The first question is, what’s in the best interests of the United States? What’s in the best interests of our people? When it comes to foreign policy that’ll be my guiding question. Is it in our nation’s interests?
George W. Bush, Second Presidential Debate, Wake Forest University, 11 October 2000
Ethics, the national interest, and the leader’s role
Bush’s frank statement of his commitment to the national interest came in response to a question that Jim Lehrer, moderator of the 2000 presidential debates, put to both candidates, asking them about their guiding principles for exercising the enormous power that one of them would shortly be wielding as leader of the most powerful nation in the world. Vice-President Gore said that ‘America’s real power comes, I think, from our values’ and urged that America must stand up for human rights at home, in order to set an example to the rest of the world. His answer, although a little equivocal, gestured towards universal values like human rights that look beyond the borders of his own country. Bush’s characteristically more direct appeal to national self-interest put the two candidates on opposite sides of a deep ethical divide. When a nation’s interests are in conflict with the interests of the people of the world as a whole, to what extent should national leaders make decisions on the basis of what is in the interests of the nations over which they rule, and to what extent should they take into account the interests of the rest of the world? How much of an obligation does a leader have to ensure that his nation acts as a good global citizen, rather than as a country concerned only to protect its own interests?
When we consider individuals, rather than nations, there is no doubt about what is right for each individual to do. Consider a situation that resembles the global problem of greenhouse gas emissions, but at the level of individuals. Our cars used to run on fuel containing lead, which was hazardous for everyone’s health, especially for children. It is now illegal to sell leaded fuel in the United States. Suppose that someone we call John supports this policy, because he is concerned about the health of his own young children. But he also likes the better performance his car gives when it runs on leaded fuel. His car is the biggest in town, and he drives a lot, using more fuel than anyone else in town. John lives near the border of a country that still sells leaded fuel. Every week, he drives across the border and fills his tank. There is nothing illegal about this, but John is pleased that very few others in the town where he lives do the same. (Those who do are mostly much poorer than John, and buy their fuel across the border only because they can’t afford the higher gas prices in their own town. They drive cars with very small engines that put much less lead into the atmosphere than John’s car does.) As John drives around his town, enjoying the increased responsiveness of his large engine, he knows that his car is putting lead into the air, but he also knows that, since so few others in town use leaded fuel, the lead that his own car emits is not going to create dangerous levels of lead in the area in which he and his children live.
Is John acting ethically? He has no special reason for needing a better performing car, he just likes the feel of driving one. Others in the community also regret the loss of performance that unleaded fuel has brought, and they too could fill their tanks with leaded fuel on the other side of the border, but they think about the interests of the community as a whole, and they run their cars on unleaded gas. In these circumstances, John’s choice is selfish and unfair.
If John is selfish, unfair, and doing the wrong thing, does that also mean that a country that acts like John, obtaining advantages for itself and its own citizens while gaining the benefit of the restraint of others, is being selfish, unfair, and doing the wrong thing? And does it mean that the leader of that country is also acting wrongly? So-called ‘realists’ in international relations answer these questions in the negative. Realists believe that morality works only within a community that has some common values, a source of authority, and a means of enforcing laws. Between nations, as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes pointed out in the seventeenth century, the ‘state of nature’ still prevails: there is no community, no authority, and no enforceable law. Hence neither nations nor their leaders can be judged by the standards we apply to individuals.
Bush’s choice of Condoleezza Rice as his foreign policy adviser during the campaign and as his national security adviser after the election made many people assume that he was a realist. Rice attacked the Clinton administration for confusing foreign policy and morality, and promised, as a realist would, to ‘refocus the United States on the national interest and the pursuit of key priorities’.187 Bush’s answer to Jim Lehrer about what he would do if elected president reinforced this assumption, for it certainly sounded like a realist’s answer. At least since September 11, 2001, however, it has become obvious that Bush is not a realist. He has consistently painted the international scene in moral terms. His ‘axis of evil’ speech is merely the best known of many examples. Not only in his speeches on Iraq and Saddam Hussein, but also when speaking about foreign aid, free trade, and the Kyoto Protocol, Bush puts his views in moral language. His moralism is the polar opposite of the realist approach.
If we are working within a moral, rather than a realist, framework, we have to come back to the question posed above: if something would be wrong when done by an individual, is it also wrong when done by a national leader? One way of answering that question in the negative is to say that the role of a national leader carries specific duties. Just as parents are expected to provide for their own children, rather than for the children of strangers, so too in accepting the office of President of the United States, George W. Bush has taken on a specific role that makes it his duty to protect and further the interests of Americans. Other countries have their leaders, with similar roles relating to the interests of their fellow citizens. For example, the Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, has defended his government’s determination to advance Australia’s national interests by arguing ‘if we don’t, no one else will’.188 In the absence of a global community, we must have nation-states, and the leaders of those nation-states must give preference to the interests of their citizens.
There is some merit to this argument. If you are sick and in hospital, the philosopher Robert Goodin argues, it is best to have a particular doctor made responsible for your care, rather than leaving it up to all the hospital doctors in general; so too, he says, it is best to have one state that is clearly responsible for protecting and promoting the interests of every individual within its territory.189 An American government that devoted more resources to building schools in Mexico than it did to building schools in America might be accused of neglecting its responsibilities to its own citizens. Specific duties assigned by roles may be justified on the grounds that a system of roles with corresponding duties provides a better framework for achieving the results we want, whether it is a safe and nurturing environment in which children can grow up, or good government that protects the well-being of citizens. A father who takes his children to the local playground is not, however, entitled to push his children ahead of others who have been waiting to use the swing. The chief executive of a corporation has a duty to make profits for shareholders, but that does not mean that he is entitled to engage in dishonest business practices in order to do so. Something similar holds for national leaders. The duties of a role do not trump the obligation to consider the interests of others, and to deal fairly with them. Today, especially, it is important for nations to be good global citizens, and governments must balance that obligation with concern for the interests of the nation they govern. How do Bush’s ethics hold up by this standard when it comes to a range of issues that reach beyond America’s borders, issues like foreign aid, free trade, the International Criminal Court, and global warming?
Aiding others
If doing what is in the interests of the United States and its citizens is Bush’s declared guiding principle in foreign policy, there is one field in which he appears to have violated that principle by acting in a manner that is more compassionate and more ethical than a commitment to national self-interest would suggest. That field is foreign aid, or the extent to which wealthy nations like America should assist the world’s poorest people to feed themselves and their families, to educate their children, to have at least a minimum of health care, and generally to be able to improve their way of life.
The first significant Bush initiative on foreign aid came in March 2002, during the buildup to a United Nations Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey, Mexico. Bush spoke movingly about the need to do something about the fact that nearly half the world’s people live on less than $2 a day. He talked about Malawi, where life expectancy has fallen to only thirty-eight years, about Sierra Leone, where nearly one-third of babies die before the age of five, and about Sudan, where only half the children attend school. Though he linked poverty and the despair that it causes to terrorism, thus suggesting that it was in America’s interests to help people rise out of poverty, he also said that the growing divide between the wealthy and the poor is ‘a challenge to our compassion’, and that working for prosperity and opportunity is ‘the right thing to do’.
Most importantly—and in contrast to his similar language about creating a land of justice and opportunity within the United States—Bush was prepared to put additional resources behind these words, above those that had been allocated to foreign aid in recent years. He announced that the United States would increase its development assistance by $5 billion over three years, leading to, at the end of that period, a substantial 50 per cent annual increase over current levels. In order to make this additional money as effective as possible in overcoming poverty, it is to go into a new ‘Millennium Challenge Account’ reserved for projects in countries with governments that satisfy certain eligibility requirements: they must, in Bush’s words, ‘govern justly, invest in their people and encourage economic freedom’. This means rooting out corruption, respecting human rights, and adhering to the rule of law, as well as allowing markets to operate freely. The idea behind the Millennium Challenge Account is to forge a ‘Compact for Development’ with those countries that are developing sound policies.‘When aid is linked to good policy,’ Bush said, ‘four times as many people are lifted out of poverty compared to old aid practices.’ The United States will show that it stands ready to help, if the governments of the developing nations will do their part to remove internal obstacles that keep their people in poverty. Once established, the compact would serve as an example to other nations, showing them that the path of reform will bring rewards.
Separately from the Millennium Challenge Account, Bush has also made a substantial commitment to the global struggle against AIDS. It took some time for him to become involved with this struggle. At an AIDS conference in Nigeria in April 2001, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan outlined the size and urgency of the AIDS catastrophe that is overwhelming Africa and other parts of the world. By that date, seventeen million people had already died from the disease in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and worldwide, thirty-six million were infected with the virus that leads to the disease. Annan called for a multi-million-dollar global fund to fight AIDS, saying that $7 billion to $10 billion was needed every year to reverse the spread of the disease. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose foundation has pledged $126 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, challenged world leaders, starting with Bush, to make ‘new and unprecedented financial commitments’ to the fight against AIDS.190 Nine months later, however, the Bush administration had made only a very modest commitment to the global AIDS fund—$200 million for 2002, and the same amount for the following year.191 The fund was languishing, and its advocates were blaming America for setting such a poor example. Leading conservative Republican senators Bill Frist and Jesse Helms announced that they were planning legislation that would authorise an increase of $500 million in US funds, aimed especially at preventing transmission of the AIDS virus from mothers to their children. Frist, a surgeon who had been to Africa to care for AIDS patients, also put forward a bipartisan bill with Democrat senator John Kerry urging the allocation of $4 billion over two years for the fight against AIDS, but the Senate rejected this proposal.192 In June 2002 Bush announced his own $500 million initiative, but advocates for AIDS victims pointed out that this sum, to be spent over two years, was still far less than was needed, and also fell short of what other developed nations were putting into the global fund, relative to the size of their economies.193
Bush’s thinking on what he ought to do about AIDS may have begun to change in December 2002 when Frist became Senate majority leader. Now, as one of the two most powerful members of Congress, he was in a position to do something about the victims of AIDS. A month later Bush surprised even well-informed AIDS activists when, during his 2003 State of the Union Address, he turned from terrorism and the threat posed by Iraq to the plight of the thirty million Africans, including three million children under fifteen, infected by the AIDS virus. Bush pointed out that AIDS can be prevented, and that the cost of the drugs needed to extend life for many years had dropped from $12,000 a year to under $300 a year. (This was a remarkable statement in itself, since the reduction in price was the result of the use of cheap generic drugs which Bush’s administration had, in response to lobbying from pharmaceutical corporations, tried to restrict.) The lower cost of the anti-retro-viral drugs, Bush said, ‘places a tremendous possibility within our grasp…seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many’. He then asked Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to ‘turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean’. Congress rapidly did as requested and four months later Bush signed into law what he said was ‘the largest, single up-front commitment in history for an international public health initiative involving a single disease’.194
How significant are Bush’s initiatives to increase US aid, both for development and to fight AIDS? To answer that question, we need to begin by clarifying Bush’s confusingly phrased statement about the additional amount he was proposing for the Millennium Challenge Account. Although he spoke of $5 billion over three years, this figure did not match his reference to a 50 per cent increase in US development assistance. When officials later clarified the proposal, they confirmed the higher figure— a 50 per cent increase, meaning that the amount of aid given will increase progressively over the next three fiscal years, until at the end of that period—for the fiscal year 2006—it will be $15 billion, or roughly 50 per cent, higher than the level prevailing at the time of Bush’s speech. Since some additional money will be available in the fiscal years 2004 and 2005, the total extra amount of money over the three years in question will be significantly more than $5 billion. When, in February 2003, Bush submitted budget proposals to Congress extending as far ahead as 2008, they included a total of $20 billion over five years for the Millennium Challenge Account. Including the additional money for AIDS, Bush is proposing increasing annual US development and humanitarian assistance from $10 billion in 2002 to $18 billion in 2008.195
This is, then, a big increase over present aid levels. Nevertheless, even if all goes according to plan, the US will, in 2008, still be giving an ungenerously low level of aid. In 2001, the latest year for which figures are available, Denmark gave a little over 1 per cent of its gross national income in foreign aid. The United Nations has set a target of 0.7 per cent. Apart from Denmark, four other nations—Norway, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Sweden—have exceeded that target. Major European nations, like the United Kingdom, France and Germany, gave approximately 0.3 per cent. Japan, the nation with the world’s second largest economy, gave 0.23 per cent, and Australia 0.25 per cent. The United States gave only 0.11 per cent, or just eleven cents in every hundred dollars the nation produced—the lowest proportion of all the developed nations. (These figures are for government aid. Private donations from the US are higher than from other nations, but including them moves the US proportion of gross national income given as aid up only to 0.145 per cent, still among the lowest of the developed nations.196 ) If the United States had given $18 billion in 2001, it would still have ranked below all of the nations I have mentioned. To be on the same footing as Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in the amount of aid it gives relative to the size of its economy, the US would have to increase its annual foreign aid, not to $18 billion, but to approximately $80 billion. Moreover, even that figure underestimates the shift towards genuine development and humanitarian aid that would be required. The top five recipients of US development aid in 2001 were, in diminishing order of magnitude, Egypt, Pakistan, Colombia, Jordan and the former Republic of Yugoslavia. Compare this with the leading recipients of Danish aid—Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Mozambique and Ghana—and it is easy to see that Denmark’s aid is going to the countries with far greater needs. What the United States terms ‘development aid’ goes largely to countries of strategic or other special interest to the United States (for example, ensuring that Egypt is a partner in the Middle East peace process, or attempting to stop Colombian drug exports).197
We can also compare Bush’s proposal with the aid that was given by the United States in recent decades. In 2006, with the Millennium Challenge Account fully phased in and the commitment to the special fund for AIDS met, US foreign aid would be well below the average of 0.2 per cent of national income that the US gave during the 1980s. It would still be below the level currently being given by virtually every other industrialised nation, and only about a quarter of the UN recommended target.198
Most illuminating of all is a comparison between Bush’s additional foreign aid spending and defence budget increases in the same period. In his budget proposal for 2003, released just a month before he announced his Millennium Challenge Fund initiative, the Department of Defense received an increase of $48 billion over the previous year. A year later, shortly after he had asked Congress to approve spending $15 billion dollars over five years to fight AIDS, he proposed adding another $15 billion to the defence budget for 2004, bringing the Department of Defense budget to a total of $380 billion. Since this increase was for a single year, it was five times the spending he was proposing for the fight against AIDS. Then in March 2003, as the attack against Iraq was launched, Bush went back to Congress asking for an additional $75 billion for the ‘war on terrorism’, of which $63 billion was specifically for military operations in Iraq.199 Months after Bush had declared the combat in Iraq ‘over,’ the occupation of Iraq was still costing the Pentagon, every month, 30 per cent more than Bush had promised to spend on AIDS in a full year.200
Taking the Millennium Challenge Fund and the AIDS funding together, Bush has sought an eventual increase in foreign humanitarian and development assistance of $8 billion annually. Of that sum, $5 billion annually is to help more than two billion people living in poverty, and $3 billion annually is to assist more than 30 million people infected with the AIDS virus, who will die if they cannot get access to drugs costing $300 a year, as well as untold millions more who will be infected if efforts to reduce the spread of the virus are inadequate. Bush knows these numbers—they are taken from his 2003 State of the Union address. He also knows what happens to people with AIDS in Africa. Here are his words:
Because the AIDS diagnosis is considered a death sentence, many do not seek treatment. Almost all who do are turned away. A doctor in rural South Africa describes his frustration. He says,‘We have no medicines. Many hospitals tell people, you’ve got AIDS, we can’t help you. Go home and die.’ In an age of miraculous medicines, no person should have to hear those words.
It doesn’t take much arithmetic to calculate that $3 billion is not enough to ensure that no person will hear those words. The other developed nations are doing their part as well, but even if the total is $9 billion, since much of this will have to go on educating people about preventing further infections, it will fall well short of providing every victim of AIDS with the drugs they need. The contrast between the sums that Bush sought for fighting poverty and AIDS, and those he sought for the defence budget and for the war with Iraq is an indication of his priorities. So too is the lengthy delay that has occurred since his State of the Union address without anything really happening on the ground. In the words of Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University,‘despite a lot of talk and one famous speech, and one plan that isn’t in operation, they’ve essentially accomplished nothing’. Since more than seven million Africans had died of AIDS since Bush was elected to office, history would, Sachs thought, judge him ‘severely’ for this ‘utterly inexcusable’ delay.
There are other concerns about Bush’s humanitarian initiatives. Critics of globalisation see the criteria developing nations must satisfy to obtain assistance from the Millennium Challenge Account as a ruse to force them to open up their economies to global trade. That, the critics suggest, will actually disadvantage their poorest citizens, who will find their markets lost to more efficient and often subsidised goods produced by the industrialised nations. Nor will those who are at the bottom of the least developed nations of the world be able to take advantage of the opportunities global trade offers, for they lack the skills and infrastructure needed to make goods that the rest of the world is willing to buy. Critics of Bush’s AIDS program point out that at least one-third of the AIDS-prevention funds must be used to promote abstinence. Some believe that promoting abstinence is not effective, and others point out that this provision will restrict the flow of funds to groups that work with prostitutes, whose co-operation is important in preventing the spread of AIDS, but who are hardly likely to respond to efforts to promote abstinence. But even if promoting abstinence is not the most effective way to fight AIDS, it can do some good under some circumstances, and there is still a considerable (if inadequate) sum available for other ways of preventing AIDS, as well as for preventing mother–child transmission of the virus, and for providing life-saving drugs to people who have AIDS. Another serious concern is that the legislation Bush signed does not mandate the spending of the $3 billion a year for five years; the money still has to be allocated each year by Congress and the White House asked for an allocation of only $2 billion for 2004.201 Nevertheless, and even if Bush was slow in appreciating the scale of what was needed, his AIDS initiative was a major step forward. Until then, it seemed possible that the developed world would do little or nothing to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale that dwarfs the Nazi Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda. Now it seems that, with other developed nations joining in, something significant will be done.
Credit should be given where it is due. While Bush has certainly not done—by his own standards—nearly enough to fight poverty or AIDS, during the Clinton era, US aid declined both in proportion to the size of the economy, and in proportion to government spending. In reversing this alarmingly selfish and short-sighted trend, Bush has, as USAID administrator Andrew Natsios has put it, ‘taken development off the back burner and placed it squarely at the forefront of our foreign policy’.202 Though the outcome is still uncertain, it is possible that by insisting that the additional aid included in the Millennium Challenge Account will go only to nations that govern justly, invest in their people, and allow economic freedom, Bush’s initiative will help to set these nations on a better path. In any case, in giving both more money and more prominence to development aid and the fight against AIDS, Bush has taken steps that have the potential to improve and prolong the lives of millions of people.
Trade
From the time when he was a candidate for the presidency Bush has been a forthright advocate of international free trade, on ethical as well as economic grounds. In A Charge to Keep he said that support for free markets and free trade was part of what made him a conservative.203 Honouring Ronald Reagan in 1999 he said that the case for trade ‘is not just monetary, but moral. Economic freedom creates habits of liberty’.204 At the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, in April 2001, he affirmed his intention to ‘vigorously pursue a free trade agenda’ unaffected by anti-globalisation protests.205 A month later, he said:‘Open trade is not just an economic opportunity, it is a moral imperative.’ 206 Signing the Trade Act of 2002, he described free trade as ‘a proven strategy for building global prosperity’ and said that it has helped lift ‘millions of people, and whole nations, and entire regions, out of poverty and put them on the path to prosperity’.207 In May 2003 he told Coast Guard cadets: ‘America’s national ambition is the spread of free markets, free trade, and free societies.’208
Despite all the rhetoric from Bush and the leaders of other industrialised nations about breaking down barriers against trade and assisting the world’s poor, when developing countries export to rich countries, they have to overcome tariff barriers that are four times higher than those encountered by rich countries for their products. These trade barriers deprive the developing countries of annual earnings of about $100 billion, or roughly twice what they now receive in aid from the rich nations.209 That is one reason why some protest against economic globalisation. They say that the industrialised nations, including America under Bush, have skewed the terms of trade to their own advantage, forcing developing countries to open their doors to goods and services produced in the industrialised world, but refusing to allow the free market to determine the fate of their own industries.
Oxfam, the international aid agency, has compiled a ‘Double Standards Index’ to measure the gap between a nation’s rhetoric about free trade, and the reality of what it actually does to allow developing countries access to its markets. Of the four major industrialised trading nations or blocs, the European Union comes out as the worst offender, but the United States is in second place with a record rated worse than those of Japan and Canada. Among the major blots on the US record are huge subsidies on agricultural products; a tariff in excess of 120 per cent on groundnuts, a staple product of some African nations; the failure to remove more than a quarter of the restrictions on the import of textiles and clothing that the US committed itself to remove under the World Trade Organization Agreement on Textiles and Clothing; higher tariffs on processed than on unprocessed food, thus deterring developing countries from creating jobs by adding value to their exports; and a sharp rise in the number of ‘anti-dumping’ actions taken against low-cost producers in developing countries. (‘Dumping’ involves the sale of goods abroad below their cost of production, or more cheaply than they are sold at home. While countries are entitled to protect themselves from such unfair trade practices, claims of ‘dumping’ are often a cover for protection against legitimate competition.)210
Bush’s own record is mixed. He has supported one important initiative for some of the world’s poorest nations, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). This legislation, enacted under Clinton’s presidency but enhanced in August 2002, allows free market access for selected products from thirty-eight African nations. In remarks videotaped for broadcast at the 2003 summit of nations participating in AGOA, Bush said that ‘AGOA shows the power of trade to lift people out of poverty’. Exports from AGOA nations to the United States were ‘rising dramatically,’ he said, and the legislation was ‘helping to reform old economies, creating new incentives for good governance, and offering new hope for millions of Africans’.211 It is true that during 2002 exports from AGOA nations to the US increased by 10 per cent, but more than three-quarters of these imports were petroleum products, which do less to generate employment than more labour intensive products like textiles, and are unlikely to do much to ‘reform old economies’. Excluding petroleum products, all the thirty-eight AGOA nations together exported only a modest $2.2 billion worth of goods to the US. For comparison, Australia, with a population of twenty million, or about one-twentieth of the combined total of the AGOA nations, had exports to the US of more than $6 billion. The ‘dramatic’ rise is therefore from a very small base, and the growth in imports from AGOA nations was not enough to offset a more substantial decline in imports from other sub-Saharan African nations, which meant that overall US imports from sub-Saharan Africa actually fell by more than 15 per cent in 2002.212 The African Growth and Opportunity Act is a step in the right direction, and Bush’s support for it is commendable, but even for the nations that come within its scope, it falls well short of eliminating all barriers to trade.
In other respects, Bush’s commitment to free trade does not live up to the principles he espouses. In announcing his candidacy for the presidency, he said:‘I’ll work to end tariffs and break down barriers everywhere, entirely, so the whole world trades in freedom. The fearful build walls. The confident demolish them.’He then went on to express his confidence in American workers, farmers and producers.213 Yet as president, Bush imposed tariffs of nearly 30 per cent on most types of steel imported from Europe, Asia and South America. That was scarcely a move that showed confidence in American industry. The tariff increase offered the Chinese Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng with an irresistable opportunity to complain that ‘advanced economies which once preached free trade are now undermining free trade’.214 For once, conservatives agreed with the Chinese leadership. The Weekly Standard described the tariff as ‘perhaps the worst piece of trade legislation in half a century’. Columnist George Will said the tariff was a case of ‘compassionate conservatism for government-addicted corporations’ and added the ultimate conservative condemnation: on this issue, Bush had proven himself ‘less principled than Bill Clinton’.215 Predictably, foreign nations affected by the tariffs, led by the European Union, took their case to the World Trade Organization. No one was surprised when the WTO ruled the steel tariffs illegal.216
In the election year of 2002, Bush’s free market principles melted away again, apparently unable to take the political heat he would have received for opposing a farm bill that gave away huge amounts of tax revenues to farmers—and mostly, to wealthy corporate farmers. The Wall Street Journal called the legislation ‘a ten-year, $173.5 billion bucket of slop’ that ‘would embarrass even the French’.217 The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 increased subsidies to producers of crops like corn and wheat by $50 billion over ten years, a 70 per cent increase over previous levels, and a complete reversal of the attempt made in the previous comprehensive farm bill (passed in 1996, in the Clinton era) to wean American farmers off subsidies. Instead of refusing to sign so blatant a violation of free market principles, Bush merely said that the law was a compromise that ‘did not meet all of my objectives’. He then went on to express his pleasure that the law ‘provides a generous and reliable safety net for our nation’s farmers and ranchers’ and signed it.218
If Bush really considers free trade a moral imperative, he ought to have vetoed the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002. Less than six months earlier, at a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Doha, Qatar, the United States and other members of the World Trade Organization, had agreed to remove barriers to farm trade.219 The so-called ‘Doha Round’, initiated at that meeting, was made much more difficult by the jump in US subsidies to farmers. The subsidies may threaten trade agreements that limit the amount the US can spend on what are known as ‘trade-distorting’ subsidies.220 It also makes it much harder for the US to credibly complain to the European Union about its farm subsidies—for as European Union Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy caustically noted, the US now pays three times more per farm than does the EU.221
James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, has pointed out that farm subsidies in the rich nations amount to six times what those countries provide in foreign aid to the entire developing world. Moreover, whereas the aid is distributed among the almost five billion people living in developing nations, the subsidies go mainly to a relatively small number of agribusinesses and large corporations.222 The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 has infuriated Brazilians, who claim that the subsidies deprive their soybean and cotton farmers of $1.5 billion a year in exports.223 The Act also doubled subsidies on cotton, to nearly $4 billion annually. These subsidies threaten the livelihood of some of the world’s poorest people, including those that the African Growth and Opportunity Act is supposed to help. West African cotton growers say that despite their lower costs, they cannot compete with US cotton, exported for a price that is 57 per cent below the cost of its production. The American subsidies are paid to only 25,000 cotton growers, with an average net worth of $800,000. In the African nation of Burkina Faso, where cotton is the principal export crop, the average annual income is $200. According to Oxfam, US cotton subsidies have caused a 12 per cent drop in Burkina Faso’s export earnings, with smaller but still significant drops in the earnings of several other poor African nations. The Bush administration spends more on subsidising its 25,000 cotton growers than it provides in aid, through the US Agency for International Development, for all of Africa.224 African cotton producers in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali joined with Brazil in an official complaint to the WTO against cotton subsidies paid in the United States and Europe.225 In September 2003, the round of talks begun in Doha came to an abrupt halt when negotiations broke down at the WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico. The refusal of the United States to reconsider its cotton subsidies was one factor in that setback to further progress in liberalising trade. The long-term effects of the farm bill on efforts to create a global free trade environment are clearly negative.
As an ethical goal, global free trade is controversial, but defensible. It is consistent with Bush’s other professed values, including the value of free markets in general. But it is not ethical to preach the value of free trade to the world, and then bow to political pressure to protect American industries that cannot compete in their own marketplace. Nor is it ethical to subsidise wealthy domestic producers so that, with the assistance of American taxpayers, they can take markets from producers in developing countries. That, however, is what Bush has done.
The International Criminal Court
In July 2002, more than 100 countries celebrated the birth of the International Criminal Court, or ICC. The ICC is the successor to a line of tribunals that goes back to the Nuremberg Tribunal, set up by the victorious Allies to try the Nazi leaders for the crime of waging a war of aggression and also for genocide and crimes against humanity. Other tribunals followed, to deal with crimes against humanity in Bosnia after the breakup of Yugoslavia, in Rwanda during the Hutu massacre of Tutsis, and by Indonesian-supported militias in East Timor. In setting up the ICC, the participant nations have attempted to move beyond the justice of the victors over the defeated, and instead give international criminal justice a more impartial and permanent basis. The court will have a prosecutor who can bring charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes against individuals as long as they are a national of a state that has ratified the treaty, or the crime was committed on the territory of such a state, or a specific case is referred to the court by the United Nations Security Council. The aim is to ensure that there is no legal refuge anywhere in the world for those who commit such crimes. That objective, one might have thought, is one that fits well with American values, with support for universal human rights, and for the principle that power should be restrained by the rule of law.
In the final days of his presidency, Clinton signed the treaty setting up the ICC. Since then an additional important reason has emerged for the US to support the ICC. If, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, other nations doubt the impartiality of American justice and are reluctant to hand one of their citizens suspected of terrorism over to a US court, they might instead accept the jurisdiction of an international court. Although, as of November 2003, 139 nations had signed, and ninety-two had ratified, the treaty—well above the sixty required to bring the court into existence—the United States was not one of those ratifying the treaty. Bush has said he would not submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification, and denied that any legal obligations arise from his predecessor’s signature. In taking the second of these steps, he was not only opposing the ICC, he was also acting contra to the authority of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties which requires states to refrain from undermining treaties they sign, whether or not they later ratify them.226
Bush and his aides have said that participating in the court would mean ceding US sovereignty to an international prosecutor, and that the court could initiate capricious prosecutions of American officials and military personnel.227 Had the US supported the court, it could have played a role in developing safeguards to prevent such misuse. Instead the Bush administration’s preoccupation regarding the court has been to negotiate—under threat of a withdrawal of US aid—agreements with individual nations guaranteeing that US citizens in their jurisdiction will not be extradited to the ICC. It has also persuaded the UN Security Council to pass resolutions extending immunity to US citizens. In June 2003, the Security Council agreed to another year of immunity for US citizens, but the fact that the US was once again seeking special treatment for its own citizens raised an important question in the minds of the international community: Is the United States willing to play its part, as one citizen among others, in creating an international system of law and order, or will it stand apart and require special treatment, different from that which other nations are willing to accept?228
In July 2003, the Bush administration announced that it was suspending military aid for thirty-five nations that had refused to pledge to give American citizens immunity before the International Criminal Court. Some of these countries, like Colombia and Ecuador, were considered vital for efforts to bring stability to the Western hemisphere, while others, like Croatia, were being assisted in efforts to join NATO. Richard Dicker, a director of Human Rights Watch in New York, pointed out that the administration had created a dilemma for itself, for now it had to choose between supporting democratic nations, and its ideological campaign against the ICC. Dicker then added pointedly:‘ I’ve never seen a sanctions regime aimed at countries that believe in the rule of law rather than ones that commit human rights abuses.’229 No wonder that other nations see Bush’s insistence on special treatment for Americans as a stumbling block to international co-operation. At a European Union summit held in Greece in June 2003, the member nations issued a pointed rebuke to the Bush administration, saying: ‘The European Union strongly supports the ICC as an important step forward in the implementation of international law and human rights. We will continue to work actively for the universality of the court and contribute to its effective functioning.’230
Ironically, while Bush was insisting that US citizens are not to be brought before the ICC, despite all its safeguards ensuring proper political process, his administration was continuing to hold, at Guantánamo Bay, hundreds of citizens of other countries, not charged with any offences, unable to see lawyers or have any of the rights that the ICC would allow to those accused of crimes under its statute. It was during negotiations between the US and Australia to ensure that Americans in Australia would be immune from prosecution by the ICC, that the Bush administration announced that it would try David Hicks, an Australian citizen captured in Afghanistan, before a military tribunal. The tribunal rules do not respect the normal procedural right of the accused to confidential communication with his or her lawyer, reject the usual courtroom standards of admissible evidence, and allow a two-thirds majority of the ‘judges’ (of whom only one need be legally qualified) to decide on the guilt of the accused. From this tribunal the only avenue of appeal is to a panel of three military officers that meets behind closed doors.231
Many non-Americans regard Bush’s concern about protecting US citizens from the ICC, while himself detaining people for years without trial and even (as we saw in Chapter 4) ordering the assassination of the citizens of other nations, as sheer hypocrisy. That impression is reinforced by the fact that Bush’s attitude to the ICC runs parallel to his approach to another, arguably more momentous, global issue that also requires international co-operation between sovereign nations: global warming.
Climate change, or being even-handed
The idea that Americans come first has enormous importance for dealing with the paradigmatically global problem of climate change. Our planet’s atmosphere is a common resource. No individual, and no nation, owns it, or any part of it. We all need it—not only to breathe, but also to absorb the waste gases we produce, of which carbon dioxide is the most significant. The more fossil fuels we use, the more carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere. We now have strong—many atmospheric scientists would say, overwhelming—evidence that the carbon dioxide produced by human use of fossil fuels is changing our planet’s climate. The predicted change in climate is already happening, with nine of the hottest ten years ever recorded occurring since 1990.
If every nation in the world goes ahead with ‘business as usual’, doing nothing to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases it is putting into the atmosphere, the results will be bad for the people of the world as a whole, for most non-human animals, and for the preservation of many endangered species of animals and plants. A relatively small number of people and animals, living in areas like Siberia and northern Canada, are likely to be better off, but their gains will be outweighed by the losses to others who will suffer from more severe droughts and floods, increased frequencies of tropical storms (extendng beyond their present climatic zones) and also spreading tropical diseases. The Asian monsoon, on which hundreds of millions of peasant farmers in India and several other Asian nations rely to grow their food, will become less reliable. As polar ice melts, sea levels will rise by between four and thirty-five inches. Even the lowest estimate will pose a threat to tens of millions of people farming the fertile but low-lying delta regions of Bangladesh and Egypt. These lands are already prone to flooding from the sea when storms and high tides coincide. If the higher estimate turns out to be nearer the truth, they will lose their land, and small island nations in the Pacific will disappear beneath the waves. Species unable to adapt to climate change, or move to a cooler environment, will become extinct. Australia, for instance, has unique alpine ecosystems that depend on winter snowfall. But since Australia’s mountains barely reach 7000 feet, if the climate warms, these mountains will cease to receive snow. Animals and plants found nowhere else will be trapped on their isolated peaks like animals on high ground about to be drowned by rising floodwaters.
When, shortly after taking office as president, George W. Bush was asked what he would do about global warming, his answer was:‘We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America.’232 Asked whether the president would call on drivers to sharply reduce their fuel consumption, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, replied:‘That’s a big no. The President believes that it’s an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.’233 Under Bush’s leadership, the US has refused to accept the Kyoto Protocol, which requires its member nations to reduce greenhouse gases to, on average, 5 per cent below 1990 levels. (By 1999, the US was already 11.7 per cent above its 1990 emissions level, and this figure has been growing with every passing year.234)
‘First things first are the people who live in America’ endorses the same kind of national selfishness that is evident in the answer Bush gave to Jim Lehrer’s question in the second presidential debate. It is an implication of this view that the rights of Americans to drive large gas-guzzling cars outweigh the rights of people in other countries to live on their land, undisturbed by changing rainfall patterns and rising sea levels. But it is not surprising that people in other nations should consider that this way of thinking fails to deal fairly with those who are not Americans. Romano Prodi, at the time president of the Commission of the European Union, and a former Prime Minister of Italy, responded to Bush’s statement by saying that ‘If one wants to be a world leader, one must know how to look after the entire earth and not only American industry.’
At times Bush has acknowledged, and apparently accepted, the view of the National Academy of Sciences that global warming is ‘due in large part to human activity’. At other times he has backed away from that admission. In 2002, when his own State Department submitted to the United Nations a report by the Environmental Protection Authority that emphasised the seriousness of the problem of global warming, Bush dismissed it as a ‘report put out by the bureaucracy’. The following year, when the EPA prepared a comprehensive report on the state of the environment, the White House forced the deletion of a section stating that emissions from factories and cars contribute to global warming. Bush’s aides wanted to drop references to a 2001 report by the National Research Council, which Bush himself had commissioned, and to a 1999 study showing a record rise in global temperatures over the previous decade. In place of the original wording, they proposed a few paragraphs drawing on a report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute that came to no specific conclusion about global warming. In an internal memo leaked to the New York Times, an EPA official stated that the White House version ‘no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change’. Christine Todd Whitman, Bush’s appointee as administrator of the EPA, thought it would be better to have no discussion of global warming in the EPA report than the wording that the White House proposed. She resigned her position about this time.235
Admittedly, there are gaps in what we know about global warming, for example how much of the rise in temperatures is due to natural causes, how fast our planet is likely to warm, and what impact some of our actions could have. Officials in the Bush administration have suggested that given these uncertainties, costly measures to reduce climate change, such as those required to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, are unjustified.236 Even if we agree that there are these uncertainties, however, the risks of not taking immediate action are so great that they outweigh the much more limited costs of taking action. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for 100 years. The carbon in the exhaust of Henry Ford’s original Model T is still trapping heat. By the time the gaps in our scientific knowledge are closed, it may be too late to undo the consequences of our past actions. The ‘better safe than sorry’ approach—sometimes more formally referred to as ‘the precautionary principle’—suggests that even in the absence of complete information, we should be prepared to incur reasonable costs to avoid a significant chance of a disastrous outcome. The evidence on climate change is that the risk is quite considerable. As University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has pointed out, Bush’s attitude towards the risk of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction was that it is better to act pre-emptively, even in the absence of complete information, to ensure that the disaster of such weapons being used is averted. This precautionary stance is exactly what Bush’s critics are urging him to take regarding climate change. The cost of restricting greenhouse gas emissions, however, is far less than the many thousands of deaths and injuries caused by the war in Iraq.237
From a collective standpoint that takes everyone’s interests into account, it would be best if all countries with high levels of emissions made significant reductions in the amount of greenhouse gases they produce. But from the standpoint of an individual nation, this is not necessarily the best possible outcome, for the national costs associated with reducing greenhouse gas emissions could outweigh the national benefits. To cut emissions substantially, instead of using the cheapest fuel available to generate electricity or drive our cars, we would have to take into account the amount of carbon dioxide we are producing. We may have to switch to natural gas, which produces less carbon dioxide than coal, but in some regions is more expensive. We may need to use more expensive, but more fuel-efficient, cars. Or we may simply have to consume less energy, which may mean that our houses are a little warmer in summer, and cooler in winter, than we would otherwise wish them to be.
When Jim Lehrer asked Bush why he would refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol, Bush said:
I’ll tell you one thing I’m not going to do is I’m not going to let the United States carry the burden for cleaning up the world’s air, like the Kyoto treaty would have done. China and India were exempted from that treaty. I think we need to be more even-handed…
Regrettably, neither Lehrer nor Gore asked Bush what he meant by being ‘more even-handed’. Thus a chance to learn more about Bush’s ethical thinking was missed and we can only speculate about why he thinks that the fact that the treaty did not require any reductions in emissions from developing nations means that it is not ‘even-handed’.
Since Bush believes that people should be held responsible for their actions, he should be sympathetic to the principle that the person who breaks something is the one who ought to fix it. How does that idea apply to the atmosphere? Well, there is a problem right now about climate change because over the past century or more, industries in the developed nations pumped a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Most of that carbon dioxide is still there. Although the developed nations have only about one fifth the population of the developing nations, at present rates of emissions the contribution that the developing nations, including China and India, have made to the problem will not begin to match the contributions of the developed nations until 2038. (That calculation includes gases released by clearing forests, the one area in which the developing countries are now worse than the developed countries.238) In other words, if the developed nations had had, during the past century, per capita emissions at the level of the developing nations, there simply wouldn’t be a problem at present, and there would be plenty of time to prevent any problem coming about. As far as the atmosphere is concerned, the developed nations broke it. If those most responsible for breaking something should do the most to fix it, then the developed nations owe it to the rest of the world to fix the problem. Instead, they are making it worse—and the United States is the chief culprit. Despite having less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, it is the largest producer of greenhouse gases, responsible for 25 per cent of all emissions. China, with more than four times the population of the United States, emits only 60 per cent as much carbon dioxide.239
Some say that because the United States has planted so many trees in recent decades, it has actually soaked up more carbon dioxide than it has omitted. But this is an arbitrary way of calculating emissions, for the United States has only been able to reforest because it had previously cut down much of its great forests, thus releasing the carbon into the atmosphere. The balance sheet depends on the time at which the accounting is done. If the period includes the era of cutting down the forests, then the United States comes out very badly. If it starts from the time in which the forest had been cut, but no reforestation had taken place, it comes out much better. In any case, forest regrowth offers only a temporary solution to the greenhouse problem. It locks up carbon only while the trees are growing. Once the forest is mature, it ceases to soak up carbon from the atmosphere. US reforestation, therefore, while a good thing for many reasons, does not enable the country to avoid its responsibility for causing a large part of the problem of global warming.
Suppose, though, that Bush were to reject the ‘you broke it, you fix it’ ethic. Perhaps he could argue that at the time the developing countries put most of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, there wasn’t the scientific knowledge we have today. So although the US and other developed nations did cause the problem, they didn’t know what they were doing, and shouldn’t be held responsible for it.
That would be a dubious argument for a tough-on-crime death penalty supporter to use, especially one who thinks that even mentally retarded criminals may be held responsible for their actions and executed. And even if we think that today’s Americans cannot be held morally responsible for what earlier generations of Americans did, Americans today are enjoying a higher standard of living because of the actions of their polluting predecessors. By accepting the benefits generated by these earlier emissions the present generation of Americans could be said to have incurred an obligation to pay for the costs that the acts of earlier generations of Americans imposed on others by using more than their fair share of a common resource.
But suppose we forget about everything that has happened up to now. Is there some other principle of fairness that would not require the developed nations to do more than the developing nations? In other words, let’s bend over backwards to avoid any possibility of being unfair to Bush in his attempt to protect the interests of the United States, and put aside the strong argument that the United States has, because it did more than any other nation to bring about global warming, and has benefited from doing so, an obligation to take the lead in remedying it. Starting afresh, we begin with the fact that the atmosphere is a common resource. No one owns it. How should we divide it up? The simplest and most obvious answer is: equally. Not, of course, equally between nations. It would be absurd to give a small nation like Costa Rica the same share of the atmosphere as a large nation like the United States. And not equally in proportion to the area of a nation’s landmass, either, because having an extra million square miles of uninhabited desert or frozen tundra doesn’t generate any extra emissions. But having an extra million people does. Hence the simplest answer is to divide equally, between every inhabitant of the planet, the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb our emissions. Unless someone can show that he or she is entitled to more of the atmosphere than others, equal shares would seem to be a good starting point.
Unfortunately for Bush, this principle would also require the United States to make drastic cuts to its greenhouse gas emissions, while allowing China and India to avoid any cuts, at least at present. The United States produces more than 5 tons of carbon per person per year. Japan and Western Europe average below 3 tons. China emits 0.76 tons per capita and India 0.29.240 This means that given an ‘even-handed’ per capita annual emission limit of 1 ton of carbon per person (which is not very far off what the Kyoto Protocol aims to achieve) India would be able to increase its carbon emissions to more than three times what they now are. China would be allowed a more modest increase. The United States, on the other hand, would have to reduce its emissions to no more than one fifth of what they now are. Compared with the mauling that such a reduction would inflict on the US economy, the cut that the US would have had to take if it had signed on to the Kyoto agreement would barely be noticeable.
Are there any other principles of fairness or ‘evenhandedness’ that would give the industrialised nations a better deal? In his speeches on this topic, Bush has referred to the fact that the United States is not only the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases, but also the world’s biggest producer of goods and services. This suggests that he may have in mind a principle of distribution like, ‘To each according to how much they produce’. How evenhanded is this? One argument for it might be that if the United States were forced to slow down its economy and produce less, in order to meet an emissions target based on something other than the value of goods and services it produces, then other nations would step into the gap to produce the goods and services now produced in the United States. But they might do so less efficiently. The outcome would be fewer goods from the same level of emissions.
Even if this were true, as a principle of fairness, ‘To each according to how much they produce’ suffers from a major ethical flaw. It’s not as if the United States produced all these goods in order to benefit everyone equally. The vast majority of the goods and services that the United States produces are consumed in the United States. The relatively small fraction of goods produced in the United States that are sold abroad also benefit United States residents, who gain employment and income from the production and sale of the goods. These benefits are gained in part by the appropriation, without consent or compensation, of a collective resource. Admittedly, it is a resource that everyone freely appropriated up until now, but it is also one that, as every nation (including the United States) agreed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, should no longer be seen as available on a ‘take as much as you want’ basis.
In any case, the claim that the United States produces more efficiently, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, than other nations has been refuted by figures published by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The United States is well above average in the amount of emissions it produces in proportion to its per capita GDP. The CIA figures show that developing countries like India and China, as well as some European nations like Spain, France and Switzerland, are the best at producing a high value of goods for a given level of emissions.241
Although it is true that the Kyoto Protocol does not initially bind the developing nations, it is generally understood that the developing countries will be brought into the binding section of the agreement after the industrialised nations have begun to move towards their targets. That was the procedure with the successful Montreal Protocol concerning gases that damage the ozone layer, and there is no reason to believe that it will not also happen with the Kyoto Protocol. China, by far the largest greenhouse gas emitter of the developing nations and the only one with the potential to rival the total—not per capita—emissions of the United States in the foreseeable future, has already, even in the absence of any binding targets, made significant progress in reducing fossil-fuel emissions, thanks to improved efficiency in coal use.242 Hence the claim that the Kyoto Protocol does not require the developing nations to do their share is misleading, because they have not yet reached the point at which they are using more than their quota of the planet’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases. When they do, it is reasonable to presume that they will also have obligations under the next international climate agreement to reduce their emissions. The fact that 178 other nations, including every major industrial nation in the world other than the United States, have now indicated their intention to ratify the Kyoto Protocol makes the Bush Administration’s position particularly odious. It amounts to saying that the poor nations of the world should commit themselves, in perpetuity, to much lower levels of greenhouse gas production per head of population than the rich nations have. There is no way in which that principle can be defended as ethical.