QUITO, Ecuador -- Give it to the members of Bush's foreign-policy team: They certainly aren't loafers. While American citizens spent the days leading up to July 4 stocking up on burgers and bottle rockets, the Bush administration was hard at work offending 35 of our remaining military allies and removing any annoying last traces of international credibility we might still have had. On July 1, the White House unexpectedly announced that it would be immediately cutting off all military aid to certain countries unless their leaders signed bilateral agreements guaranteeing the total immunity of all Americans (military and civilian) before the International Criminal Court (ICC). This bald-faced threat does not, of course, apply to our NATO allies (none of whom signed such agreements) or to other major aid recipients such as Japan, Israel, Jordan and Egypt. Besides a handful of African and ex-communist nations, the list of countries that do have to comply reads like an atlas of Central and South America: Belize, Ecuador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, Peru and Colombia, to name a few. What these countries have in common are long-standing military alliances and cooperation agreements with the United States, large foreign debts and related economic problems, and, perhaps most importantly, no effective regional association such as the European Union or the Arab League with which to formulate a common response to American bullying. Obviously the Bush team was picking its targets.
This is a new front in Bush's battle to sink the ICC, whose development has, despite American obstruction, continued apace: The court now has some 90 member states, and about 50 other nations have become signatories to the Rome Statute (the ICC's founding document), though have not ratified it. The ICC also boasts a recently appointed chief prosecutor and a panel of 18 judges (including seven women). The court's mandate -- to provide a permanent tribunal for prosecution of war criminals and perpetrators of genocide, and to counter the immunity they all too frequently enjoy in their home countries -- has found widespread support around the globe. Its rapid evolution from idea to reality is almost certainly the result of the international community's horror at the atrocities of the 1990s (Rwanda, Kosovo) and a collective frustration with the inability of ad hoc tribunals and existing extradition mechanisms to deal with them. For internationalists, it is one of the most exciting and promising efforts of the last 50 years.
Alas, an internationalist our president is not. Bush has consistently opposed the creation of the court, withdrawing America's signature from the Rome Statute in May 2002 on the grounds that American military personnel and citizens might be wrongfully prosecuted while on peacekeeping missions. In fact, the Clinton administration had harbored similar misgivings, and, in exchange for America's signature, successfully bargained for the inclusion of a clause -- Article 98 -- stating that the court could not force member states to break international agreements they had made. Bush's decision to withdraw that signature should have been enough to protect us from the ICC; it certainly means that the United States will never hand over its citizens to the court or allow it to scrutinize a domestic trial. But the Bush administration, unsatisfied, has made it a policy priority to obtain "Article 98 agreements" with as many countries as possible. In these agreements, countries recognize the immunity of all Americans and agree, in the case of an ICC investigation or trial of Americans, not to hand them over to the court or cooperate with its efforts.
Whatever one's feelings about the ICC, it's hard not to characterize the Article 98 campaign as unrealistic and excessive. Why would a country that has ratified the Rome Statute, submitting its own citizens, military and judicial system to the court's jurisdiction (on the supposition that all other member states would similarly acknowledge that jurisdiction), grant blanket immunity to the citizens and soldiers of another country? The official White House rhetoric is that we respect other countries' rights to join the court, and that the Article 98 agreements are a way for countries to recognize our right not to join. In reality, though, signing the agreements explicitly compromises member states' commitments to the court, making them accomplices in the U.S. effort to undermine the ICC's authority. After all, what kind of international court has jurisdiction over the citizens of every country except one? Of course, the ICC is not likely to ever exercise de facto jurisdiction over Americans, given our lack of cooperation. But the Article 98 campaign is designed to legally codify America's status as an exception to international norms. Even if you believe that such status is somehow our birthright, you can't really blame other countries for not seeing it that way. A little persuasion, then, is in order, and as we have come to expect from the Bush team, that means more brandishing of sticks than tendering of carrots.
But like so many of Bush's foreign-policy forays, this one has proved fabulously unsuccessful. So far the only country to sign an agreement in response to the administration's July 1 ultimatum is Botswana. All of South America has refused, though with differing degrees of finality. Colombia, the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, at about $150 million a year, was cagey, with President Alvaro Uribe saying that a "dialogue" over the issue would continue. Brazil shrugged the whole affair off rather coolly, with the government explaining that U.S. military aid was "not significant" and that it had no intention of signing such an agreement. The Peruvian government called the measure a "reprisal." Here in Quito, the government's reaction to the American request has been a reserved but firm "no," with the chairman of Ecuador's congressional foreign-affairs committee, Carlos Vallejo, arguing that the country should rescind its lease of the Manta military base, near the Colombian border, to U.S. armed forces.
To Ecuadorians, those are fighting words: The Manta base has been a controversial issue since the United States began occupying the facility in 1999. The accords authorizing our use of the base were never approved by Ecuador's congress; all U.S. personnel and residents on the base -- including 64 civilian employees of the logistics firm DynCorp -- are granted diplomatic immunity in Ecuador, even when off-base. And though the United States pays neither rent for the use of the facility nor a penny in Ecuadorian taxes, the security and maintenance costs of the base are Ecuador's responsibility. Three successive governments have endured the public unpopularity of these conditions, partly because of the amount of American aid, military and otherwise, that the country receives and partly because of emphatic arguments made by the U.S. military and anti-narcotics forces as to the importance of the base. "It's the only site," Gen. Charles Wilhelm, chief of the U.S. Army's Southern command, told the Ecuadorian newspaper El Hoy shortly after the first accord was signed, "that will give us the operational reach we need to cover all of Colombia, all of Peru and the coca cultivation areas of Bolivia."
That is what is so surreal about the White House's ultimatum, at least from the perspective of the Andean countries: The United States has gone to such lengths over the last 10 years -- often overriding local popular opposition -- to aid and build up the armed forces of these countries. The region, with Colombia at its center, has received more than a billion dollars in direct military aid in an attempt to fight cocaine production and the growth of paramilitary, anti-government groups -- chief among them being the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, aka FARC. Many conservatives and hard-liners see our military alliances and deepening ties of cooperation with Latin American governments as victories for U.S. foreign policy in the region and the global war on narcotics. And even someone as wary of U.S. military involvement in Latin America as myself can concede that the region's armed forces could stand to learn a thing or two from ours (civilian rule, for example, or independent auditing of expenditures). Why choose a sanction that so clearly goes against even the American right's narrowly conceived notion of our national interest?
The State Department, in any event, realized the contradiction and was at pains to explain that anti-narcotics efforts would not be affected. Because much of our military activity in the region is aimed at fighting cocaine production, it wasn't clear which programs were really being cut, and when reporters asked for details, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher hemmed and hawed. "There are still some authorities in this law to exercise specific waivers for specific programs," he said. "So, you know, speculating on what kind of program we'll have next year, how much of that money might be affected, if there are aspects of the program we might want to waive, I think it's a little too early to do that now, particularly given that we continue to pursue with Colombia and others agreements under Article 98." Indeed, the 2002 American Servicemembers' Protection Act -- in addition to authorizing the use of "all means necessary" to liberate Americans being held before the court -- handed over to the president the power to decide on a case-by-case basis which aid programs in which countries are subject to cancellation over the Article 98 issue.
One would hope that the president would at least use this unprecedented power over which countries the United States chooses to support with some degree of savvy. But the July 1 announcement was neither diplomatic nor effective. Here, where the issue was front-page news all week, it has generated little more than ill will and hostility. Vallejo (of Ecuador's congressional foreign-affairs committee) spoke for many when he said, according to the Ecuadorian newspaper La Hora, "Ecuador, no matter how small, should not kneel down. Threatening to withdraw military aid doesn't really affect us, since [aid levels] are minimal, but it is a moral offense to the Ecuadorian people." The Latin American Association for Human Rights went further, issuing a public statement arguing, also according to La Hora, that the U.S. position "indicates the North American conviction that its military, its citizens, and its actions are beyond good and bad; that whatever they do, nobody on planet Earth can judge them." The Brazilian newspaper O Globo editorialized that "the hegemonic mind frame now determines, unabashedly, the US's relation to the rest of the world."
Neocons may characterize this kind of language as the typical griping of the weak and the unwilling, but it bears reflecting on just what it would be like for one of these countries to accede to our demands. Given that they have already signed and ratified the ICC treaty, with its implication of non-immunity for citizens of all nations (including their own), an Article 98 agreement could only be seen as a spineless acceptance of blackmail (and particularly cheap blackmail at that -- most of these countries only stand to lose about $2 million).
In a way, though, the Bush administration has matured. Its freshman-year tantrum over the Kyoto Protocol and its sophomoric performance at the United Nations leading up to our invasion of Iraq have given way to a more confident, upperclassman-style hazing of its weaker, smaller brothers. Humiliating our own allies may seem counterproductive (not to mention just plain surly), but it fits into a larger strategy for remaking the way the United States relates to the rest of the world. The Article 98 campaign reinforces the Bush administration's ever-clearer expectation that countries -- even friendly, cooperative countries -- will do what we want not because we have convinced them with sincere argument nor because our interests coincide but simply because they dare not oppose us. Latin America's rejection of the administration's Article 98 demands may prove that the continent has yet to relinquish its freedom and dignity, but the whole affair sheds a little more light on just what kind of world the neocons are intent on building.
Benjamin Lessing is a writer based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
