8.27.2005
Road Map for US Relations With Rest of World (Guardian.co.uk)
Hundreds of deletions and insertions on just about every global issue could undermine the UN summit agreement
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday August 27, 2005
The Guardian
For any student of the Bush administration's foreign policy, the US version of the draft United Nations summit agreement, leaked earlier this week, is an essential text.
The hundreds of deletions and insertions represent a helpfully annotated map to Washington's disagreements with most of the rest of the world on just about every global issue imaginable.
Most of the disagreements illustrated in this document are longstanding. President Bush was never going to sign a document urging UN member states to support the Kyoto protocol on climate change, or the international criminal court. The mystery is how these differences surfaced only at the end of a long drafting process.
There are two versions of how this happened. The US delegation says it was raising its objections informally at meetings to discuss the draft, and was forced to circulate its blunt list of deletions and additions only after those objections were ignored.
The account provided by European officials at the UN explains the late timing of this intervention by turmoil inside the US foreign policy establishment. For the first seven months of this year, as the draft was being hammered out, the US had no full permanent representative at the UN. John Danforth retired in January, and the White House's attention was focused on persuading the Senate to confirm John Bolton. A career diplomat, Anne Patterson, led the delegation in the interim, but reportedly received little political guidance from Washington.
(More ... Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Road map for US relations with rest of world) ¶ 17:01
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday August 27, 2005
The Guardian
For any student of the Bush administration's foreign policy, the US version of the draft United Nations summit agreement, leaked earlier this week, is an essential text.
The hundreds of deletions and insertions represent a helpfully annotated map to Washington's disagreements with most of the rest of the world on just about every global issue imaginable.
Most of the disagreements illustrated in this document are longstanding. President Bush was never going to sign a document urging UN member states to support the Kyoto protocol on climate change, or the international criminal court. The mystery is how these differences surfaced only at the end of a long drafting process.
There are two versions of how this happened. The US delegation says it was raising its objections informally at meetings to discuss the draft, and was forced to circulate its blunt list of deletions and additions only after those objections were ignored.
The account provided by European officials at the UN explains the late timing of this intervention by turmoil inside the US foreign policy establishment. For the first seven months of this year, as the draft was being hammered out, the US had no full permanent representative at the UN. John Danforth retired in January, and the White House's attention was focused on persuading the Senate to confirm John Bolton. A career diplomat, Anne Patterson, led the delegation in the interim, but reportedly received little political guidance from Washington.
(More ... Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Road map for US relations with rest of world) ¶ 17:01
