September 10, 2003 - Newhouse News Service: Former Peace Corps Director Mark Schneider says Bush's unilateral approach has inspired distrust

Peace Corps Online: Peace Corps News: Headlines: Peace Corps Headlines - 2003: September 2003 Peace Corps Headlines: September 10, 2003 - Newhouse News Service: Former Peace Corps Director Mark Schneider says Bush's unilateral approach has inspired distrust

By Admin1 (admin) on Friday, September 12, 2003 - 11:24 pm: Edit Post

Former Peace Corps Director Mark Schneider says Bush's unilateral approach has inspired distrust





Read and comment on this story from the Newhouse News Service that today after U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the launching of an ambitious enterprise to reshape the politics of the Middle East, things are very different. Polls show a deepening resentment of U.S. power worldwide, even among traditional allies. America's mailbox is again full, this time with hate mail.

The reasons for the shift are complex, and in many ways the changes merely reflect the realities of a single-superpower world. But analysts say there is also something deeper at work: a newly assertive U.S. foreign policy that has broken with many of the principles that defined international relations for half a century. "After 9-11, the United States had an enormous opportunity to solidify and expand our leadership in all international organizations," said former Peace Corps Director Mark Schneider, now senior vice president of the International Crisis Group, a think tank headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. "Instead, we have adopted an increasingly unilateral approach that has inspired distrust." Read the story at:


Aggressive U.S. Foreign Policy Generates Distrust*

* This link was active on the date it was posted. PCOL is not responsible for broken links which may have changed.



Aggressive U.S. Foreign Policy Generates Distrust

BY JOHN HASSELL
c.2003 Newhouse News Service

In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks nearly two years ago, America became a mailbox, receiving letters of condolence from all corners of the globe. Even Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, no friends of the United States, sent their sympathies.

Today, after U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the launching of an ambitious enterprise to reshape the politics of the Middle East, things are very different. Polls show a deepening resentment of U.S. power worldwide, even among traditional allies. America's mailbox is again full, this time with hate mail.

The reasons for the shift are complex, and in many ways the changes merely reflect the realities of a single-superpower world. But analysts say there is also something deeper at work: a newly assertive U.S. foreign policy that has broken with many of the principles that defined international relations for half a century.

"After 9-11, the United States had an enormous opportunity to solidify and expand our leadership in all international organizations," said former Peace Corps Director Mark Schneider, now senior vice president of the International Crisis Group, a think tank headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. "Instead, we have adopted an increasingly unilateral approach that has inspired distrust."

The boldest element of this policy, enshrined in a National Security Strategy report released just after the first anniversary of Sept. 11, was the doctrine of pre-emptive military action. "The United States cannot afford to remain idle," the document warned, "while dangers gather."

President Bush's recent decision to ask the United Nations for help in rebuilding Iraq could, analysts suggest, indicate a renewed willingness to work within the traditional framework of international institutions to accomplish foreign policy goals. If so, experts say, U.S. actions of the past two years could be seen as an aberration.

If not, "the behavior of the Bush administration since 9-11 will ultimately be seen as a significant departure from the consistent premise of American foreign policy since World War II," said James F. Hoge, editor of the influential journal Foreign Affairs, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

"That premise," Hoge said, "has been that a stable, secure world can only be accomplished by greatly strengthening international actors, law and procedures, so that the problems between nations become the subject of resolution through negotiations, compromise and mutual accords, rather than conflict."

Even before Sept. 11, there were indications that the Bush administration wanted to craft a foreign policy less constrained by international agreements. The White House dismissed the Kyoto environmental accords, worked to alter nuclear weapons treaties and criticized the creation of an International Criminal Court.

"In many ways, what we've seen since Sept. 11 is merely a reinforcement of an existing tendency in the Bush administration toward charting a more unilateralist approach than its predecessors," said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington.

But over the past two years, the administration has gone much further "than even the president probably envisioned," Carpenter said. In addition to trumpeting the doctrine of pre-emption, the White House has downgraded the role of the United Nations and NATO and issued blunt warnings that other nations are either "for us or against us."

As long as the security threat posed by terrorist groups such as al-Qaida exists, Carpenter predicted, "we're likely to see the Bush administration treat the United Nations as a trash can to deposit issues that are not seen as critical. Those things that are considered important they will handle themselves with little or no consultation."

Though the neo-conservatives who have largely driven U.S. foreign policy during the Bush presidency dispute the notion that they aren't interested in the opinions of America's allies, they argue strenuously that the post-Sept. 11 landscape demanded a more robust U.S. approach to issues of national security.

"It took until Sept. 11 for us to begin to address the unaddressed questions of the post-Cold War world," said Thomas Donnelly, a former deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century, a Washington think tank that played a leading role in formulating the Bush White House's Iraq policy.

The challenge, Donnelly said, was to determine "what was necessary for the United States to preserve the international order that we sort of fell into when the Soviet Union collapsed, and to decide what military, strategic steps were required by the new circumstances."

One thing that quickly became clear to the administration, Donnelly said, was that "there was no international institution that was up to the task of dealing with the terrorist threat or the problem of rogue states." And while building such institutions was desirable, he said, "we had to walk and chew gum at the same time."

There was "always a question" about whether the strategy of forging ad hoc coalitions -- rather than seeking explicit U.N. mandates -- was a viable long-term strategy, said Donnelly, who now works at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. In that sense, Bush's recent outreach to the United Nations "may prove to be another fork in the road."

At the moment, polls of public opinion around the globe suggest little enthusiasm for America's role in the international arena. A Pew Research Center survey of 16,000 people in 20 countries, released in June, found that "favorable opinions of the United States have slipped in nearly every country for which trend measures are available."

This has been true even with America's closest allies. A poll of 8,000 Americans and Europeans released by the German Marshall Fund last week found that "throughout Europe, majorities expressed disapproval of current U.S. foreign policy." Disapproval among Italians and Germans was 20 points higher than a year before, the poll found.

The irony, the survey's authors noted, is that Americans and Europeans agree on the top five threats to global security: international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction in North Korea and Iran, Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Priorities are not the issue, the poll suggests; the problem is the United States.

"It's clear that Europeans are very concerned about the direction of U.S. foreign policy, have a very different view of the role we should be playing in the world and are hence less inclined to want to work with us," said Stephen R. Grand, a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and now an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

America's image problems in Europe pale, however, in comparison with the situation in the greater Middle East.

According to the Pew poll, "The bottom has fallen out of support for America in most of the Muslim world." Majorities in seven of eight Muslim countries surveyed -- the sole exception being Morocco -- expressed worries that the United States might become a military threat to their own countries.

Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East expert at Sarah Lawrence College, said much of the anti-U.S. sentiment in the Muslim world stems from a perception that policy-makers in Washington are less interested in promoting democracy and more interested in protecting U.S. economic and security interests in the region.

"Despite the rhetoric about democracy and human rights in Iraq, the administration has not nudged its allies in the region to reform," Gerges said. "The result of the Iraq war in the Middle East seems to be more repression. Autocratic governments friendly to the United States have been able to weather the storm."

Without goodwill and support from long-time allies, "our efforts to persuade others that our security interests coincide are diminished," said Daniel Benjamin, who served as director of transnational threats at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.

Whether Americans like it or not, Benjamin said, "our ability to do things in the international area that we believe are important depends largely on how the rest of the world sees us. Unless things change, we could be headed toward a situation in which antipathy for the United States is so high that others will oppose our goals simply because they are ours."

Sept. 8, 2003

(John Hassell is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at jhassell(at)starledger.com.)

(John Hassell is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at jhassell@starledger.com.)




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This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; Peace Corps Directors - Schneider; Speaking Out

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By bankass.com (0-1pool136-25.nas12.somerville1.ma.us.da.qwest.net - 63.159.136.25) on Sunday, November 09, 2003 - 10:17 am: Edit Post

Many volunteers fell under his watch and there were many acts of violence which he covered up. He did nothing to prevent these tragedies from happening. He is part to blame for the lapse in security of Peace Corps volunteers during the 1990's. "Two Volunteers at every site is prudent policy Mark."


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