If Necessary, a Superpower Acts Alone

By Charles Krauthammer

Since Viet Nam, Congress has muscled its way into the formulation of American foreign policy, first with the War Powers Resolution and then with a baroque assortment of Boland amendments. Now Congress is determined to pronounce on the Persian Gulf. But Congress does not know what to say. In the past two weeks it has been toing and froing, its actions best summarized by Congressman George Gekas, who said on the floor of the House, "We are confused. If you are not confused, I am, and I am willing to admit it. That may be the difference between me and most of you."

Congress will not, however, allow confusion to deter. Instead, it is trying to legislate its confusion with a series of stalling actions. First the Senate, then the House voted to block Administration plans to put Kuwaiti tankers under U.S. Navy protection unless they got a report from the President on the risks and dangers. A report is due soon, which means Congress might actually have to make a decision on a plan that the Administration first presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March. At which time, pre-Stark, congressional leaders showed little interest in the issue. Post-Stark, they discovered that the Persian Gulf is a dangerous place and went into a frenzy of directionless activity. Except for Claiborne Pell, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He knows where he is headed. He introduced a bill (S1327) that prohibits the Administration from reflagging Kuwaiti vessels but urges a "United Nations peacekeeping force to protect nonbelligerent shipping in the Persian Gulf and to seek an early end to the Iran-Iraq war." (It would, of course, be a late end, the Secretary-General having tried for years for an early one.)

The reactions to the President's reflagging plan are many, and they generally fall along party lines. For example, among presidential candidates, Democrats (with the notable exception of Senator Albert Gore) are trying to restrain him. Republicans (with the notable exception of Robert Dole and Alexander Haig) are supporting him.

Democrats begin every call for retreat with the ringing assertion that the Persian Gulf is indeed a vital American interest and the United States will not be run out of the region. But they then set conditions for U.S. action in the gulf that are impossible to meet. The favored technique for doing this is to demand that the United States not act alone. Where are the allies? they complain. After all, it is their oil and not ours that is flowing through the gulf. They should join us in any military action. If they don't act, why should we?

This objection fails on four counts. First of all, it is "their oil" in only a technical sense. It is true that the Europeans and Japanese import more gulf oil than the U.S. does. But oil is fungible, and the U.S. imports almost half its oil. Were the gulf shut down, our allies would have to get it + elsewhere, thus bidding up the price. If this resulted in a panic, as happened in the oil shock of 1979, all oil importers, including the U.S., would be badly damaged.

Second, this scenario -- "their oil" in the gulf, "ours" safely elsewhere -- is not just false, it is beside the point. The reason for reflagging Kuwaiti tankers has little to do with securing Western oil supplies. There is no new threat to world oil supplies. Iran has long threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz and long desisted, for the simple reason that nearly all its own oil flows through the strait. And the tanker war in the Persian Gulf has been raging for almost four years, during which time the world has seen the greatest oil glut and sharpest price collapse in history. The Administration wants to protect Kuwaiti oil not because the West needs to buy Kuwaiti oil, but because Kuwait needs to sell it.

Third, the British and the French, who have powerful navies, are in fact on patrol around the gulf. As for the West Germans and the Japanese, they have no global navies to send. (We arranged for that after World War II.) Shall America wait then for the Canadians and Italians before venturing back into the gulf? As Secretary Shultz points out, the British have two frigates and a destroyer in the area, which is more, proportionately, than the U.S. has. The French also have warships in the region protecting their own vessels. Shouldn't they be acting with the United States to protect American-flagged ships? The answer is that they did join the U.S. in a similar action in Lebanon four years ago and woke up one morning to find that the U.S. had "redeployed" its Marine force to the Mediterranean and left the French high and dry. They have learned that American ambivalence about the use of force abroad is such that it is unwise, indeed reckless, for any ally to risk a joint venture with the U.S.

Fourth, even if all of the foregoing were not true, the idea that a superpower does not act except in conjunction with allies has become the disease of American foreign policy. Central America is without a doubt a vital American interest, but, we hear, America must not act unless Contadora or the OAS or Costa Rica -- a country with no army -- leads the way. Since it is impossible to imagine that weak countries will go where a superpower fears to tread, this requirement of allied support is a guarantee of American inaction. This is isolationism disguised as multilateralism. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what superpower status means. It means acting to protect allies even when they are too weak or too cowed to do so on their own. In most foreign policy crises, such is the case. The only country in a position to act is the U.S. To fob off the responsibility on allies, who we know in advance are in no position to act, is to declare, in the most pious multilateral tones, an American retreat.

The highest form of multilateral nonsense, however, is to pretend to fob off the responsibility on the U.N., as Senator Pell proposes. And Pell is not alone. Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis spoke for much of the Democratic Party when he expressed opposition to American use of "armed forces in the gulf unless it does so in concert with other nations, preferably under the aegis of the U.N. Security Council."

When Cordell Hull, F.D.R.'s Secretary of State, talked of the U.N. as a panacea for world problems, of bringing an end to the era of power politics, he could be forgiven because the U.N. did not yet exist.

Forty years later, one cannot be forgiven. What exactly do Pell, Dukakis and the Democrats have in mind? Perhaps they think of the U.N. as some independent world actor. Jeane Kirkpatrick, who spent some time there, had a crisper view. She called it a "Turkish bath" where the Third World can let off steam, denounce the West, air resentments and demand transfers of wealth. Its principal achievement is to generate a billion pages of paper every year. This U.N. is not even able to field peacekeeping forces in precisely the areas, like the Sinai, where they are most needed. When Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty that effectively ended the possibility of a major war in the Middle East, the U.N. called its peace-keepers home, since this was not a peace that it approved. The U.S. had to field a makeshift substitute force. This U.N. is hardly capable of any action. It is certainly not going to do the West's dirty work in the Persian Gulf.

What about the Security Council? If Pell really wants the Security Council to protect the gulf, what he means is for the U.S., Britain, France, China and the Soviet Union to act together. But this is absurd. China, for example, is supplying Iran with the very missiles it would use to target any peacekeeping flotilla. And even if united action were possible, it would not be desirable. What the "U.N. route" really means, after all the disguises are removed, is that the U.S. should act in the gulf only with the permission not just of allies but also of the Soviet Union. This amounts to ending Western control of the gulf, which the British maintained for a century and which the United States has been keeping for the past 15 years, and turning it over to a joint partnership with the Soviet Union. Because of what? Because in an accidental attack one Iraqi plane hit one American ship that was asleep in a war zone.

To invite the Soviets to share the responsibility, and thus the rewards, of controlling the Persian Gulf would amount to the most astonishing voluntary abdication of a Western position in the postwar world. At least when the British ran out on their responsibilities in the gulf in 1971, they turned it over to an ally. But now Pell and others would like to offer the Soviets, who have been lusting for the gulf since Romanov days, a share of it. Gratis.

But the Democrats are not alone. Among the others warming to this idea is Howard Baker. "It's a unique arrangement that the Kuwaitis chose to invite both the United States and the Soviet Union to share the responsibility for assuring the passage of oil tankers to the Persian Gulf," he offered. "That's a real first . . . I think it is clearly not a bad thing." If this was an off-the-cuff remark, it shows an amazing lack of seriousness by the vaunted new Administration team. And if what Baker enunciated was a decided change in American policy, it constitutes a far-reaching and gratuitous American capitulation.

Have the Democrats or the Administration thought through the implications of a "U.N. action" or of cooperation with the Soviets? One suspects they have. Congress is obsessed that the Persian Gulf may be a new Gulf of Tonkin. The Administration is obsessed that it may be a new Lebanon. Everybody is looking for a way out.

But if the United States is not going to defend its allies and interests in the Persian Gulf, then where? The gulf is the one area declared by the last Democratic President to be such a vital American interest that he pledged -- this is the Carter Doctrine -- American military action, if necessary, to secure the gulf.

Those advocating retreat, in its various camouflages, ought not to be debating whether our defense budget should be $303 billion or $289 billion. Thirty billion ought to be quite enough to maintain all that their foreign policy would require: a few nuclear missiles and a Coast Guard to patrol the Florida Keys.