In praise of mild hypocrisy in foreign policy

The Economist’s Global Agenda has a story about negotiations over UN reform. It appears the U.S. would like to make some changes:

If there was still any question that America is taking a new line with the United Nations, the answer now seems clear. Next month, 175 world leaders will gather in New York to consider a raft of reforms for the world body. But just weeks before the summit is to begin, America has asked for extensive changes to the draft ?outcome document? that many other negotiators felt was almost finished. Many detect the hand of John Bolton, America?s controversial new ambassador to the UN, who offered the proposed changes on Wednesday August 24th. But Mr Bolton is probably more symptom than cause?George Bush sent him to the UN as a signal that business-as-usual would no longer be acceptable. There is talk of crisis in many of the media reports about America?s proposed changes. The Washington Post reported that 750 such edits had been made to the draft ?outcome document?. In truth, the majority of these are nitpicking wording changes that have little effect on the content. But some of them would change the declaration considerably, particularly regarding development efforts and intervention to stop human-rights catastrophes…. The superpower?s critics note that it has once again lined up with a rogue’s gallery of badly behaved states to oppose a human-rights agreement: in this case Pakistan, Egypt, Cuba, Iran and Syria. But even the vaguer American version of “responsibility to protect” would be the first-ever clear international agreement that outside countries should be willing to act to stop atrocities in a country whose government cannot or will not stop them itself. This could form the political basis for a future intervention, possibly even military intervention, should the Security Council be presented with, say, Darfur or its successors. So the atmosphere is not as bad as some of the more breathless talk of crisis indicates. Nonetheless, America has annoyed many with some seemingly needless niggling points?cutting ?respect for nature? from a legally meaningless laundry-list of the world?s basic values, for example. Critics say that the deletion is emblematic: America is taking an overly lawyerly approach to a non-binding political document on which all have made compromises. An American spokesman responds that ?mumbo-jumbo? does no one any good, and that America may support a shorter statement instead of the current 36-page draft. Time is now limited. A document must be substantially complete before national leaders show up on September 14th, and there remains procedural wrangling about which countries (approximately 30) should be in a core group negotiating these last-minute changes. Diplomats are firing up their coffee pots, preparing to work through nights and weekends. It will be a long and harrowing two weeks. But everyone agrees that the UN needs reform. Failure to achieve consensus in September would be a sadly wasted opportunity for all concerned.

Read the whole thing to see the substantive points of difference. Here’s the thing that bothers me: the Bush administration can make a credible case for many of the substantive changes. By throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, however, and by doing so at such a late hour in the negotiations, the U.S. winds up alienating more countries than it needs to. This is one of those examples where good diplomacy can grease the wheels to advance U.S. interests — and instrad there’s going to be trouble. Part of the problem, ironically, is that the Bush administration takes these international agreements way too seriously. Early in the administration many commentators praised the Bushies for being forthright about rejecting agreements they had no intention of honoring. There’s such a thing as going too far in the rejection of hypocrisy, however. Think of small hypocrisies as the international equivalent of pork-barrel politics. Sometimes you agree to an empty platitude in return for tangible progress on some issue. The danger for any administration is that the platitude takes on a life of its own. This happens, however, less frequently than the administration thinks it does. UPDATE: David A. Schwartz has a piece in the Weekly Standard explaining why the existing reform proposal falls short of the mark. Schwartz was a member of the 2001 U.S. delegation to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, so he’s worth reading on this point. [On the other hand, the 2001 delegation did not cover itself with glory — the U.S. lost its seat on the commission, while China, Sudan, Syria and Cuba were elected.–ed.]