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Going It Alone on Foreign Policy
Sept. 11 Response Seen as Illustrating Bush's Unilateralism
 Listen to Part One of Mike Shuster's report.
Listen to Part Two of Shuster's report.
Sept. 9, 2002 -- The Sept. 11 terror attacks forced President George W. Bush and his closest advisers to face perhaps the most fundamental questions any administration has had to confront since the start of the Cold War: how to exercise U.S. power and dominance in a turbulent, unpredictable and dangerous world.
As NPR's Mike Shuster reports for All Things Considered in a special report a year after the terror attacks, Mr. Bush showed little interest in foreign policy before running for president. Mr. Bush and his advisers tended to be distrustful of international institutions, believing they encroached on American sovereignty. The Bush administration was quickly labeled unilateralist.
But that go-it-alone policy -- which continues to echo in current discussions about pre-emptive U.S. military action against Iraq -- has alarmed and offended some U.S. allies, bolstering the view among many countries that America is an arrogant bully on the world stage.
"Many of our allies and partners conceptualize a war on terror as a multilateral effort, one that will require the cooperation of countries and many different agencies," says Clyde Prestowitz, who was a senior Commerce Department official in the Reagan administration. "Their concern is that the U.S. is tending to go it alone or to operate on the basis of coalitions of the moment rather than on the basis of established alliances and global institutions and procedures."
On Sept. 12, 2001, NATO for the first time in its history invoked Article 5 of its charter, calling the attack on the United States an attack on all 19 members. But when the United States decided to go to war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan last fall, it was virtually a solo effort.
In a January speech at the National Defense University, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained the decision this way: "Wars can benefit from coalitions of the willing, to be sure, but they should not be fought by committee. The mission must determine the coalition. The coalition must not determine the mission. If it does, the mission will be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and we can't afford that."
In May, Mr. Bush signed a treaty with Russian President Vladimir Putin agreeing to cut the number of nuclear warheads deployed in the United States and Russia to about 2,000 for each side over the next decade. But Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and some other critics say Mr. Bush didn't go far enough in making the reductions, especially now that Russia is no longer the major threat.
In the National Defense University speech, Rumsfeld said: "Our goal is not simply to fight and win wars. It is to try to prevent wars. To do so we need to find ways to influence the decision-makers of potential adversaries to deter them not only from using existing weapons but to the extent possible try to dissuade them from building dangerous new capabilities in the first place."
The Bush administration has not publicly advocated a policy of global dominance; such a policy would certainly draw criticism at home and abroad. But Joseph Nye, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a former assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, says the United States must still decide how it will exercise power in the world.
"I have no complaint about American dominance if we use our power wisely, used in a way which is attractive to others and co-opts others into our view of the world," Nye says. "I think the danger is that when you make American power a goal in and of itself and you define it in ways which (don't) include the interests of others, you run the risk of alienating them and giving them an incentive to gang up against you."
Foreign policy experts say the exclusive focus on terrorism may be obscuring other important issues.
"We won the Cold War and the question now is, 'What is the purpose, what is the vision of our leadership in the world?'," says Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to President Carter. "And I think we have to define that much more broadly than the war on terrorism. We have to view the war on terrorism as part of a larger struggle to deal with the underlying sources of turbulence and violence and conflict in the world of which terrorism is an important, dangerous manifestation."
And while Secretary of State Colin Powell and some others in the administration believe that the United States must consider international interests in settings its own policies, Rumsfeld and other officials have focused more on the ability to deal with unanticipated threats.
"We have to recognize that it is an uncertain world..." Rumsfeld says. "It is the world that, besides promising surprise and promising little or no warning is a world that has weapons of mass destruction. So the penalty for not being able to cope with surprise can be enormous."
In Depth
 Search for more NPR stories on U.S. foreign policy.
Other Resources
• Visit the White House site: America Responds.
• Read the text of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Jan. 31, 2002, speech at the National Defense University.
• Learn about NATO's Article 5 on mutual defense.
• Read more about international issues at the State Department Web site.
• Read the text of the May 2002 U.S.-Russia strategic arms reduction treaty.
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