The U.S. must be confronted with the loneliness is isolationasim

George Monbiot, Guardian News Service, London

Tony Blair might believe he belongs to an international coalition, but George Bush has other ideas. Bush's international war against terrorism has not stopped him from waging a parallel war against co-operation.

Two weeks ago, the United States ambassador failed, for the first time, to attend a meeting of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. This may suggest that America is no longer prepared to abide by the rules against the testing of nuclear warheads. A week ago, the Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon had told the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to investigate Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector, in the hope of undermining his credibility. When the CIA failed to discover any evidence of wrongdoing, the deputy defense secretary is reported to have "hit the ceiling".

Last Friday, the United States government succeeded in dislodging Robert Watson, the chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Watson had been pressing member nations to take the threat of global warming seriously, to the annoyance of the oil company ExxonMobil. Last year, it sent a memo to the White House requesting that he be shoved.

Today, after a week of arm-twisting and secret meetings, the United States government hopes finally to force the departure of Jose Bustani, director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). This will be, if the U.S. succeeds, the first time that the head of an international organization has been dismissed during his term in office. The tactics the U.S. has deployed in the past few days offer a fascinating insight into the way its diplomacy works.

Last Friday, the U.S. ambassador organized an illegal meeting with American members of the organization's staff. He explained that he had arrived late as he had been trying to find a replacement for Bustani (this is also an illegal maneuver). He told the meeting that the U.S. had been encountering "great difficulty finding people of the right caliber" because no one wants "to be associated with a dying organization". This was news to the staff, who had previously been told by the U.S. that sacking Bustani would revive the OPCW.

The U.S. had promised that the directorship would pass to another Latin American. But the ambassador was kind enough to note that "Latin Americans are so characterized by sheer incompetence that they won't be able to make up their minds". He warned the meeting "if any of this gets out of this room, I'll kill the person responsible".

To obtain the result it wants, the U.S. appears to be paying for delegates to attend the "special session" it has convened. Micronesia said it could not come, but that the U.S. delegation could vote on its behalf (another illegal move). On Sunday, the U.S. claimed that Bustani himself had offered to resolve the situation by exchanging his deputy for an American. Recently, it was forced to admit that this claim was false.

This month's attempts to demolish international law follow America's unilateral abandonment of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, its successful sabotage of the biological weapons convention and its rejection of the Kyoto protocol on climate change, the UN treaty on gun running and the international criminal court. America is pulling away from the rest of the world, and dragging our treaties down as it goes. Given that it is in danger of alienating the very nations from whose allegiance it claims to draw its global authority, why is the U.S. going to such lengths to destroy international cooperation? I think there may be several, overlapping reasons.

The first and most obvious is that there's no point in possessing brute strength if you are not prepared to be brutal. The U.S. establishes its power by asserting it. Other nations are kept in a constant state of apprehension about what it might do next, which helps to ensure that they step back from confrontation.

It is also clear that at least three of these recent attempts to undermine international law are being pursued with an eye to the impending war with Iraq. As the American plans for destroying Saddam Hussein appear to involve new "bunker busting" nuclear weapons, the nuclear test ban treaty (which the U.S. has never ratified) must be ignored. The U.S. justification for war with Iraq is that Saddam Hussein may possess weapons of mass destruction. So the two foremost obstacles to war are Blix and Bustani, who have proposed non-violent methods of getting rid of these weapons.

War would enable the U.S. to re-establish its authority in an increasingly wayward Middle East, while asserting control over Iraq's vast oil reserves. Iraq is also daddy's unfinished business: For George W, it's personal. War is popular: The more bellicose President Bush becomes, the higher his ratings rise. It justifies increasing state support for the politically important defense industry. Arguably, war also serves as a re- legitimization of the state itself.

The Republicans argued so forcefully in the 1990s for a "minimal state" that they almost did themselves out of a job, as many Americans began to wonder why they were paying taxes at all. War is the sole irreducible function of the state, and the ultimate justification of the greatly concentrated powers and resources this "minimal" entity in the U.S. has accumulated. But the underlying reason for these unilateral breaches of the law is that the rest of the world allows them to happen.

It is not hard to see why other nations should seek to appease the United States. If the U.S. can be persuaded to keep supporting global treaties, ministers argue, it will not retreat into dangerous isolationism. But once America sees that other nations will submit to its demands, it will continue to bend the treaties to suit itself until the entire framework of international law collapses. More dangerous by far than U.S. isolationism is the unilateral demolition of the world's agreements, forcing every nation to live by its own rules.

Let Bush walk out in a huff if he can't have his way, but let him be sure that if he does so, he can no longer expect to receive either moral authority or material support for anything he wishes to achieve abroad. For all the U.S. government's talk of splendid isolation, that is the kind of loneliness his administration does not seem ready to accept.