In this age of President George W. Bush’s “War on Terrorism” and preventive war, multilateralism is under attack. Even the most unlikely critic of multilateralism in the Bush administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell, said in January 2003 that “multilateralism cannot become an excuse for inaction.” The 2002 National Security Strategy makes a similar point: “The greater the threat, the greater the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.” In other words, action—unilateral if necessary—must be taken, and the adversary must not be allowed to strike first.
In the eyes of many, the wrangling over Iraq in the United Nations Security Council has made multilateralism an unpopular concept. Multilateralism is seen as an ideal of liberals who haven’t recognized the potent new threat that faces the United States. And, worse, those who advocate multilateralism have had their patriotism doubted. These liberals, it is alleged, underestimate the utility of military force in the fight against terror and attach undue importance to international cooperation and the institutions of cooperative security.
Today a global society in which individuals occupy a more prominent role in the international system is emerging. Though individual nations retain their centrality, they matter less than before. Human security, as envisioned by the UN Charter, is beginning to occupy a more important role in the way some scholars look at international relations. Ann Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, for instance, argues for punitive sanctions to be applied against individual dictators in the target states in order to minimize the adverse effect on the populations of those countries.
The decline of state power is evidenced in the movement to strip state rulers of their unlimited immunity, to which they have, until now, been entitled by the concept of state sovereignty. The December 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, unambiguously entitled Responsibility to Protect, notes:
State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself. . . . Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.
The more prominent role that individuals come to occupy in the international system is linked to the decline in state power. This is the most evident in the Middle East. A recent study entitled Socioeconomic Roots of Middle East Radicalism, by Alan Richards, professor of economics and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, states: “The incompetence and authoritarianism of many Middle East and Muslim governments represent vital sources of the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism. These governments . . . have delivered neither material goods nor a sense of dignity at home or abroad.” Discontented with their lives and disillusioned with their governments, the people in these states seek to make decisions for themselves. Some who are indoctrinated with a virulent interpretation of Islam choose the path of terror to make their mark on the world. Unfortunately, the proliferation of modern technology and know-how has empowered these individuals to do so with unprecedented consequences. According to the U.S. Department of State Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002 report, released on April 30, 2003, the international terrorists carried out 554 attacks around the world in 2001 and 2002. In those two years, the terrorist acts claimed 4,020 lives and left 4,296 people wounded. “Terrorists,” Bush warned in his 2004 State of the Union Address, “continue to plot against America and the civilized world.”
Some Americans may like to think that terrorism is a completely new kind of threat because the events of September 11, 2001, witnessed the most devastating attack on U.S. soil in the nation’s history. But, of course, terrorism has been around for a long time. England, Russia, and Spain, just to name a few examples, have all experienced terrorism in one form or another. The United States has also experienced terrorism in the past. February 26, 1993, witnessed the first attempt by terrorists to destroy the World Trade Center. And on August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda destroyed American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in Nairobi, Kenya.
While terrorism isn’t new, the U.S. approach to fighting this threat has changed dramatically since 9/11. Bush’s declaration of a global war on terror marked a distinctive break with the past. The proclamation created an illusion that terrorism could be defeated militarily and demonstrated that the Bush administration is thinking in arcane terms about how to fight this age-old adversary.
Terrorism is fundamentally not about states but about individuals and ideology. While states can sponsor terrorist activities, only individuals can perpetrate acts of terror. Terrorist cells may, at times, permeate a whole country, as happened in Afghanistan, but state control isn’t essential for the survival of terrorist groups. To defeat state sponsors of terrorism, therefore, simply isn’t enough.
The international community must develop a strategic framework to dissuade and prevent potential perpetrators from committing these heinous acts. In the long run, the goal of the international community must be to defeat terrorism by preventing the rise of a new generation of terrorists. Accordingly, the struggle against terror is more about winning minds than battles. Military power, however advanced, cannot do that. As Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf states, “The U.S. possesses a fine hammer. But the challenges it confronts are not all nails.”
Modern radicalism-cum-terrorism is rooted in an ideology. The world most recently fought an ideological battle with the Soviet Union. True, there was an enormous military effort to contain the communist threat. Yet, notwithstanding the many proxy wars that were fought in Africa, Latin America, and Vietnam, among other places, the power of Western ideas played a critical role in defeating the “red scare.” The ideals of democratic accountability and capitalism, however imperfect, have unquestionably vanquished the hollow communist slogan of “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
While Russia retains the bulk of its Soviet-era weapons of mass destruction (including the world’s second-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons), it is, as Bush often says, not an enemy but a friend. This holds an important caveat for the fight against terror: an adversary whose strength lies in a perverted ideology must be defeated ideologically in order for the defeat to stick. Unless Western ideas are robust enough to conquer the ideology of radicalism, modern terrorism will flourish— no matter how many terrorists are preemptively killed and how many weapons are intercepted.
That the Bush administration wants to capitalize on the conventional strengths of the United States in countering terrorism is understandable. Yet, if it is to be successful in the long term, the United States will have to adapt its capabilities to deal with this threat. The Bush administration is correct in that failed states and dictatorial regimes can be safe havens for terrorists and the war in Iraq vividly demonstrated the efficacy of U.S. power in defeating a state. Yet the United States must now learn that to topple a dictator is to complete just 20 percent of the job that can be accomplished unilaterally.
In Iraq, the United States has yet to prove itself effective in stabilizing a conquered nation populated by increasingly radicalized people who speak a different language than that of most American soldiers. As Ronald D. Asmus and Kenneth M. Pollack, senior fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution, respectively, wrote recently in the Washington Post, “The question now is how best to transform the Middle East so that it no longer produces people who want to kill us in great numbers and increasingly have the ability to do so.” To prevent Iraq from becoming a new breeding ground for terrorists who will seek to perpetrate acts of indiscriminate violence in the atmosphere of anti-occupation and anti-Western popular sentiments, the United States will need the legitimacy of the international community. Occupation by a UN force is never as humiliating as governance by the few proud victors.
In today’s world, individuals are to be reckoned with: whether as al-Qaeda operatives who blow up Western hotels or as mobs of Iraqis on the streets of post-Saddam Iraq. In this nascent global society, the United States needs to develop different, subtler capabilities than have traditionally been used against countries—capabilities that will have an effect on individuals and groups. The United States needs to come to better grips with “soft power:” the power of ideas, accepted by many—and not just by our allies; the power of world image; and the power of legitimacy, derived from the overwhelming support of the international community. Today, the United States largely lacks these powers and can only acquire them through a genuine cooperation with the world community.
It may seem that the bickering over Iraq at the UN Security Council substantiated the claim that multilateral approach is unsuited for dealing with terrorism. This criticism is unwarranted and unwise. International cooperation is, in fact, essential in the struggle against terrorism. France and Germany, the United States’ greatest rivals prior to the war on Iraq, are its best friends in eliminating al-Qaeda cells worldwide. As the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said before the war in Iraq, “Obviously, the more assistance one gets the easier it is, the less assistance one gets the more difficult it is, but nevertheless it is doable.” Mr. Rumsfeld was referring to the fighting of the war, which, indeed, proved to be “doable.” Serious doubts are starting to emerge, however, about how long the United States and the United Kingdom will manage the occupation of Iraq on their own. To achieve substantial progress in stabilizing the country and, critically, in helping Iraqis build the institutions of civil society, the occupying powers are well advised to internationalize the occupation as they have done in Afghanistan, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organization took over the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force on August 11, 2003.
The advocates of multilateralism aren’t ignorant of the pernicious nature of the global terrorist threat. Two years before the nineteen hijackers awakened the United States to the full egregious potential of this menace, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 54-110, denouncing all forms of terrorism. The multilateral approach to fighting terrorism is informed by the realization that the world is no longer a neat conglomeration of nation-states. Rather, it is a messy place where individuals have global power capabilities.
Powell was right to say that multilateralism can’t become an excuse for inaction. But unilateralism shouldn’t pave way for a wrong kind of action; deficiency in “soft power” isn’t an excuse to use hard power instead. The new order of the world requires that U.S. leaders stop hiding behind traditional strengths and start adding new capabilities to the toolbox of the foreign policymakers so that they can more effectively deal with terrorism and nation building. The United States can make a solid first step by adopting a more collegiate approach in its relations with the international community. If the Bush administration is serious about vanquishing terrorism and making the new global society safer for the next generation, multilateralism is the right way to go.
Until January 2004, Eugene B. Kogan worked as a research intern at the Washington, D.C., office of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies. His articles and letters have appeared in Arms Control Today, Foreign Policy Forum, Issues in Science and Technology, and the Washington Times. Kogan is a member of the UN Association of the USA.
