Is the U.S. really unilateralist?

Richard Halloran, Contributor, Honolulu

Critics of America and particularly of President George W. Bush have vehemently and repeatedly accused the United States of "unilateralism," meaning that Washington often sets out on a course without getting the approval of other governments. The buzz phrase is "going it alone."

American officials just as vigorously have asserted that the U.S. acts in concert with other nations far more often than not, especially in combined military training and operations in Asia and the Pacific. Careful scrutiny and a wide-angled perspective suggest they have the better of the argument.

During a policy seminar of Asians and Americans at the East- West Center in Honolulu last week, speaker after speaker lashed out at the U.S. for being unilateralist. Said an Asian: "Many Asians see the U.S. as a power that interferes with our domestic political stability." Similarly, an American said: "It has become dangerous to oppose the U.S. because the U.S. has the power to punish people."

In contrast, the American ambassador to South Korea, Thomas Hubbard, said in a brief interview after the East-West Center gathering: "The U.S. is not nearly so unilateral or pre-emptive as our critics sometimes contend."

Two senior military commanders, Admiral Thomas Fargo, who heads the Pacific Command here, and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, who commands allied forces in Europe, are advocates of a multinational approach, both having been quoted: "No nation is so big as to be able to go it alone, and no nation is too small to contribute."

Part of the disagreement is a tangle of semantics. Those who accuse the U.S. of unilateralism say they favor multilateralism, in which everyone involved has a say. The multilateralists don't come right out and say so but each wants a veto over the U.S., a sure formula for gridlock.

Americans have rarely been enthusiastic about multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, the most multilateral of them all. A recent poll showed that only 37 percent thought the UN was doing a good job against 58 percent who thought not.

When it comes to multinational ventures, the U.S. stands in the front of the line. The most immediate endeavor are the negotiations among China, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. scheduled to open in Beijing on Wednesday. At issue are North Korea's nuclear ambitions, which all the other parties to the talk wish to halt.

For months, North Korea insisted that the talks be conducted between itself and the U.S. The Bush Administration was adamant in arguing that Pyongyang's nuclear program was a threat to all of its closest neighbors and therefore the negotiations should be multinational. China tipped the balance by demanding that North Korea sit down with the other five nations.

A long-standing military exercise in Asia has been the annual "Cobra Gold" drill in Thailand. Initially, it was a combined operation with the U.S. and Thailand. Then Singapore has taken part for the last two years. Next year, Malaysia and the Philippines and even Japan may participate; until now, pacifist Japan has been hesitant about doing anything that hinted at collective defense.

Since its founding in 1995, the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu has educated 1,100 military officers, civilian defense officials, diplomats, and law enforcement officers from 40 Asian and Pacific nations in the non-warfighting aspects of security.

Nor does the U.S. insist on being the leader of combined operations. Australians, with the U.S. relegated to providing logistics, led the multinational peacekeeping operation in East Timor in 1999. Senior American military commanders have said U.S. forces would play similar roles in the future.

The multilateralists, who would tie down the U.S. as six-inch tall Lilliputians bound Lemuel Gulliver (in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels), often assert that the unilateralist U.S. operates to serve its own national interests and not those of other nations.

In the real world, any government, especially one in a robust democracy, that does not serve the interests of its own nation ought to be turned out by its voters and taxpayers for dereliction of duty.

The writer is a former Asia correspondent of The New York Times.