| 摘要 | The mid-term elections have demonstrated the persuasiveness of President George W. Bush’s depiction of the war on terrorism to his domestic audience. Successful negotiation of a unanimous United Nations resolution on Iraq has shown his willingness to pursue a multilateral approach to security threats. His forthcoming European tour, however, presents a different challenge. For his address to the Nato summit in Prague next week, he will have to adapt the rhetoric of good versus evil that resonates so well with Americans, emphasising shared interests rather than the appeal to patriotism and the defence of the American way of life. Over the past few months, discordant voices within the US administration have given confusing messages to governments and publics abroad. Pentagon hawks have queried the relevance of the UN and Nato. Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, referred to the “so-called occupied territory”, calling into question a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Outside the administration, the noise on US airwaves and comment pages has threatened to blot out reasoned arguments for joint action against common threats. Europeans have been vigorously denounced; so too several of Iraq’s neighbours, most of all the Saudis and the Iranians. Mr Bush has to convey a coherent message to governments across Europe and beyond, constrained by their sceptical publics from uncritical acceptance of US leadership. The US needs its allies far more than the noisy ideologues of the new right are willing to admit. The projection of power still depends on access to bases and intelligence facilities in friendly states. Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, was explaining in Britain last week that it is impossible to keep the US secure without active co-operation from police and intelligence services across the world. America’s allies repaid the cost of the 1991 Gulf war, recognising that US military action constituted an international public good; the cost of another Middle East conflict, and of reconstruction, is not a burden that the US will wish to shoulder alone. Even within the US, public opinion wants the administration to act in co-operation with others, either through UN approval or through ad-hoc coalitions. But coalitions of the willing cannot be built, let alone sustained, by pressure on reluctant governments to disregard their domestic publics. Mr Bush needs to persuade a much wider audience that the US stands for universal values and an equitable world order. US Republicans are much fonder of quoting Winston Churchill than Franklin D. Roosevelt, although they together defined the postwar multi- lateral order. The American right is reversing Roosevelt’s legacy, replacing the welfare nation-state with one focused on security and individual responsibility. European publics, living in a more densely packed continent, are less enamoured of this libertarian approach. The social democracy that FDR espoused still underpins the legitimacy of all European democracies. The world order the US created under Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower – of which Nato was an intrinsic part – was Wilsonian in its emphasis on international law and multilateral institutions. The Jacksonian revolt, led by the Republicans since the 1980s, has been far more nationalist, suspicious of foreign governments and international entanglements. The rhetoric of the incoming Bush administration was dismissive of international law and institutions as constraints on US action; constraints were for lesser nations, while America needed to be free. Now Mr Bush has to address member governments of what used to be America’s most important alliance, and persuade them to continue to follow US global leadership. Nato has diminished in significance for Washington, not only because European defence capabilities have shrunk so much but also because the European region is no longer the main focus for US security policy. Yet it would be a massive setback for US diplomacy and security if Nato withered into irrelevance, fuelled by popular opposition to US policies and perceived values, and to the aggressiveness of their presentation. Both style and content therefore matter. Admission of where the administration has changed its mind from its initial rejection of “nation-building” to its commitment to the reconstruction of Afghanistan and its promise to stay the course to rebuild Iraq, would win friends. Mr Bush will rightly call on his self-absorbed European allies to pay more attention to threats outside their region, and to shoulder more of the burden of maintaining our threatened international order, under the US’s reasserted leadership. For his message to hit home, however, he must appeal to values that European publics share and to international rules that Americans, like others, are called upon to observe. Lord Wallace is professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and a Liberal Democrat peer |
