what the United States wants to reintroduce, at least for itself, in international politics. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, approving of "the new American unilateralism" that Bolton coyly denies, wrote in June 2001 that "we now have an administration willing to assert American freedom of action and the primacy of American national interests... the new unilateralism seeks to strengthen American power and unashamedly deploy it on behalf of self-defined global ends" (emphasis added).

If the US only backs treaties that serve the interests of the haves, then they will lose whatever moral force they have. What will then be the basis for insisting on inspections in Iraq and North Korea or condemning the treatment of American prisoners of war? Does America really want to revert to the law of the jungle? Will the rest of the world really let this happen?