Abstract

'Soft Multilateralism'

This article discusses the so called policy soft multilateralism in regards to the United States. The hawks around George W. Bush believed the United States had been in a slow decline for at least thirty years. Their remedy called for the United States to flex its considerable military muscle, abandon all pretense of multilateral consultations with hesitant and weak allies, and proceed to intimidate both friends and enemies alike. For the past thirty years, every administration, from Nixon to Clinton, including Reagan and Bush's father, pursued the same basic strategy, a policy I call "soft multilateralism." First, when the United States found it was no longer economically dominant but had become merely one part of a so-called triad (the United States, Western Europe and Japan/East Asia), each more or less competitive with the others, it had to change the way it handled these allies. So did South Africa, whose apartheid government generously abandoned the program just before turning over power to the African National Congress When Brazil's generals looked as though they would proceed with a nuclear program (with Argentina just behind), the United States suddenly became in favor of democracy. The financial crisis in 1997 in Southeast and East Asia, followed by those in Russia and Brazil, tarnished the sheen of globalization and brought to power a series of leaders who represented a harder line toward the United States: Roh Moo Hyun in Korea, Megawati Sukarnoputri in Indonesia, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Luiz In& aacute; cio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Néstor Kirchner in Argentina Saddam Hussein had survived the Gulf War and remained a lump in the craw of the United States and a continuing symbol of defiance for others in the Arab world.