A Matter of Record

Particularly in the western hemisphere, they argued, traditional norms regarding aggression and intervention "cannot be said to have ever been taken very seriously, as the several interventions from the 1950s through the 1980s attest." The Reagan Doctrine was, again, a particularly egregious departure from such norms, for it "subordinated the traditional bases of international order to a particular version of legitimacy by proclaiming a right of intervention against nondemocratic governments. ... In doing so, it went well beyond the grounds for intervention sanctioned by the traditions and practice of states."

Even in 1989, when "Cold War necessities could no longer plausibly be invoked," President George H.W. Bush "intervened militarily in Panama, though his stated reasons for doing so ... were generally seen as little more than a pro forma justification for removing a dictator who had defied Washington once too often." His administration had acted "unilaterally and for reasons that would not have been sanctioned either by the UN or by the Organization of American States." One could add to this list the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the overthrow of regimes in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, and other events--which is why Tucker and Hendrickson described U.S. foreign policy from the Truman administration to the first Bush presidency as a consistent "record of departure from the first and foremost principle of world order."

Today, Tucker and Hendrickson claim that NATO would never have gained support on either side of the Atlantic had it not been "justified ... in terms of its conformity with the principles of the UN Charter and its rule forbidding aggression." But back in 1982, in a lengthy essay on the transatlantic alliance published in the neoconservative organ Commentary, Tucker did not once mention those principles as having any bearing on the alliance. He described the "original compact" between the United States and its European allies exclusively in terms of security and self-interest and warned, correctly, that when perceptions of security and interests changed, the strength of the alliance would diminish. "Global unilateralism," Tucker wrote in 1982, had "deep roots in the American past." And although Tucker and Hendrickson now sing of the multilateralism of U.S. policy prior to the present administration, in 1999 Tucker noted in Foreign Affairs that throughout "the Cold War a commitment to multilateralism generally masked the substance of unilateralism." Even during the Cold War, U.S. "acceptance of multilateralism" was, Tucker and Hendrickson stated in The Imperial Temptation, "conditioned by our ability, bordering on a right, to act unilaterally."

CLASSIC MYTHOLOGY

In 1999, Tucker gently criticized those who were then, in the Clinton years, writing about "the specter of unilateralism" and expressing "anxiety and dread" in response to "the arrogance and assertiveness" of U.S. foreign policy. Although he acknowledged some truth in the charges, he also noted that they rested on "a comparison with an imagined past when the United States ... accepted the constraints of a nascent internationalism."

Have Tucker and Hendrickson, in their fury at the administration of George W. Bush, now themselves succumbed to the myth of this "imagined past"? This common error has been made by many recent commentators, who have been unwilling to see the continuities in U.S. foreign policy and instead prefer to imagine a past in which the United States bound itself to the strictures of international law. Many who make this error do not know any better. These two influential pundits do.