The Global Testby SelwynnFollowing the first round of Presidential debates this election year, polls clearly indicated a decisive upset victory for Senator John Kerry. But in the immediate days to follow some political hay was made over his use of the phase “global test.” His comments were as follows:
Kerry: The president always has the right and always has had the right for pre-emptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the cold war. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control. No president through all of American history has ever ceded and nor would I the right to pre-empt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.
But if and when you do it, Jim, you've got to do it in a way that passes the test. That passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing. And you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.
The problem with Senator Kerry’s statement is not his use of the phrase “global test.” It is his definition of the doctrine of preemption and his failure to understand that America has a larger responsibility to the world that simply acting unilaterally first, and then defending to the world the reasons for action second. This is how Kerry defined his idea of the “global test” during the debates.
John Kerry needed instead to point out that the President of the United States has not always had the "right" to use the term “preemption” in the way the Bush Administration has. The so-called “Bush Doctrine” is not the way it has always been in American political history; it is new. And it is important that we make that reality clear to the American public.
The age old doctrine (and the only doctrine of military intervention that can even remotely be considered just) is that we have the right to respond to
clear and immanent danger in order to defend ourselves against a direct impending attack. If a country was fueling its strike missiles or we had armed nuclear subs entering American waters we can respond by taking them out first, not waiting for them to hit. Such a response to direct and immediate danger is rightfully considered defensive.
The Bush Administration has raped this doctrine by changing it to argue for the right to invade and take over sovereign nations that we do not particularly like or that have tactical and/or economic assets that we covet, even when that nation poses no clear or immediate danger of any kind. The “Bush Doctrine” justifies this aggressive posture by arguing that the fact that a country might one day possibly arrive at a place where it could conceivably threaten us gives us the right to act unilaterally without and accountability to the rest of the world to invade, attack and murder. That's ridiculous.
Bush's doctrine sneers and laughs in the face of the global community, and that is a very popular sentiment among a certain percentage of the country. There is no doubt that a certain element of the population sees its nation more like John Wayne or the Lone Ranger than as a government with ties and accountability to the world. Some people believe that we should do whatever we want everywhere in the world and be accountable to no one, even when our actions affect other sovereign nations. There is a word to describe this kind of action: tyranny.
Still other people argue that the fact that we were attacked on September 11th, has given us the justification to wage global war and take any action we see fit in the name of national defense against terror. But how do we avoid becoming terrorists ourselves? How do we rationalize murder and desolation of tens of thousands of innocent lives simply because a country might have been a “gathering threat” to us one day in the future?
Are we ready to argue that our national security justifies a policy if aggressive first-strike perpetual war and endless initiation of conflict? This perversion of the doctrine of preemption into militant nationalism and state aggression in the name of protection from any and all perceived threats is not new to Bush philosophy. The last time we heard this language was in 1938.
There must be a distinction made between action necessitated by clear and immediate danger, and action warranted due to a more long term growing threat. As former President Clinton said in this speech at the Democratic National Convention, "they
believe we should act unilaterally when we can and multilaterally only when we have to." I stand along side form President Clinton in my belief that this is fundamentally wrong.
The "global test" should mean that we ought to work multilaterally when we can and unilaterally only when we must. These “must” times are few and far between, representing only instances of crystal clear immediate danger to the United States. It is arrogant, ignorant and insulting to take an attitude that says the United States has the right to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to the rest of the world, thereby affecting the lives of millions of people all over the globe without any input from the rest of the world.
The United States likes to talk about "Rogue States" that do not follow international law and do not participate in the global community. But the United States is a Rogue State; in fact it is probably the number one Rogue State in the world. America earns the title by ignoring international law, human rights laws, global governing bodies or anything else it doesn’t like any time it wants in the name of "national interests."
Saying that our actions should pass the global test is not bad or wrong - it's dead right. That does not mean that our actions should all be rubber stamped and approved by some international governing body. It does say however that we should involve the rest of the world in decisions that affect the whole world, earn their support, work multilaterally, honor international and human rights laws, and operate within the framework of a global reality, instead of operating as a rogue and reckless state.
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