The big problem we have in dealing with propaganda wars with the Europeans is a publicly available and plausible analysis of their motives. If the Europeans are mad at us it must be our fault because, as we all know, those who want multilateral institutions are good seeking the betterment of all mankind while those who defend the right of nation states to determine their own affairs and, particularly, to fight wars, are on the side of selfish aggrandizement.
First of all, we should make clear that power is a good that nations and peoples pursue for its own sake. The European powers know that the only means of competing with us at their disposal is through multilateral institutions. This doesn't make their motives bad--power can be sought for good and bad reasons, but it is always sought--but there is no reason it should not entitle them to a presumption of having good motives.
We should also constantly remind people that international institutions are not servants of all the people of the world, just all their governments. Some of these governments are good but many are not.
But even if they were all democratic--and most of the democratic ones are critical of us as well--that should not entitle them to the presumption of good motives relative to ours. Even if people are democratic it does not mean that their motives are good. Anyone on the left who criticizes the second Bush administration must at least admit that people can be misled about their true interests since it is obviously the case that Bush was democratically elected. If the American electorate can be mislead by ignorance or emotions of false pride into backing a policy that is against mankind's true best interests, why cannot the publics of advanced European democracies make the same sort of mistake?
Surely it requires a certain amount of willful ignorance to blame all our problems with the Muslim world on Israel. For instance, where is the Israel factor in the 325 Thais that have been killed so far this year in the Muslim quest to impose Sharia on that most tolerant of countries? Eight of these people have been beheaded, 27 of the dead are school teachers. But we can't expect this to go away until there is justice for the Palestinians. Then everything will be fine. And is it impossible to see how more than a little false pride may be at work when America is criticized by the UN for threatening to send Guantanimo detainees to their countries of origin while the human rights records of these same countries are not only not criticized but even rewarded (think of the Sudanese replacing the Libyans on the Human Rights Commission). Surely some of the indignation at America's supposed hypocrisy in claiming to be promoting Human Rights while countenancing such abuses could be motivated by the guilty knowledge of our detractors that they are by any measure far worse (it is, for instance, hard to make a brief for France on this score).
Which brings us to a final point. When criticizing another nation for human rights violations a nation inevitably makes itself open to scrutiny on the same issues. It would be rather a delicate thing for France to criticize the US for selling arms to Sadaam when they themselves sold about 250 times as much to him over any comparable period. Complaints about the Patriot Act would be rather hard to make if you were a government—and this includes almost any country on the planet, democracy or not—that grants its police even more latitude in investigations of even ordinary crimes. But put the criticism in the UN and the hypocrisy problem is solved. The UN has no human rights record to defend. It is a creature of the nations that compose it. Voicing criticisms through it has the effect of washing away all sins.
And why wouldn’t a nation take advantage of mechanism so beautifully adapted to the needs of the small, numerous and morally compromised. The thing we should remember is that the desire to take power from the US and put it into international institutions is not selfless—it results in an increase in power for almost all of the nations of the world. The desire for power is just as natural for small nations as for large—and not necessarily any more admirable.
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