The New York Times

Sunday August 8,

Tying Down Gulliver With Those Pesky Treaties

By BARBARA CROSSETTE

HAVE we that is, Americans -- got a really serious problem with the rest

of the world?

Over the last decade or so, significant numbers of countries have been

signing on to one treaty or convention after another aimed at reining in

abusive regimes, ending the mistreatment of the weak and cutting back on

the proliferation of all kinds of weapons from nuclear bombs to land mines.

Washington, even while participating in the writing of another pact, has

reacted with diminishing enthusiasm in the White House, unease in the

Pentagon and mounting outrage in Congress, always on the lookout for

invasions of American sovereignty to beat back.

Withholding American backing for international pacts sometimes puts the

United States in decidedly mixed company. Only two nations are holding out

against the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United States and

Somalia.

When 120 nations agreed last year to set up a permanent International

Criminal Court for the future Hitlers, Pol Pots and Saddam Husseins of the

world, Washington was one of seven dissenters. The others were China, Iraq,

Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen.

With the cold war reduced to history and only one superpower left, it seems

to some politicians that foreigners, most of them not reliable friends,

want to tie this Gulliver down with Lilliputian ropes.

"There is a healthy skepticism across the political spectrum about what

direction these treaties can take," said Ian Vasquez of the Cato Institute

in Washington. "Another healthy attitude is that the United States does not

sign on to multilateral treaties in a casual way, which I do think occurs

in other countries."

Americans reckon that many nations ratify agreements they have no intention

of abiding by, although this does not stop their leaders from trying to use

them against the United States.

However, beyond American borders the view is different. Canadian officials,

for example, lose no opportunity to chide Washington for its failure to pay

American assessments to the United Nations, a situation that rankles

worldwide.

"Is the United States committed to multilateralism or not?" a Middle

Eastern envoy asked last week. "We need American leadership."

Now two unresolved issues are prompting new looks at American attitudes

toward international covenants. One is arms control. Last week, a

commission of disarmament experts from around the world warned that

American reluctance to ratify a pact against nuclear testing, or to press

Moscow for further mutual reductions in strategic weapons, or to give full

attention to deteriorating relations with Russia and China, was creating an

atmosphere of insecurity worldwide.

At the same time, the Japanese-backed commission found, Washington was

whittling away inspection safeguards in the Chemical Weapons Convention and

lagging in commitments to tighten international rules against biological

weapons. The United States has also opted out of an international

convention banning the production or use of land mines, killers of millions

of the world's poorest people caught in the most brutal of civil wars.

The second battleground is the International Criminal Court. Three weeks

of talks are going on now at the United Nations to clarify details about

the court's operations. Most diplomats, including Americans, are convinced

that the court is likely to be up and running in a matter of a few years,

replacing the ad hoc tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda. The question is,

where will the United States be then?

WHAT we are seeing now is a trend that was exemplified by the U.S.

opposition to and isolation on the convention to ban antipersonnel mines,"

said Richard Dicker, associate counsel of Human Rights Watch. "On the

Convention on the Rights of the Child, it has to do with the military

recruitment of individuals less than 18 years of age, and the U.S.

Department of Defense does recruit some 17 year olds. It's for that

military, Pentagon-driven reason that the United States has put itself in

opposition to everyone in the world."

This predicament is not entirely without precedent. "It took 40 years for

the U.S. to ratify the Genocide Convention," Mr. Dicker said. "It took 25

years for the U.S. to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and

Political Rights. This is part of a broader issue, and it's particularly

concentrated or crystallized in the case of the International Criminal

Court, because here what you have is the creation of a new judicial body

that would extend the rule of law in its broadest conception."

For American officials, that is exactly the problem: the specter of a

sweeping judicial process outside American control with the potential to

interfere with American policy decisions, especially when waging war or

sending troops abroad on international missions short of combat. This is

the treaty that Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina and chairman of

the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has preemptively declared "dead on

arrival" in Congress, if and when it shows up for ratification.

David Scheffer, the Clinton Administration's Ambassador at Large for War

Crimes, has met dozens of government delegations here over the last two

weeks in his effort to persuade foreign capitals that Washington is not

uniformly opposed to an International Criminal Court, but that American

concerns about its reach and the risk it could pose if used politically

against the United States and, more particularly, American soldiers will

have to be addressed.

HIS arguments represent a classic American caution about entangling foreign

alliances -- in this case a treaty that will change the face of

international criminal law, and could involve Americans whether or not they

are party to it.

"We cannot sign the present text of the treaty," Mr. Scheffer said. "We've

made that very clear. But we also want to engage very constructively with

other governments to see if there is a pathway for our support.

"A lot of governments recognize that if the United States can be brought on

board, the treaty, in a pragmatic sense, can be greatly strengthened, he

said, "because we can bring our resources, our enforcement capabilities,

our diplomatic skills, and so much of what we provide to the ad hoc

tribunals." If this campaign doesn't work, the isolation of the United

States, for all its power, can only grow, and with it a distrust of

American motives now that Washington stands above the world.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of graduate and international legal studies

at the Harvard Law School, prepared a hypothetical memo to the President on

the options, pro and con, open to the United States in a recent study for

the Council on Foreign Relations. She noted that in the wake of the bombing

of Serb targets and the occupation of Kosovo, "the apparent conflict

between our humanitarian justification for NATO action and our vote against

the I.C.C. in July 1998 feeds suspicion and confusion about our foreign

policy."

Even more important, she added: "Beyond Kosovo, our position on the court

will affect our ability to exercise leadership in shaping the international

order for the next century."