The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush began with a clear and pronounced bent toward unilateralism in foreign policy. Japan felt this most keenly with respect to the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, but others also experienced it with regard to arms control treaties and the International Criminal Court. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, most foreigners hoped that the United States would become more sympathetic to the idea of global governance. Many now fear that, instead, the U.S. has concluded that Sept. 11 has freed it of any remaining need to accommodate international feelings in framing national foreign policy.
With Iraq, Iran and North Korea publicly identified as the contemporary "axis of evil," with warnings of the risks of permitting man's most destructive weapons to fall into the hands of the world's most dangerous regimes and with promises of the U.S. acting before and not after it has been attacked, is the Bush administration likely to intervene to change the composition of the governments of these countries? And where does this fit into the late 1990s' debate about "humanitarian intervention"?
International intervention for human protection occurs so that those condemned to die in fear may instead live with hope. The goal is not to wage war on a state to destroy it and eliminate its statehood, but to protect victims of atrocities inside the state, to embed the protection in reconstituted institutions after the intervention and then to withdraw all foreign troops.