Magazine| Aug 07, 2006
opinion
Night Of The Empire
Bush's foreign policy manual will yield a Hobbesian dystopia
PREM SHANKAR JHA When George W. Bush announced a new national security doctrine in June '02, which gave the US the 'right' to launch a 'pre-emptive' (in reality preventive) attack on any country anywhere at any time if, in its judgement, that country was harbouring terrorists who planned to attack the US, few realised he was announcing the end of the 350-year-old Westphalian order and the beginning of an American Empire.
The immediate casualty of the new doctrine was the United Nations, for the UN charter was nothing if not a legitimisation of the Westphalian order in its most evolved form. Its purpose, like that of the original treaty of Westphalia, was to prevent war by bringing the combined weight of all the member-states to bear upon the warmonger. In the well-ordered world that the UN's founding nations envisaged 61 years ago, force would only be used when sanctioned by the Security Council under chapter VII of the charter. Articles 2 and 51 explicitly took away the right to use force or the threat of force unilaterally, except in self-defence.
It was no surprise, therefore, that most nations received the announcement with disbelief. No one, they believed, could destroy a 350-year-old state system which had yielded the basis for peace in the western world, quite so casually.
They underestimated Bush. Four years after the declaration, the US has announced pre-emptive unilateral war without reference to the UN twice-on Afghanistan and Iraq, and brandished the threat of pre-emptive attack against three other countries-North Korea, Iran and Syria.
The Bush administration had intended that the US should be the only country with the right to launch pre-emptive military action. When asked whether other countries could also invoke his doctrine to deal with threats to their security, its answer was an emphatic no. But the Pandora's box that it opened when it invaded Iraq in '03 remains stubbornly open. Other countries are beginning to contemplate taking pre-emptive action to solve their security problems.
It's no surprise that the first country to take advantage of the door Bush opened is Israel. Israel refused to accept the victory of Hamas in the January elections in Palestine and embarked on a campaign to starve the Palestinians till, out of sheer misery, they throw the Hamas government out. All it succeeded in doing was to weaken Hamas' parliamentary wing and strengthen its extremist military wing. When the latter resumed attacks on Israeli settlements, Israel responded by bombing Gaza, killing, on an average, two civilians a day and destroying the Palestinian Authority headquarters. When Hamas responded by killing two and kidnapping one Israeli soldier, Israel abducted three score members of the government and legislature of Palestine. Its actions have only garnered support for the military wing in Gaza.
But Israel learned nothing from its experience in Gaza. Instead, it responded to sustained provocation by Hezbollah that climaxed in the killing of three and kidnapping of two soldiers by unleashing an indiscriminate aerial attack on Lebanon. In the first 12 days, this attack has taken 356 civilian lives and destroyed the country's infrastructure, setting it back by twenty years. But as both the UN secretary general Kofi Annan and the Lebanese defence minister have said, it has hardly dented Hezbollah and only increased Lebanese support for it.
For each of these actions there was a 'plausible' justification. Bush justified the new security doctrine on the grounds that deterrence, the lynchpin of peace in the UN/Westphalian system, only works against states, not against 'non-state actors' i.e terrorists. It justified its frequent use of pre-emptive attacks by claiming the governments of the host states were conniving with terrorists.Israel took punitive action in Gaza to recover its kidnapped soldier and in Lebanon to force the government to live up to its commitment to the UN to force the Hezbollah out of south Lebanon. But the results of each action has been to worsen the disease it sought to cure-terrorism-and deepen the chaos into which the international order is falling.
The chaos is proving infectious. Pressure is building for attacks on Iran and Syria on the grounds that these are the cradles of Hezbollah. On BBC's Hard Talk on Monday, former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar proposed Israel be invited to join NATO. If it did so, under article 5 of the covenant, all European nations would be obliged to join it in bombing Lebanon. And in India, a vocal but insane lobby is asking why it shouldn't do to Pakistan what Israel has done to Lebanon. How long will it be before Russia and China start dealing with troublesome neighbours in this way?
The truth is, the US has destroyed the Westphalian order but been unable to create an Empire. The world is, therefore, reverting to what Hobbes called the state of nature, a state of permanent war where life is nasty, brutish and short. That is what the world is entering today.
Magazine| Oct 23, 2006
opinion
The NPT Is Dead
The West is equally to blame for turning the world into a nuclear jungle
PREM SHANKAR JHA North Korea's nuclear test has touched off a spate of mutual recrimination between liberals and conservatives in the US. Democrats are blaming the Bush administration for having tied up its army in a point-less Iraq invasion, allowing North Korea to thumb its nose at the US. Republicans are castigating president Clinton for not being tough with North Korea in the mid-'90s. The only issue on which they see eye to eye is the need to push the genie back into the bottle. Else the NPT will fall apart, and the world will become a jungle full of nuclear-armed predators.
Almost no one is asking who let the genie out of the bottle in the first place. The non-proliferation lobby in Europe and US says that India and Pakistan loosened the stopper. North Korea and Iran are taking it out. Each new nuclear power destabilises the security balance in its neighbourhood. So a Domino effect follows. That is why North Korea has to be forced back in line, through targeted UN sanctions, and by forcing China into cutting off its food and oil supply.
Beneath all the bluster is a feeling that no matter what action is taken, the NPT is as good as dead. Commentators are, therefore, now assessing how much of a threat nuclear North Korea will be. What none of the western nuclear powers is conceding is their role in freeing the genie. They began doing this long before the Iraq invasion, by converting a manifestly temporary treaty to prevent the spread of nuclear arms into an instrument to create a permanent hierarchy of power and world dominance. As if that wasn't enough, beginning in the late '90s one or several of them began eroding the pillars of the Westphalian international state system-the bedrock of all international treaties of the past three-and-a-half centuries.
In 1970, when the NPT was signed, the signatories knew that treaties of this kind, which gave rights to some and imposed obligations upon others, seldom endured. To make the treaty more equal, several nations, including India, proposed that the P-5 create a nuclear umbrella to guarantee freedom from nuclear blackmail to the non-weapon states, but it was rejected. As a sop, the treaty's preamble and several of its clauses ensured that its aim was to prevent the spread of nuclear arms till an agreement for universal nuclear disarmament was signed. The treaty also had a review clause. If the P-5 did not meet their watered down obligation to move towards nuclear disarmament, the non-weapons states had the right, in theory at least, to wind it up. That right was taken away in the 1995 NPT review conference by making the treaty permanent. The P-5 refused, again, to provide a nuclear umbrella to the non-weapon states. Led by the US, they also refused to assure that they would never use nuclear arms against the latter. From then onwards, the non-nuclear weapon states' security depended upon the P-5's goodwill.
Only one legal safeguard remained: the UN charter. Article 2 of the charter forbade waging unprovoked war. War could only be waged in self-defence, or in pursuit of a chapter vii mandate of the UNSC. But eight months earlier, he US had signalled that it would not be bound by the UNSC's dictates. Shortly after a Europe trip, US secretary of state Warren Christopher declared that UN sanctions on Iraq would remain till Saddam Hussein was in power. This was the start of the US policy of 'regime change'. The same year, North Korea threw out the iaea inspectors, and Iran sent a representative to meet members of the 'Khan network'.
From the mid-'90s, the world saw increasingly frequent, and unprovoked military attacks on Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan and again on Iraq. All of these were launched by one or more of the P-5, and all of them violated Article 2 of the UN charter on paper-thin pretexts.In February 2002, after labelling North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an 'axis of evil', the US threatened North Korea with military action, stopped supplying fuel oil and stopped the construction of the nuclear power plants Clinton had begun in exchange for its not going nuclear. In July, it unveiled its plans for regime change in Iraq and Iran. In 2003, the US and UK invaded Iraq, and the next year the US and Israel began threats to invade Iran. By then it was clear that neither of these countries considered itself bound by the UN charter, by the principles of the Westphalia international order, or by Grotius' and St Thomas Aquinas' concepts of a 'just' war. Is it really surprising that both these countries conclude that their safety ultimately lies in arming themselves with nuclear weapons?
The genie cannot be pushed back into the bottle, but it can be coaxed back. The way to do this is for the P-5 to convene a conference to work out the modalities of a nuclear umbrella, guarantee that nuclear arms will not be used against non-nuclear powers, and abandon the right to pre-emptive invasion and regime change. In short, to construct a different kind of world.