Quentin Peel: America’s poor choice of friends

Hell has no fury like a dictator scorned. The thought must have occurred to the White House late last month when Islam Karimov, the corrupt and autocratic ruler of Uzbekistan, abruptly announced he was closing the US air base in his country.

It cannot have come as a complete surprise. For several weeks the state-controlled media in Tashkent had whipped up anti-American stories. Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, rushed to neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to make sure they would not follow suit and close the bases on their territory for the US military campaign in Afghanistan. He was reassured.

Yet the Uzbek saga provides a clear example of the perils of Washington’s split personality in foreign policy, and the double standards it continues to pursue with both enemies and allies in the so-called “war on terror”.

In spite of an atrocious record of disdain for democracy, human rights and free speech, Mr Karimov had been reassured ever since September 11 2001 that he remained an indispensable ally in the fight against Islamist extremism. The state department issued occasional rude reports on human rights abuses but the Pentagon gave generous finance and training. Only when the Uzbek security forces killed several hundred civilian demonstrators in Andijan did the US Washington really remonstrate. Closing the air base was Mr Karimov’s revenge.

It certainly proves that relying on dictators is bad policy. Yet the US faces a dilemma throughout the region. There are no nice democracies. Does Washington seek to foment more regime changes, along the lines of the Orange revolution in Ukraine, or the Tulip version in Kyrgyzstan, and risk far greater instability, or does it learn to live with the devils it knows? In both Kazakhstan, on Mr Karimov’s northern border, and in Azerbaijan, on the other side of the Caspian Sea, two oil-rich countries have undemocratic rulers trying to resist reform. The US cannot quite decide which side it is on.

Tolerating friendly dictators had its place in the cold war. The habit dies hard. Yet according to an excellent new collection of essays on American exceptionalism*, having double standards is hard-wired into US foreign policy. It is a consequence of the “messianic” tradition of seeking to export American values, such as democracy, while still seeking to pick allies.

It is not just a matter of having double standards for others – such as the willingness to forgive India, Israel and Pakistan for having nuclear weapons while demonising Iran and North Korea. It includes promoting international norms and standards of behaviour that the US is not itself prepared to observe. That is the essence of US exceptionalism. And the trouble is that it undermines the whole campaign to export US values that is at the heart of this Bush administration.

Michael Ignatieff, professor of human rights practice at Harvard University and editor of the book, seeks to distinguish between US “exemptionalism”, double standards and legal isolationism. The first consists of negotiating treaties that the US then opts out of, fails to ratify, or hedges around with US-specific reservations. John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, is an arch exponent, having campaigned most furiously against US adherence to the International Criminal Court.

The second includes criticising others for ignoring the reports of UN rights bodies, while refusing to accept criticism of its own performance: for example on conditions of detention in US prisons. It also includes condemning abuses by the likes of Iran and North Korea, while excusing comparable behaviour in Israel, Egypt, Morocco or indeed Uzbekistan.

As for legal isolationism, that concerns the attitude of US courts towards the jurisprudence of other liberal democracies, and the refusal to use foreign human rights precedents to guide them in domestic opinions.

Harold Koh, professor of international law at Yale, is most concerned about the negative consequences of double standards. He argues that US exceptionalism has good and bad faces. In Afghanistan, the Korean peninsula and in the Middle East peace process, the US cannot afford to disengage, he argues. But when it intervenes militarily, it tends to destabilise. Passivity, as in the lack of engagement by President George W. Bush in Israel during his first term, has the same effect.

With the war in Iraq, he argues, American exceptionalism has reached a new watershed. The emerging Bush doctrine “makes double standards – the most virulent strain of American exceptionalism – not just the exception, but the rule”. It reflects, in part, an Achilles complex after 9/11, combining a sense of exceptional power with exceptional vulnerability, and a certainty that American values are good and universal.

The strain in the world today is that America has become more exceptionalist just as global rules (on trade, the environment and human rights) become more intrusive. A solitary superpower that seeks to ignore the rules that govern the rest will earn few allies.

* American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, edited by Michael Ignatieff (Princeton University Press)

quentin.peel@ft.com