The Progressive Response

The Progressive Response is a publication of Foreign Policy In Focus, a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. The project produces Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) briefs on various areas of current foreign policy debate. Electronic mail versions are available free of charge for subscribers. The Progressive Response is designed to keep the writers, contributors, and readers of the FPIF series informed about new issues and debates concerning U.S. foreign policy issues.

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Table of Contents

I. Updates and Out-Takes

CONTAINMENT LITE: A SPECIAL REPORT ON RUSSIA AND ITS NEIGHBORS
By John Feffer

SETTING UP THE UN TO TAKE THE BLAME IN KOSOVO
By Phyllis Bennis

I. Updates and Out-Takes

CONTAINMENT LITE: A SPECIAL REPORT ON RUSSIA AND ITS NEIGHBORS
By John Feffer

(Editor's note: Ten years after the Soviet bloc began to crumble, Russia and its neighbors are mired in economic and political chaos--in no small part due to misdirected U.S. policies. In Containment Lite: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Russia and Its Neighbors, John Feffer provides a timely review of U.S. policy in the former Soviet Union and recommends a more constructive policy agenda.

Containment Lite, a new special report published by the FPIF project, comes at a critical juncture. Increasing tensions with Russia over Washington's Star Wars policy when added to Russia's rising resentment of U.S. unilateralism create a potentially explosive mix. Deteriorating international relations overlay internal turmoil. Economic paralysis has Russia flirting with third world status, insurgents challenge a debilitated military apparatus, and U.S. protege Boris Yeltsin suffers single-digit popularity as the country nervously awaits the presidential elections scheduled for next year. The following selection is excerpted from this new FPIF special report, which can be accessed in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/papers/russia/ or purchased for $7.50 from the IRC or IPS. The Feffer essay is also included in Global Focus, the forthcoming FPIF book to be released by St. Martin's Press in early 2000.)

In 1992 Boris Yeltsin predicted that good times were just around the corner. This corner has retreated further and further into the distance (particularly after the crisis of August 1998, when the ruble went into free fall and Moscow defaulted on its treasury debt). Today, Russia's gross domestic product (GDP) is half what it was ten years ago. The government is suffocating under $150 billion in foreign debt. Barter has reemerged as a dominant mode of economic transaction. Workers are paid in-kind when they are paid at all. Poverty is rampant. Life expectancy is dipping, the population is declining, and Russia is flirting with third world status.

Economic reform in Russia has not only been unsuccessful, it has been profoundly undemocratic. By collaborating almost exclusively with Boris Yeltsin and his hand-picked "reformers"--and circumventing Russia's popularly elected legislature, the Duma--the Clinton administration placed expediency over accountability, transparency, and the checks and balances of a truly democratic system. The international community poured billions of dollars into Russia, money that didn't trickle down but was instead diverted into the pockets of a select few. The result was a crony capitalism far more pronounced than anything on show in Asia: all the corruption with none of the growth.

The motives for the Washington's insistence on Russia's swift, monetarist transition to capitalism are complex. U.S. economists and politicians, in cooperation with the IMF, focused on a single method for untangling from communism, a model developed and applied in Poland with mixed success. The Bush and Clinton administrations were also suspicious of allowing the Russian state to play a stronger role in economic recovery because of their residual antipathy toward any state authority emanating from the Kremlin. By acting quickly, the Western advisors expected to get the worst of the transition over before the public could vote the "reformers" out of office (economic pain is rarely popular at the polls). And the U.S. government, pressured by business interests, wanted to establish a playing field in Russia that benefited U.S. commercial interests, particularly in the energy and mining sectors.

U.S. businesses are interested in Russia for very good reasons. Russia has an educated work force, a strategic location straddling two continents, and a generous supply of natural resources, including gold and timber. But energy is the true jewel in the Russian crown. Oil and natural gas currently represent 60 percent of Russian exports and 25 percent of federal revenues. Even with the fall in energy prices, Russia can parlay its resources into hard currency--if the profits don't accrue principally to foreign companies, and if the U.S. government stops trying to undercut the future expansion of Russian energy interests in the Caspian Sea.

A good deal of oil lies beneath the Caspian Sea. The problems in getting that oil to market are manifold, not the least being the countries surrounding the potential oil fields--Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. Russia wants to work with the latter three countries to build a pipeline that (at least in part) runs through Russia. In that way, Russia can maintain an interest in the region. The U.S., meanwhile, has exerted heavy pressure on a consortium of eleven major oil companies to build a 1,400-mile pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan in southern Turkey, skirting Russia altogether.

The U.S. plan suffers from numerous problems. The original estimates of 178 billion barrels are now thought by independent experts to be closer to 17.8 billion (a problem compounded by the current buyers' market). The estimated cost of the pipeline has recently risen by another $1 billion. The pipeline would pass through a very unstable Georgia, home to major insurgencies in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The U.S. project also necessitates paying off Turkey, a strategic ally, and continuing to overlook this NATO member's continuing human rights abuses.

But the plan's most important failing is that it denies Russia any piece of the pie. Russia believes it has natural interests in this region that the U.S.--halfway around the world--does not.

(John Feffer is the author of Shock Waves: Eastern Europe After the Revolutions (South End, 1992), Beyond Detente: Soviet Foreign Policy and U.S. Options (Hill and Wang, 1990), and several In Focus briefs (on NATO, U.S.-Russian Relations, Eastern European economic reform, and the situation in former Yugoslavia). He is also co-editor of Europe's New Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 1996).)

SETTING UP THE UN TO TAKE THE BLAME IN KOSOVO
The Law of Empire: U.S. Sets Up the UN to Take the Blame in Kosovo
By Phyllis Bennis

(Editor's note: Recent statements by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry Shelton and Secretary of Defense William Cohen criticize the UN for its inadequate peacekeeping role in postwar Kosovo. Institute for Policy Studies Fellow Phyllis Bennis looks at recent U.S. treatment of the UN and outlines steps the U.S. should take to become a responsible party in the Balkans.)

It was eminently predictable. Only weeks after NATO's bombing campaign, U. S. officials are already blaming the United Nations for their own inevitable failure to restore anything resembling peace in Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia.

It was only after the months of NATO bombing failed to stop the ethnic cleansing and expulsions in Kosovo that Washington and its allies grudgingly allowed a role for the once-excluded UN. The bombing devastated Yugoslavia and shored up support for Slobodan Milosevic. So it turned out they needed the world body to orchestrate the deal for ending the air war, withdrawing Yugoslav troops, and creating an international protectorate in Kosovo. But from that same moment it was clear that part of the U.S. strategy was to set up the UN (already denied adequate resources, personnel and authority) as the fall guy for the not-so-peaceful conclusion of the Yugoslavia war. The U.S. rejected any UN role in decisionmaking about military action. But now Washington holds the UN accountable for the messy aftermath of the U.S.-NATO war.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry Shelton and Secretary of Defense William Cohen focused their testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on condemning the UN. "We need to put as much pressure as possible on the UN to do more," threatened Cohen. Adding to the accusations, the Committee's chair, Senator John W. Warner, berated how "the United Nations moves very slowly to assume its responsibilities."

What the officials ignored, among other the things, is that thanks largely to U.S. and its wealthy allies' miserliness, the UNs High Commissioner for Refugees has so far received only $140 million of the $400 million needed to rebuild homes for the returning Kosovar refugees. The New York Times reported that "only 150 police officers of a projected 3,110 member international force are in Kosovo" and one can almost see the shaking heads of disapproval at the UN's failure. But the real problem is that the entire 3,000+ volunteer force must be individually recruited and sent to Kosovo by separate governments around the world. This is largely because the U.S. has prevented the creation of any kind of standing UN reaction force or international police force that could, under the direction of the Secretary General, move swiftly and proactively in crisis zones.

The Clinton administration refuses to help rebuild Serbia's bomb-devastated infrastructure so long as Milosevic remains in power, and it is pressuring other NATO members to do the same. That means that while Kosovo, with its mostly Albanian population, will eventually receive millions in reconstruction money, the rest of Serbia will get nothing. As this situation causes ethnic tensions to rise, the UN's task will remain that much more daunting, and Washington's position is likely to make its failure that much more likely.

The Clinton administration refuses to recognize how much it needs the UN for any hope of achieving a more peaceful world. The U.S. violated the UN Charter by using NATO, a military alliance, to authorize its air war against Yugoslavia instead of placing the issue before the United Nations. Widespread human rights violations, such as those that occurred in Kosovo, may indeed necessitate the consideration of international intervention even within a sovereign state--but only the UN is entitled to make such a determination. Fear of a possible veto by other Security Council members does not give the U.S. and Britain the right to do an end run around the UN's primacy in matters of international peace and security. By acting solo, the U.S. trumpets its contempt for other nations.

So what's going on here? Why is the U.S. leading the charge to discredit and undermine the UN and international law even further, now that NATO's unauthorized war in Yugoslavia is over?

It's an old story, really. It's the story of a strategically unchallenged dominion, at the apogee of its power and influence, rewriting the global rules for how to manage its empire. The Greeks did it a couple of thousand years ago. Thucydides described how the lands conquered to ensure stability for Greece's golden age would be governed by wholly different laws than the Athenians' tranquil (if slavery-dependent) democracy at home. So too, the Roman empire. In the last couple hundred years the sun-never-sets-on-us British empire did the same thing. And now, having achieved once unimaginable heights of military, economic, and political power, it's Washington's turn.

The law of empire was clear in the U.S. refusal to sign the 1997 convention prohibiting the use of anti-personnel land mines, The rest of the world agreed that anti-personnel mines, responsible for far more civilian than military deaths, should be outlawed. But the U.S., while claiming to support the convention, demanded that it be exempt, and be allowed to continue using land mines in Korea's demilitarized zone and around the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Everyone else should ban land mines, the U.S. agreed, but we should be the exception.

And it is perhaps most clear of all in how the U.S., the only country in the world with the power to do so, shifted international decision-making out of the hands of the United Nations, replaced by unilateral action and NATO decision-making. In 1990 the U.S. selected the UN as its legitimizer of choice, orchestrating through bribes and threats and punishments a Security Council vote authorizing Washington's coalition war against Iraq.

In the run-up to Operation Desert Fox in 1998, Security Council members were afraid Washington was going to sideline them once more. A parade of Council ambassadors stated explicitly that their resolution did not authorize a unilateral U.S. military strike on Iraq. Their fears were right: then-U. S. Ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson blithely shrugged and told the press, "we think it does." And four days of bombs and cruise missiles devastated Baghdad.

By 1999, having denied the UN and European diplomatic organizations the authority and resources needed for serious preventive diplomacy in the escalating Kosovo crisis, Washington took the final step. It abandoned the UN altogether, replacing the legal requirement of UN authorization for the use of force with the projection of NATO, a military alliance, as champion of yet another bombing campaign.

Of course the UN is the right organization to be in charge of the Kosovo situation right now--but it must be granted the money, personnel, and authority it needs to do the job. In fact, the U. S. should have promoted the UN as the central actor there years ago--by paying its UN dues, by supporting UN efforts (along with those of European organizations such as the OSCE) to respond proactively before the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo escalated, by supporting the creation of a UN Department of Preventive Diplomacy and a standing, independent, UN-controlled, rapid-reaction civilian/police/peacekeeping force.

Setting up the UN to take the blame for U.S. and NATO failures is no way to bring peace to Kosovo--nor to Sierra Leone or Colombia or anywhere else. Being the richest and most powerful nation in the world doesn't give the U.S. the right to trample international law, to run endgames around the UN, or to use or discard the global organization on the whims of superpower arrogance or domestic politics.

The world has had enough of empires writing their own rules.

(Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a frequent contributor to FPIF, and author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN.)

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This page was last modified on Thursday, February 15, 2001 10:19 AM