The Great Transformation and the Failure of Illiberal Hegemony - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 182

agreements. Along the way, it signaled a new resolve to resist recently negotiated multilateral
agreements in areas of climate control, international justice, and arms control. Each agree-
ment had its specific liabilities from the viewpoint of the administration, but the resistance
was also a more general orientation that a full range of old and new multilateral agreements
imposed unacceptable constraints on American sovereignty, interests, and freedom of ac-
tion. 80
This orientation that the Bush administration brought to office has been described as the
“new unilateralism.” “After eight years during which foreign policy success was largely
measured by the number of treaties the president could sign and the number of summits he
could attend, we now have an administration willing to assert American freedom of action
and the primacy of American national interests,” wrote the conservative essayist Charles
Krauthammer. “Rather than contain power within a vast web of constraining internation-
al agreements, the new unilateralism seeks to strengthen American power and unashamedly
deploy it on behalf of self-defined global ends.” 81 In this view, rules and institutions were
primarily useful for weak states that want to try to constrain powerful states, most particularly
the United States. In one of the most sweeping critiques, for example, Bush administration
official John Bolton argued before becoming Under Secretary of State that a great struggle
was unfolding between what he called “Americanists” and “globalists.” Globalists were de-
picted as elite activist groups who seek to strengthen “global governance through a widening
net of agreements on environment, human rights, labor, health, and political-military affairs
and whose agenda is to enmesh the United States in international laws and institutions that
rob the country of its sovereignty.” 82 The postwar growth of multilateral treaties and agree-
ments—the so-called global governance movement—was perceived as the result of a primar-
ily liberal agenda that threatened American sovereignty and self-rule. Accordingly, Bolton
and others argued for an agenda of prudent resistance to entanglement in multilateral agree-
ments and institutions. The rise of American power after the Cold War provided an oppor-
tunity to restore American policy autonomy and sovereign control of its affairs. 83
Second, there was a deep skepticism about anything that might be called the “international
community.” So to try to use American foreign policy to strengthen the international commu-
nity or to adjust policy to abide by its norms and precepts was misguided—even dangerous.
The United States operates in a system of states where power politics prevails. Condoleezza
Rice articulated this conservative realist view during the 2000 presidential campaign to de-
scribe how a Republican administration policy would differ from Clinton's liberal interna-
tionalism. Many in the United States are “uncomfortable with the notions of power politics,
great powers, and power balances,” Rice observed. “In an extreme form, this discomfort leads
to a reflexive appeal instead to notions of international law and norms, and the belief that the
support of many states—or even better, of institutions like the United Nations—is essential
to the legitimate exercise of power.” In contrast to this view, which she describes as deeply