Bush administration's internationalist credentials.(Insider Report)

In "Partnership and Principle," the major essay in the January/February 2004 Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Colin Powell outlines the Bush administration's various multilateral initiatives. Writing to an internationalist audience (Foreign Affairs is the flagship journal of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations), Powell emphatically rejects the familiar caricature of President Bush as a unilateralist cowboy.

"Above all, the president's strategy is one of partnerships that strongly affirms the vital role of NATO and other U.S. alliances--including the UN," writes Secretary Powell. "Don't believe it? Perhaps this is because the commentariat widely claimed that the president's recent decision to seek a new UN Security Council resolution on the postwar reconstruction of Iraq was a sharp break with policy."

In fact, as Powell elaborates, the Bush administration's foreign policy--particularly with respect to the "war on terrorism"--is deeply intertwined with the UN:

 
   To think [otherwise], one would have to 
   ignore the fact that President Bush went 
   before the UN on September 12, 2002, to 
   make his case for the UN's enforcing its 
   own resolutions (16 of them in total); that 
   Security Council Resolution 1441--which 
   warned the Iraqi regime to comply 
   with its own obligations under previous 
   UN resolutions--passed unanimously 
   in November 2002; that we tried for a further 
   resolution to unite the international community in the months 
   before ...