Bush Aides Cite 'Realism' in Tougher Foreign Policy
3.26.01   NewsMax.com Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Voltemand   "On such regards of safety & allowance"
George Argyros   Spain   by way of Yorba Linda
Bush administration Embassy Row

Ambassadorships go for steep price
4.13.01   Robt Windrem NBC NEWS

Donors fill top envoy posts
5.4.01   Laurence McQuillan USA TODAY

At this point in Clinton's admin, 23 envoys nominated, 21 foreign service officers. The others: Pamela Harriman, a leading fundraiser, was sent to Paris, … Ronald Reagan had made 9 ambassadorial nominations at this point: 5 political picks, 4 career diplomats. Bush pere nominated 21, 8 State Dept vets.   White House officials say they earmarked about 50 embassies of 162 as political posts, in line with 30% guideline most presidents follow.
[ gains taken up front per speculative internationalist SOP ]

For Bush, the sanctions conundrum
5.15.01   Reginald Dale Intl Herald Tribune

If Mr. Bush decides to support renewal, he again will be telling European allies that their views are unimportant, and he will be telling them on the eve of a visit to Europe next month that is intended to repair strained trans-Atlantic relations. He will provide the rest of the world with further evidence of U.S. unilateralism. He will enrage U.S. oil companies, which are banned from doing business in Libya & Iran under domestic U.S. sanctions, and he will miss a big opportunity to increase oil & gas supplies to avert a looming energy crisis. The Iran-Libya Sanctions Act is only one part of a broader sanctions package. It was intended to level the playing field for U.S. oil companies by extending to foreign companies the bans on U.S. corporations doing business with Libya & Iran.
President Clinton, however, waived sanctions against non-American corporations, allowing them to sign lucrative contracts that American companies were barred from signing by their own govt. The latest instance is a report that Wintershall, a German energy co., is seeking permission from Libya to drill in oil fields owned by the Oasis group, a consortium of the U.S companies Conoco, Amerada Hess and Marathon. In Iran, Royal Dutch Shell & Japanese companies are jockeying to exploit the giant Azadegan oil & gas field, from which U.S corporations are banned. Foreign companies have invested more than $10 billion in Iranian energy projects over the past 5 years, and sources say they plan to double that amount in the next five to 10 years.

Security experts say the exclusion of U.S. companies from Iran & Libya also prevents U.S. covert operations from being carried out under the cover of oil industry operations. If Mr. Bush opposes the Iran-Libya sanctions, on the other hand, he will anger the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is leading the campaign for renewal, and congressional leaders ranging from Sen. Edw. Kennedy D-MA to Sen. Jesse Helms R-NC , both of whom argue the moral high ground is more important than corporate profits. Those who advocate sanctions maintain that European policies of engagement have not stopped Iran from supporting terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction or persuaded Libya to offer compensation for the Lockerbie bombing. But neither, of course, have U.S. sanctions.
According to congressional sources, at least 45 of 100 senators support renewal of the sanctions, and the measure has what they call wide but not deep support in the House. If Mr. Bush were to fight the measure, he probably could stymie current efforts to rush it through. But he should not stop there. Allowing the Iran-Libya act to die would not end the discrimination against U.S. oil companies that is the result of U.S. sanctions. Mr. Bush should propose amending the whole sanctions package to focus more sharply on weapons & terrorism-related materials, just as Sec.State Colin Powell is recommending against Iraq, so the oil companies can go about their business. And he should take these steps before next month's meetings with European leaders. While Mr. Bush was right, if undiplomatic, in rejecting the unworkable Kyoto Treaty, he would be undiplomatic & wrong to prolong this damaging unilateral sanctions fiasco.

WASHINGTON   Mobilizing with a command center, a new Web site and five-inch-thick binders for lawmakers, the Bush White House is battling to win back broad trade-negotiating powers that Congress denied his predecessor. With a fight brewing on Capitol Hill, the administration is trying to put a human face on the issue. It is targeting four groups of Americans in particular it says would benefit: Hispanics, high-tech workers, ranchers and farmers and women. President Bush already has made personal appeals to the first three groups at the White House; he will reach out to women in coming days. On Friday, Bush addresses the Future Farmers of America on trade, and Tuesday, he will make a fresh appeal to the high-tech industry. "The president wants to bring this debate to kitchen tables across America,'' said Jim Wilkinson, deputy communications director at the White House.
Between 1974 and 1994, every president had fast-track authority. After that authority expired in 1994, President Clinton failed twice, in 1997 and 1998, to get a Republican-controlled Congress to renew it. The Bush administration is trying to defuse criticism that sweeping trade authority would simply help Bush's business allies at the expense of environmental and worker protections. Officials also believe "fast-track'' trade authority would boost Bush's standing as a world leader. Also, they argue, the authority would aid the economy by lifting tariffs that discourage other countries from buying American goods and services.

A new command center in the White House complex is coordinating trade efforts among seven Cabinet agencies and administration officials who lobby lawmakers. The "trade action center'' provides information on demand to a broad array of officials seeking to spread the message. Daily conference calls and periodic meetings keep the operation humming. Binders prepared for lawmakers of both parties contain talking points tailored by state, with some arguments condensed onto pocket-sized and laminated cards. A document aimed at women says women- owned small businesses employ millions of workers and are starting up at twice the rate of male-owned businesses. Some 40 percent of American private agricultural land is solely owned by women, the paper says.
The administration contends that other nations are advancing trade pacts far more quickly than the United States is. Of the roughly 130 free-trade compacts among nations, the United States belongs to only two, another document says. The European Union has free-trade pacts with 27 countries, and 15 more are in the works, it says. To reach beyond the Capital Beltway, the White House is building a Web site advertising what it considers the advantages of increased trade. Top administration officials are managing the effort: Nicholas Calio, Bush's chief operative on Capitol Hill, and Gary Edson, the U.S. deputy national security adviser. Commerce Secretary Don Evans and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick are also lobbying lawmakers.

Under the fast-track authority Bush seeks, the president could conclude trade agreements that Congress could accept or reject but could not amend. Bush and Republicans want a bill that allows the president to negotiate a free trade zone throughout the Western Hemisphere or a new round of World Trade Organization talks. Bush believes environmental and labor protections are important but should be dealt with outside the trade regime. A House GOP bill, sponsored by Ways and Means trade subcommittee chairman Philip Crane, R-Ill., does not mention labor or environmental standards. Sen. Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat whose committee will handle the legislation, made clear Wednesday the authority must come with a requirement that countries not lower labor or environmental standards to gain a trade advantage. He said he would create a new body of congressional trade advisers that would be allowed to sit in on all negotiating sessions and vote on whether the president met the criteria for getting fast-track authority. House Republicans are pressing ahead with plans to bring a trade promotion bill to the floor next week, before Congress enters its August recess. White House officials believe it may be September before the issue comes to the floor.

Midway through the annual UN review of human rights around the world, the Bush administration has made no significant breaks with recent American policies but is finding it harder to count on the support of traditional European allies, the leader of the American delegation says. The official, Shirin Tahir-Kheli, who represented the earlier Bush administration at the Human Rights Commission in 1991 and 1992, said in a recent interview that she was finding "that the world has changed, not only in East-West terms but in West- West terms as well." "We still like to think of it as partnership across the Atlantic, and we work with that in mind," she said. "But that partnership with what used to be a small group of countries has expanded to a full range of opinions. That assumption of close collaboration is somewhat changed. It's not a disagreement on the philosophy. The values are shared, which makes it even more puzzling."
HRtss groups concur, saying the problem stems in part from divisions that appeared between the Europeans & the Americans during the Clinton administration because of American reluctance to give active support to agreements important to Europeans. Among these were the treaties barring land mines and the use of child soldiers, and setting up an Intl Criminal Court. The Clinton administration signed the court treaty at the last possible moment, on Dec. 31, after several years of fighting to change it to meet objections from the Pentagon & the Republican- led Congress. The Bush admin has said it would not send it to the Senate for ratification.

Moreover, the confrontation with Beijing over the American spy plane came just as Washington was hoping to censure China at the Human Rights Commission, now meeting in Geneva. Europe has been reluctant to lend support to such a move. European attitudes are also being shaped by the perception that the new administration "has brought the cold war back," said Carroll Bogert, of HRts Watch in New York. "U.S. criticism of other countries on human rights grounds is being held in some suspicion in Europe because they feel that it's part of a return to cold war politics, in which human rights are really an instrument of something else." The issue of China is to be debated around 4.18.01 but the Chinese tactic, successful every year but one over the past decade , is to pre-empt discussion by persuading a majority on the 53-member commission to take China off the agenda. It is the only major country to have used this strategy.

Both Russia & the U.S. now allow themselves to be criticized, and speak in defense of their policies & practices. On Thursday, for example, Russia answered criticisms of the actions of its military in separatist Chechnya. The answers did not satisfy human rights groups, but Russian diplomats at least stated their case. The Chinese, on the other hand, are now lobbying "extremely hard" for what is called a no-action motion, Ms. Tahir-Kheli said.

"They do business very differently from us," she said. "They play hardball with countries. There are offers of assistance and offers of withdrawal of assistance. For a lot of countries, they loom very large." Ms. Tahir-Kheli, S.Asia scholar who has been a UN diplomat and NSC member, said that in the resolution the U.S. aims to introduce on China, there is ample praise for what Beijing has accomplished, including a better standard of living for the people. "But the issue is that this is the human rights commission, and if you look at their human rights record, that has deteriorated," she said. "We must shine the light on China and what is happening there."
The American delegation wants to focus on the use of psychiatric hospitals for dissidents, limits on political and religious expression & repression in Tibet, among other issues, she said. The American position is made even more difficult because of the composition of the current Human Rights Commission. Among the members are Syria, Libya & Vietnam, backed by a strong lobby from the nonaligned movement, which has been resurgent in the UN system. Leaders of this group, including India & Pakistan, do not always allow scrutiny of their rights practices by commission-appointed monitors. Ms. Tahir-Kheli praised independent human rights groups for fighting to open up more countries to scrutiny, and added that the United States would not close its doors. "The U.S. is one of the few countries that says, 'Come in, have a look,' " she said.

^{FOREIGN AFFAIRS}   95 to 5
5.29.01   Thos. L. Friedman NYTimes

But it would be wrong to blame this vote entirely on anger with the Bushies. That lets the Europeans off too easily. As former U.S. delegate to U.N. HRts Commission Nina Shea wrote in The Weekly Standard, the fact that so many Europeans could participate in the U.S. being voted out "reflects the abandonment of their historical commitment to human rights." Repeatedly at the commission, the U.S. has had to break with the Europeans in order to vote its conscience on issues like slavery in Sudan and repression in China and Cuba.

Nevertheless, maybe now that Sen. Jeffords has instilled some humility in the Bush team, and ensured that Jesse Helms will no longer be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he singlehandedly ground into irrelevance with, among other things, his juvenile anti-U.N. crusades, we can get back to taking the U.N. seriously. The fact is, the world is full of problems that touch America; the U.N. handles problems related to childhood diseases, which Unicef addresses, problems of poverty in Africa, which the U.N.D.P. addresses, problems of refugees which the UNHCR addresses, and problems related to AIDS coordinated by UNAIDS. Also, there are now 16 U.N. peacekeeping missions.

For the past decade, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Fiji and Nepal have been doing UN peacekeeping that the U.S. wants done but doesn't want to do itself. These poor countries do U.N. peacekeeping to earn extra cash, and have been paying the salaries of the UN peacekeepers themselves, while waiting for years for the U.S. to pay its dues. So the world's richest country has been taking interest-free loans from the world's poorest, dollar-a-day economies. That's embarrassing. All these problems would exist whether the U.N. were there or not. So what the U.N. provides 95% of the time is a body for coordinating our response to problems we care about. And it does it in a way that ensures that the burden of costs is shared, so that the U.S. doesn't have to pay alone, and that the burden of responsibility is shared, so that wars the U.S. wants fought, or the peace accords the U.S. wants kept, have a global stamp of approval, not made-in-U.S.A.
The secret of the Human Rights Commission vote is that it is precisely because 95% of the time the U.N. is simply a tool of the U.S. that a few countries, when they got a chance to stick it to us, did so. But if we can't understand that on just about every other day the real vote at the U.N., the vote that matters, is 95 to 5, 95% of the time it acts in our interests and 5% not, then shame on us.

US Not Leader in Human Rights ¹
5.30.01   Harry Dunphy AP

Presenting the organization's annual report, Schulz said the group's greatest disappointment was the decline of U.S. leadership on human rights. As examples he cited the U.S. failure to ratify a convention to ban anti-personnel land mines and opposition to establishment of an intl criminal court. "It is no wonder that the U.S. was ousted from the UN HRts Commission," Schulz said. "That defeat was precipitated by waning U.S. influence & double standards practiced by various administrations & Congresses."
  [ More balderdash & selfserving ballyhoo. That election result was plainly backlash for the degree of U.S. HRts enforcement heretofore. Characterizing U.S. influence as "waning" is laughably inaccurate. These utterly misdirected criticisms detract attention from genuine shortcomings of U.S. HRts policy. It is easily argued that U.S. can exercise greater leverage unfettered by the need to build consensus among the UN commission because it wields the indisputable power of global Pax Americana. ]

Marking its 40th anniversary, the organization provided a platform for the husband of an American Univ. researcher detained in China. He urged the Bush administration to step up efforts to get her released now that a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane is being returned. Xue Donghua said he had written President Bush to tell him "human beings are more important than expensive airplanes." His wife, Gao Zahn, has been held in China since Feb. 11. China has accused Gao of "activities that undermine state security." Xue said the case of his wife and at least 4 other detained academics is "just the tip of an iceberg. A lot of other people who are detained & released choose to keep silent." Xue said when he asked the State Department for an update on efforts to get Gao freed, he was told the return of the aircraft from China was a diplomatic & military priority.
  [ This is an accurate description of U.S. policy failings. If administration militarists weren't so eager to make any & all nations vassal clients of U.S. munitions marketing, e.g. warships & warplanes to Taiwan, while ensuring market demand by selling under the table to declared opponents, e.g. Clinton "dual use" authorization of Loral's China sales, and seeding the market for death merchants, e.g. financing Osama binLaden & now the southern Sudanese, it would be inestimably less expensive to compel tyrants to reform when their security forces are not equipped from U.S. army procurement surplus, e.g. Guatemala, Rwanda, ad infinitum.

Just as it behooves U.S. anti-drug abuse policy to emphasize reduction of demand rather than militarize opposition to suppliers as a guise for equipping paramilitary forces to conduct terror campaigns against populations of rebels attempting to defend native resources against transnational corporation resource plunder, likewise it is essential for planetary HRts advancement that the U.S. surrender its crown of munitions industry dominance that overshadows all other nations' combined weapons sales to plunge demand for tools of tyranny. ]

… Schulz said the group was doing everything it could to obtain the release of Gao and the other detained academics in China. Amnesty Intl was launched 5.28.01 when The Observer newspaper in London published a piece by London lawyer Peter Benenson calling for the release of "prisoners of conscience" incarcerated because of their beliefs or origins. 40 years later, the group employs more than 350 staff and has an annual budget of almost $28 million. It says it has so far dealt with the cases of 47,000 prisoners of conscience. This year's annual report documents executions outside the bounds of judicial process in 61 countries, prisoners of conscience in at least 63 countries and cases of torture and ill treatment in 125 countries.

Cash crunch hampers relief efforts, UN aid agencies warn
7.12.01   UN News Ctr ¹

For his part, Mr. Lubbers deplored the lack of funding for Afghan refugees, one of world's 2 largest refugee populations. "Our message to the donors is: if you want the numbers of Afghans arriving in Europe, N.America and Australia to continue doubling every 2 years, then continue to under-fund Afghanistan," he said. UN humanitarian pgms for 19 worldwide crises have received $974 million of the $2.74 billion the UN has asked for, a mere 35% of the entire amount. However, in some countries, humanitarian appeals have received as little as 4% of the amount needed for 2001.

US arrogance in UN HRts Commission flap
5.01   Foreign Policy in Focus ( Global Policy Forum )
Arming dictatorial states, training paramilitary or opposing intl HRts treaties; U.S. does not have best record concerning HRts

HRtsWatch & UN U.S. mission ¹ ² ³   re 5.3.01 election loss

Conceding the U.S. should pay its UN back dues and that the country has no "intrinsic authority as the arbiter of human rights," the 5.30.01 Ottowa Citizen says the "sole democratic superpower" should nevertheless be on the rights commission. "Only the US offers hope to those who are victims of Sudan's slave holders, Syria's secret police or China's anti-religious persecutions," the newspaper says, referring to states that won seats on the commission. "The removal of the US from the commission reflects the effort by nations that routinely violate human rights to escape scrutiny or sanction"

Going it alone: the payback begins
5.13.01   Phyllis Bennis Baltimore Sun

Geo.Bush's penchant for going it alone in the world is beginning to bear consequences. Ten days ago, governments from around the world voted to bump the United States off the UN Human Rights Commission. The U.S. setback was not the result of some back-room campaign orchestrated by human rights violators or enemies of the U.S. It was an expression of frustration by Washington's friends and allies, especially in western Europe, at what they see as increasing U.S. rejection of the United Nations and other international commitments, including those on human rights. As Harold Koh, human rights chief in the Clinton administration, wrote in the Washington Post, "the world was trying to teach us a lesson."
The Europeans, and others at the UN, know something most Americans don't know. That despite lots of high-sounding human rights rhetoric, the U.S. routinely refuses to sign or ratify important human rights agreements. Sometimes, the U.S. itself violates internationally agreed upon human rights standards.

Consider the recent record:
* Alone among its Western allies, the U.S. continues to impose the death penalty. It even allows imposition of a death sentence against minors and those found to be mentally incompetent, in direct violation of international human rights law.
* The U.S. has refused to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a distinction it shares only with Somalia. It opposed a key provision prohibiting child soldiers under the age of 18, because the Pentagon found it convenient to continue recruiting 17-year-olds for the U.S. military.
* The U.S. has refused to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Women, and consistently opposes UN efforts to make women's right to inherit property an internationally recognized human right.

This kind of dissing of the UN and global opinion has been going on for years. But Washington's European allies have been especially horrified by some of the most recent examples. Just days before the UN votes, the Bush administration announced its intention to abandon the requirements of the Kyoto treaty on climate change, and to unilaterally renounce the almost 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty that has been a linchpin of strategic arms control since 1972. After years of big talk but little U.S. accountability to multilateral decision-making and international treaties, it's not surprising the Europeans were furious.

There have been other examples too, where the U.S. rejected international accords. Washington's refusal to sign the treaty banning anti-personnel land mines, for instance, infuriated countries throughout the world, especially those where thousands of children's and other civilians' lives have been destroyed by mines left behind long after the conflict that spawned them. The U.S. failure to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty enraged countries across the globe. Israel claims that the UN has no authority to judge its actions, but European and third world countries alike reject that view. They see U.S. rejection of international protection for the Palestinians, and its acceptance of Israel's settlements in occupied territory and its tank and helicopter gunship attacks on refugee camps and other civilian targets, as U.S. support for continuing violations of human rights and international law. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the New York Times that the vote on Israel-Palestine was one where the U.S. "left a little blood on the floor."

But the U.S. was not defeated in the Commission only because of perceived hypocrisy on human rights. It was, as Powell said, "a vote looking for a venue to happen." In fact, in another secret ballot on the same day, the U.S. lost another influential UN position, the seat on the International Narcotics Control Board that it had held for two terms. Taken together, the losses reflect growing global dismay at what is widely viewed as a "go it alone" tendency in U.S. foreign policy, an approach that dismisses the significance of multilateralism, international law and the United Nations itself.
Some U.S. officials claimed that the current lack of an ambassador at the UN made Washington's defeat easier. Career diplomat John Negroponte is slated for appointment by the Bush administration. But it is unclear his presence would have helped. As ambassador to Honduras during crucial years of the Central American wars and the Iran-contra scandal, Negroponte himself has been widely accused of covering up serious violations by U.S. allies. Honduras human rights commissioner Leo Valladares told the Sun "Ambassador Negroponte knew all about the human rights violations, and he did nothing to stop them."

And, punditry aside, the U.S. was not replaced by Sudan in the Commission -- it was replaced by Sweden. Like most UN agencies, the Commission's membership is determined by regional groups. The Western Group, including the U.S. and Europe, was allotted three seats for this election cycle, but fielded four candidates -- France, Austria, Sweden and the U.S. If any one of those European allies had withdrawn, the U.S. would have been guaranteed another term.
One would have hoped, of course, that the African Group would nominate a country less egregiously symbolic of human rights violations than Sudan. But Africa rotates virtually all its countries onto the Commission; South Africa, Senegal, Cameroon and others are already members. And the heavy European presence actually bodes well for international human rights -- the goal, after all, is not to prevent Sudan or China from being held accountable for rights violations; the goal is to insure that Israel, other U.S. allies, and the United States itself, are held similarly accountable for theirs.

One item in the list of "roguish" U.S. behavior may have pushed several countries over the edge, from irritation to fury. That is the seemingly endless problem of unpaid U.S. dues to the UN, totaling over $1.3 billion. Last year the U.S. finally agreed to pay a portion of those overdue assessments IF the UN accepted a long list of unilaterally imposed restrictions crafted largely by UN-bashing Senator Jesse Helms. Congressional opponents are again threatening to withhold back dues -- but it should be noted that even the partial payment agreed to has not yet been sent. The U.S. remains the biggest deadbeat country in the UN.
Ultimately, it is not only U.S. hypocrisy and double standards on human rights, not only U.S. rejection of multilateralism in favor of raw power that antagonizes U.S. friends, allies and adversaries alike. It is the ugly arrogance with which Washington wields that power that leads to such animosity. No wonder the French, among our closest allies, have begun referring to the U.S. as the "hyper-power." No wonder Europe decided the U.S. had held its seat in the Human Rights Commission long enough, thank you. One hopes that some here in Washington will take seriously the sobering lesson of what can happen to super- powers, even to empires, that overreach their legitimacy once too often.

U.S. Loses Seat on U.N. Rights Commission
5.4.01   Munzi ¹

But Joanna Weschler, UN representative of NY based HRts Watch, said both Western & developing countries bore grudges against the U.S. ''Washington should have seen it coming because there has been a growing resentment towards the U.S. and votes on key human rights standards, incl opposition to a treaty to abolish landmines, to the Intl Criminal Court and making AIDS drugs available to everyone,'' she said. Other nations the U.S. has held up to the spotlight in the Geneva commission, such as China or Cuba, resented U.S. actions on the committee and ''made their feelings well known in their speeches,'' she said in an interview. Weschler also said the 53-member commission was turning into an ''abuser solidarity'' group with more & more countries with questionable human rights records gaining election then voting as a bloc against singling out individual nations for human rights abuses.

The U.S. came in fourth in the balloting among Western nations with 29 votes. France was high scorer with 52 votes, followed by Austria with 41 and Sweden with 32. The commission just completed on April 27 its annual 6 week session in Geneva to probe human rights violations around the world. Established in 1947, the U.S., Russia and India had served on the rights body ever since. Also elected to the 53-nation human rights commission Thu. were Bahrain, S.Korea, Pakistan, Croatia and Armenia. Chile, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Togo and Uganda won uncontested seats. Countries whose candidates failed to get seats were Iran, Saudi Arabia, Latvia, and Azerbaijan in addition to U.S.

UN CERD rpt 9.21.00 ˆ ¹ ² ª º ³   WCAR
Rights leaders petition UN re U.S. rights violations
10.25.00   HYPE Information Service

Students of international relations call this the "Westphalian system," after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that ended Europe's Thirty Years War, a time of indescribable carnage waged in the name of competing religions. The treaties that ended the war put domestic arrangements — like religion — off limits to other states. In the war's aftermath a rough-and-ready commitment to a balance of power among neighbors took shape. Kissinger is a noted scholar of the balance of power. And he is suspicious of attempts to meddle in the internal business of others. In a book that drips with devastating, if understated, contempt for the Clinton Administration and all its workings, nothing provokes Kissinger's ire more than America's "humanitarian" interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.
Yet Kissinger is far too sophisticated to attempt to recreate a world that is lost. "Today," he writes, "the Westphalian order is in systematic crisis." In particular, nation-states are no longer the sole drivers of the international system. In some cases, groups of states, like the European Union or Mercosur, have developed their own identities & agendas. Economic globalization has both blurred the boundaries between nations and given a substantial international role to those giant companies for whom such boundaries make little sense. In today's world, individuals can be as influential as nations; future historians may consider the support for public health of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to be more noteworthy than last week's United Nations conference on aids. And a whole raft of institutions are premised on the assumption that intervention in the internal affairs of others is often desirable. Were that not the case, Slobodan Milosevic would not have been surrendered last week to the jurisdiction of the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

The consequences of these changes are profound. Kissinger is right to note that globalization has undermined the role of the nation-state less in the case of the U.S. (Why? Because it's more powerful than anyone else.) Elsewhere, the old ways of thinking about the "national interest", that guiding light of the Westphalian system, have fewer adherents than they once did. Not long ago, the national interest of, say, the Netherlands could be defined by a necessity to protect Dutch blood and soil. It would be absurd to imagine that the modern Dutch think that way now. For a sensible Dutch government, it makes sense to define the things that really matter in terms of the international opportunities available to its companies, and in the commitment to global environmentalism that its citizens apparently avow.
As more governments start to think along such lines, Washington risks looking like an outlier. When the U.S. asserts a self-centered policy on, say, missile defense or global warming, it is speaking a language that many others now consider archaic. (Not all: remember China.) In fact, even in America, the old ways of thinking about foreign policy are visibly under threat. It is American-led NGOs who have argued loudest for humanitarian intervention and for elevating the environment into an issue of foreign policy. Perhaps most interestingly, 25 years of mass immigration to the U.S., the bulk of it from Latin America & Asia, may make it harder for tomorrow's policymakers to forge a defined national interest than it was for the men who shaped Washington's thinking after World War II. All of which is a long way of saying that Kissinger's next book should not be about the rest of the world, but his own country.

MOSCOW   President Bush's national security adviser said the United States and Russia are preparing for intensive strategic weapons talks in the months ahead but that the consultations would not impede U.S. intentions to deploy a planned national missile defense system. "The new threats that we face ... won't wait and we've agreed to work very hard over the next several months,'' Condoleezza Rice said Thursday on a visit to Moscow, where she, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Commerce Secretary Don Evans met with President Vladimir Putin and other top Russian officials. Russian officials, however, indicated the talks would be drawn-out and that Moscow would continue to push for preservation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bans the missile defense tests that Bush is eager to start.
Putin's national security adviser, Vladimir Rushailo, said any newly negotiated strategic framework would require legislative changes that would further slow the process. "This work calls for a long period of time. ... I'd like to remind you of the words of President Putin that the national security of the Russian Federation should be maintained,'' he said. Rice reiterated that the United States would go ahead with a test system for the proposed missile defense, which Russia opposes because it violates the ABM treaty - an agreement that Rice called "an impediment.'' The U.S. Defense Department said earlier this month that construction of a testing facility would begin in April.

"Our testing program is designed to give us the most effective system, not to stay within the frame of the ABM treaty. That has not changed,'' she said. Earlier this week, Putin and Bush unexpectedly announced that talks on missile defense would be linked with talks on cutting strategic nuclear weapons, a development some observers saw as an indication that Washington and the Kremlin were moving toward a resolution of the long-standing dispute on missile defense. Rice said expert-level talks, beginning in early August, would move along so quickly that Bush and Putin would already have negotiators' proposals before them when they next meet, in Shanghai, China, in October. But the Russian officials whom Rice met, including Putin, Rushailo and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, did not echo her concern for speed.
Russia contends that abandoning the ABM treaty would destroy the foundations of global security and would lead to a new arms race. Putin, who did not speak after the meeting Thursday, said this week that despite the new linkage of talks, Russia and the United States still supported the fundamental principles of the ABM treaty. Alongside the strategic talks, Rice, O'Neill and Evans held discussions on boosting economic cooperation between Russia and the United States. Receiving the three in his Kremlin office, Putin voiced the hope that "this visit will serve as an enhancement of relations.'' But he bristled at previous U.S. criticism of Russia's financial status, protesting the "non-acceptance of Russia as a market economy.''

Bush and Putin, at their first meeting in Slovenia last month, pledged to focus on revitalizing economic cooperation after disputes over corruption and money laundering allegations that have frustrated foreign investors. Russia is also seeking U.S. support for its bid to join the World Trade Organization. Russia has been pushing to join the 140- nation WTO since 1995, but it has failed to open up its markets and bring legislation into line with WTO norms. Rice said that in addition to broad security and economic issues, the two sides held talks on regional conflicts in the Middle East, the Balkans and in Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. Rice said she had also raised U.S. concern about press freedom in Russia and Moscow's use of "heavy-handed tactics'' in Chechnya, which she said "breeds extremism.''