A Matter of Record

In "The Sources of American Legitimacy" (November/December 2004), Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson respond heatedly to my essay "America's Crisis of Legitimacy" (March/April 2004). The heat is disproportionate to our disagreement. They argue that the United States has "a serious legitimacy problem" and needs international legitimacy to conduct a successful foreign policy. In my article, which they selectively quote, I made the same point at great length, noting that "for the first time since World War II, a majority of Europeans has come to doubt the legitimacy of U.S. power and U.S. global leadership" and that "the United States cannot ignore this problem."

AT THE SOURCE

What seems to have upset Tucker and Hendrickson is my discussion of the sources of legitimacy during the Cold War. I argued that the legitimacy the United States enjoyed then had little to do with fidelity to the rule of international law or obeisance to the UN Charter or the Security Council. Rather, U.S. legitimacy derived primarily from the role the United States played as "leader of the free world," providing security to allies and defending democracy against communist tyranny. It also derived from the bipolar structure of the Cold War: allied nations did not worry that the United States was too powerful because it was checked by the Soviet Union.

Tucker and Hendrickson disagree and insist that U.S. legitimacy did rest on Washington's adherence to the rule of law. The "country's leaders," they claim, "pledge[d] the use of U.S. power to international law" and "commit[ted] their country to the rule of law." The "architects of the post-World War II order," they assert, "emphasized the protection of the democratic community through rules constraining the use of force." The United States did not always "scrupulously adhere" to the rules of the UN Charter, they admit, but "U.S. leaders generally made every effort to square their actions with international law." Despite "some transgressions," the "overall fidelity of the United States to internationalist norms contributed strongly to the legitimacy of U.S. power."

This is a very misleading account of U.S. Cold War and post-Cold War foreign policy. It is fairly easy to justify most U.S. actions during the Cold War on moral and strategic grounds. But the notion that Washington tried hard to abide by the UN Charter and "pledged" its power "to international law" is ahistorical, even fanciful. From the overthrow and attempted overthrow of governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba, to the Vietnam War and the intervention in the Dominican Republic, the list of U.S. actions in defiance or neglect of international laws and institutions during the Cold War and in the decade that followed is impressive. To say that the United States did not "scrupulously adhere" to international law is an understatement.

CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS

Such arguments are especially surprising coming from these two noted "realist" commentators. If one looks at their voluminous writings on these subjects prior to the George W. Bush administration, one finds not merely a different perspective on the history of U.S. foreign policy, but very nearly the opposite perspective.

Tucker and Hendrickson now claim that throughout the Cold War, U.S. leaders "pledge[d] the use of U.S. power to international law." But in The Imperial Temptation, written in 1992 to condemn the Persian Gulf War as, among other things, unjustified under international law, they wrote that when "the United States finally committed its great power to the task of international order following World War II, it did not do so on behalf of the system of collective security that succeeded the League of Nations." That system was "stillborn." The UN "played a negligible role in the nation's foreign policy." U.S. governments used the UN only "when expedient," as in Korea in 1950 and in the Gulf War in 1991. And in "Alone or With Others" in these pages (November/December 1999), Tucker claimed that in the intervening decades, "the United Nations played no more than a marginal role, if indeed that, in the making of American foreign policy. In determining where, when, and how to employ force, the organization was usually simply ignored."

In 1992, Tucker and Hendrickson argued that the Truman Doctrine, although it "did not quite signal the abandonment of American efforts to work through the UN," nevertheless clearly showed "that the United States was ready to pursue its major foreign policy objectives by other means if necessary, including unilateral means." They also noted that during the years of the Reagan administration, the relationship between the American government and the world organization reached its lowest point. The Reagan Doctrine in its various articulations reflected a thinly disguised contempt for the UN. The unilateralism that plainly characterized the doctrine was an all but formal rejection of an organization then seen as increasingly dominated by states hostile to American interests and purposes.

Although Tucker and Hendrickson now claim that U.S. leaders during the Cold War "commit[ted] their country to the rule of law" and "emphasized the protection of the democratic community through rules constraining the use of force," a decade ago they claimed just the opposite. "The necessities of the Cold War," they wrote, "real or alleged ... not only led to the expansion of the concept of aggression well beyond its core meaning but even to its partial abandonment." The strategy of containment "did not and could not create and maintain an order by the methods and restraints of the UN Charter," but instead did so "by the traditional methods of countering hostile and expansionist power with power."