Republicans have been doing a lot of snarling against the United Nations in the past year. And Republican congressional leaders are promising to translate this mood into legislation over the next few months. Some of the energy on these issues reflects legitimate concerns. A lot of it surely is motivated, too, by political calculations in an election year. Even when it comes to campaign tactics, though, it would be nice if Republicans remembered that their candidate will reach the White House only by defeating Bill Clinton, not Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The Republican penchant for running against the U. N. secretary general threatens to make serious issues look entirely silly.
Take the case of Army Specialist Michael New, who was court-martialed and discharged from the military at the end of January. New had refused to wear U. N. insignia and a U. N. beret when his unit was deployed to a U. N. peace- keeping force. The army found him guilty of insubordinate conduct. Within 24 hours, 15 congressmen (almost all Republicans) sponsored a resolution insisting that the army had no authority to require troops to wear U. N. insignia and accordingly condemning New’s court-martial conviction as ” groundles” In the Senate, there were demands for speedy action on a bill — cosponsored by Majority Leader Bob Dole and Majority Whip Trent Lott, with some two dozen others (all Republicans) — protecting members of the armed forces from any order to wear U. N. insignia.
The underlying issue here is far from frivolous. Can the president place American forces under U. N. field command, as Clinton has done in Macedonia? Can resolutions of the Security Council authorize deployment of U. S. troops to war zones without direct authorization from the Congress, as has happened now in Bosnia, and earlier in Somalia and Haiti? These are very serious questions.
Congress tried to address them in a set of restrictions on U. N. commitments included in the defense appropriations bill, which President Clinton vetoed in December. The debate deserves to be reopened. Carping about shoulder patches or hat styles is not a serious way to do that. And it is hard to believe Republicans want these issues to be raised by encouraging civil disobedience in the ranks of the American military.
But striking at empty symbols has become a reflex among Republican leaders. At the same time they were waving the flag on behalf of Michael New, congressional leaders launched an absurd overreaction to the suggestion of the U. N. secretary general that the United Nations might seek to remedy its chronic budget crisis with a tax on international air travel. Notions of this kind have been kicking around for a long time. And Boutros-Ghali merely mentioned the possibility in passing, in the context of a lengthy interview with the BBC. Only the Washington Times picked up the story in the United States, but its initial coverage, in the last week of January, was enough to provoke a mini-tempest in Washington. Sen. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, promised hearings. Sen. Dole promised a new bill and indeed introduced the bill within less than a week.
Dole’s bill would cut off all U. S. funding to the U. N. if it tries to impose a tax or fee on U. S. citizens, tries to borrow money from international institutions like the World Bank, or so much as engages in “any effort to develop, advocate, promote, or publicize any proposal concerning taxation or fees” on U. S. persons. But the U. N. has no authority to impose taxes and no way of granting itself such authority. The IMF and World Bank have already disavowed the authority to make loans to the U. N. and, given the weighted voting in these bodies, will not change their position without U. S. concurrence. And the Clinton administration itself has announced its opposition to such initiatives. Nor can the U. N. force the United States to collect any taxes on its behalf.
On the other hand, if other countries want to tax foreign airline traffc passing through their airports, the United States has no easy way of stopping them from doing so, whatever the U. N. says or does not say. Nor can the United States stop other countries from making additional contributions to the U. N., whether from such “international” taxes or from more traditional revenue sources. But such contributions will never make the U. N. free of dependence on American contributions, which are still much in arrears from past withholding.
The Clinton administration has been pressing for fiscal and managerial reforms within the chronically spendthrift international organization. Perhaps the administration has not pressed its concerns as vigorously as it might; certainly it has done so less effectively than one might have hoped. What do congressional Republicans want in the way of reform? A tantrum over the figment of international taxing authority does not do much to clarify the stakes.
More serious and more disturbing than this huffing fit is Dole’s warning shot against the new World Trade Organization. The WTO was established last year to oversee the implementation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. A system of reciprocal commitments created in 1947 at U. S. instigation and elaborated through successive “rounds of negotiations among most of the world’s trading nations, GATT has been the central instrument for lowering barriers to international trade. The WTO for the first time provides a dispute-settlement body to judge complaints that particular nations are violating the rules. Dole’s bill would establish a commission of federal judges to review any decision of the WTO that goes against the United States and issue a formal report on whether that decision was truly in accord with the international trade norms agreed to by the United States. If the commission issued three critical reports within five years, Congress would automatically take up a resolution to force American withdrawal from the WTO.
Dole announced his intention to put through this plan during the lame duck session of December 1994. The Clinton administration endorsed the proposal as a way to buy support for the GATT agreement establishing the WTO, which required congressional approval. While the new Congress was preoccupied with the Republican Contract and then with protracted budget battles, the Dole bill was left on the sidelines. Interest in the bill picked up again at the beginning of 1996, however, when the WTO issued its first ruling on a formal dispute — a challenge to a U. S. environmental law brought by Venezuela, in which the WTO sided with Venezuela. Dole says his bill is now more urgent than ever as a means of “protecting U. S. sovereignty.”
The argument is hard to swallow. The ultimate sanction behind WTO rulings is for the complaining party to impose trade restrictions on the perpetrator. The WTO simply holds that such retaliation is warranted and suggests its proper scale and character. In the recent case, for example, Venezuela (which had complained about an American measure imposing higher purity standards on imported than on domestic gasoline) might impose an equivalent restriction on imports from the United States. But Venezuela could do this with or without a WTO ruling, and with or without a GATT framework. The hope is that a formal dispute-settlement mechanism will limit the occasions for such tit-for-tat trade friction. As WTO member states agree to swallow their disappointment at a particular unfavorable ruling in the expectation that the next ruling may be more favorable, it is hoped that the WTO will come to be seen as impartial and will win general confidence.
The United States was one of the strongest advocates of this system in the negotiations that led to the establishment of the WTO. And for a very good reason: As the world’s largest trading nation, we were most often in the position of finding fault with trade restrictions imposed by other nations. If the WTO turns out to be systematically slighting of American concerns (an unlikely development, given the central importance of the United States in world trade), we can withdraw from the organization whenever we wish to do so. But that assumes that we would prefer a trading system with no umpire to one with a less than perfect umpire.
The practical effect of the Dole bill would be to advertise our threat to withdraw if WTO rulings are not to our liking and to give Congress the confidence to make good on this threat. But it is hard to see what is gained by associating a panel of federal judges with this bluster. On the one hand, other countries are unlikely to be impressed with the legitimacy of American complaints just because they are endorsed by American judges. On the other hand, when the judges are told that their evaluation may trigger American withdrawal from the WTO, they may be extremely skittish about offering negative evaluations. The Congress (and the U. S. trade representative) may, in turn, be made more reluctant to challenge WTO polices when the challenge is not endorsed by this judicial monitoring commission. But why should trade policy hinge on the advice of unelected judges with no particular background in trade policy? The real point seems to be to prove — to ourselves? — that while we have agreed to give the WTO’s dispute-settling system a chance, we don’t intend to trust it.
Yet, as in the matters of Michael New and of Boutros-Ghali’s U. N. tax, there is a serious issue here. The WTO not only has machinery for settling individual disputes. It also is empowered to amend trade rules, replacing provisions negotiated as part of the comprehensive compromise packages in successive GATT rounds over the past 50 years. The Clinton administration has urged that the WTO try to promulgate worker-protection standards, so that in the future importing nations could retaliate against exporting countries for their substandard wages or unfair treatment of workers. This move has the potential to do a great deal of mischief, as do similar demands to enforce environmental standards through trading rules. Some Republicans have urged that the president be granted fast-track negotiating authority on future trade deals only on condition that they not include labor or environmental side issues, but Dole’s current position is that no such negotiating authority should be granted at all until after the 1996 elections. This is flirting with protectionism, more than it is laying the basis for any clarification of trade policy.
In the end, the issue always turns out to be not whether we trust some international body but whether we trust our own president. That isn’t a frivolous question, either, especially with a president who seems attracted to a dreamy sort of globalism. But the importance of the stakes only underscores the point: Congressional Republicans need to focus on what American policies they want to secure, not on what international bogeymen they want to flay. The serious debate, as always, is at home. And a presidential election year is a good time for Sen. Dole and others to try seriously to engage that debate.
Jeremy Rabkin teaches government at Cornell University.
