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 News from Around the Americas | September 2005 
US Faces Unprecedented UN Opposition
 Ann Gearan - Associated Press
| | Cindy Sheehan listens during a news conference in Westfield, N.J., on Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, with U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J. Sheehan, the California woman who camped outside President Bush's Texas ranch last month to protest the war in Iraq, which claimed her soldier son's life, said Monday she believes the U.S. never plans to leave Iraq. (Photo: Mike Derer) |
Rarely in U.N. history has the United States, the organization's chief sponsor and host, looked as awkward or vulnerable to foreign eyes as it does now.
With 170 world leaders meeting in New York this week, the Bush administration is scrambling to save lives and restore its can-do image. Hurricane Katrina has produced scenes of devastation and deprivation shocking to the rich and powerful U.S. but all too familiar elsewhere.
Televised images of fetid floodwaters in New Orleans and grim-faced U.S. officials, from President Bush on down, are greeting heads of states arriving for the U.N. General Assembly.
Bush plans a speech Wednesday, making the case for U.S.-backed initiatives that are already proving a hard sell.
Staggered by Katrina, the U.S. also faces international opposition to the war it is leading in Iraq. There is resentment, too, that Bush has refused to sign the Kyoto treaty on global warming or embrace British Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposal that rich nations donate foreign aid equal to 0.7 percent of their national income. The U.S. percentage is 0.16 percent, the lowest of leading industrialized nations.
Washington still has more money, military muscle and political say-so than anyone else. Yet Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are coming to New York dogged by the perception of disarray and government bumbling that gives other nations a rare glimpse of a superpower on its heels.
International offers of money, equipment and other aid have flowed since the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast two weeks ago. While grateful, the administration knows that accepting the help can feed the perception of weakness.
"Because of our power, they like to test the limits of that power," said conservative foreign policy scholar Gary Schmitt. His Project for the New American Century is a regular font of ideas adopted by the White House and State Department.
"I understand that, but I think there will be a surprise, frankly, at how quickly we are able to recover. They will quickly discover that we can walk and chew gum at the same time," he said.
The administration long has had a testy relationship with the U.N., a slow-moving bureaucracy where criticism of the U.S. is common.
Bush, and especially Rice, have worked to make amends around the world during Bush's second term.
The good will they won has been offset somewhat by making firebrand conservative John R. Bolton the U.S. ambassador and insisting on certain changes to a blueprint for an overhaul of the organization's management and operations.
One analyst said the U.S., hobbled or not by the hurricane, is wasting a chance to reassure leaders that it will work with other countries.
"We look like we are looking for every opportunity to limit our own obligations and taking a cramped view of what the United Nations should be," said Jim Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser to President Clinton.
Despite Bush's emphasis on spreading democracy around the world, "when push comes to shove we are being lawyerly and narrow-minded in the whole approach to the U.N.," said Steinberg, who now directs foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.
Senate Democrats blocked Bolton's confirmation this summer, and Bush used a rare recess appointment to send him to New York.
Planning for the General Assembly was well under way, and diplomats had been working for nearly 18 months on the planning document that will go to a vote this week.
Almost from his first day, Bolton proposed changes that other countries complained amounted to a last-minute rewrite to suit U.S. tastes.
Rice disputed any suggestion that the U.S. is being high-handed or waited until the last minute to raise objections. She also said she is lobbying other nations to improve the document. |
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