To help obtain the result it wanted, the US appears to have paid for delegates to attend the "special session" of the OPCW it convened. Micronesia said it couldn't come, but that the US delegation could vote on its behalf (another illegal move). On Sunday the US claimed that Bustani himself had offered to resolve the situation by exchanging his deputy for an American. Yesterday, it was forced to admit that this claim was false.
This month's attempts to damage international law follow America's unilateral abandonment of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, its successful sabotage of the Biological Weapons Convention and its rejection of the Kyoto protocol on climate change; the UN treaty on gun running; and the international criminal court. America is pulling away from the rest of the world, and dragging our treaties down as it goes. Given that it is in danger of alienating the very nations from whose allegiance it claims to draw its global authority, why is the US going to such lengths to destroy international cooperation? I think there may be several, overlapping reasons.
The first and most obvious is that there's no point in possessing brute strength if you are not prepared to be brutal. The US establishes its power by asserting it. Other nations are kept in a constant state of apprehension about what it might do next, which helps to ensure that they step back from confrontation.
This month's attempts to damage international law follow America's unilateral abandonment of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, its successful sabotage of the Biological Weapons Convention and its rejection of the Kyoto protocol on climate change; the UN treaty on gun running; and the international criminal court. America is pulling away from the rest of the world, and dragging our treaties down as it goes. Given that it is in danger of alienating the very nations from whose allegiance it claims to draw its global authority, why is the US going to such lengths to destroy international cooperation? I think there may be several, overlapping reasons.
The first and most obvious is that there's no point in possessing brute strength if you are not prepared to be brutal. The US establishes its power by asserting it. Other nations are kept in a constant state of apprehension about what it might do next, which helps to ensure that they step back from confrontation.