The Sources of American Legitimacy

Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004

Summary:  The 18 months since the launch of the Iraq war have left the country's hard-earned respect and credibility in tatters. In going to war without a legal basis or the backing of traditional U.S. allies, the Bush administration brazenly undermined Washington's long-held commitment to international law, its acceptance of consensual decision-making, its reputation for moderation, and its identification with the preservation of peace. The road back will be a long and hard one.

Robert W. Tucker is Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University. David C. Hendrickson is Robert J. Fox Distinguished Service Professor at Colorado College.

Kosovo, of course, was an exception to this generally permissive environment. In that instance, Russia blocked approval by the Security Council, but this was arguably a case in which skepticism was indeed warranted. Although the Kosovo intervention continues to be defended as an "illegal but legitimate" intervention, there are good grounds for challenging this judgment. The case for military action was attended by gross exaggeration of the scale of killing by Serbian forces and paramilitaries. The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and his colleagues at the Hague tribunal alleges Serbian complicity in the deaths of "hundreds of Kosovo Albanian civilians" rather than the 100,000 or more that advocates of intervention had claimed before the war. It was the bombing campaign itself-launched after Serbia failed to submit to NATO's humiliating demand for military access throughout its territory-that provoked the most serious humanitarian crisis. Neglected, too, by those advocating intervention was the fact that the Kosovo Liberation Army had taken up arms to secure independence from Serbia; what were represented as acts of actual or impending genocide by Serbia were measures not terribly different from those that most governments would undertake if confronted with a threat to their territorial integrity. Rather than action to prevent genocide, the Kosovo intervention promised outside support to ethnic groups that seek the territorial dismemberment of an existing state. During the war, the NATO coalition's unwillingness to introduce ground forces, instead bombing the infrastructure of Belgrade and throughout the country, was a further moral cost of this ostensible humanitarian action. Five years after the intervention, the United States and its allies remain far from achieving a stable settlement and have prevented one kind of ethnic cleansing, of Albanians by Serbs, only at the price of another, of Serbs by Albanians.

In the aftermath of Kosovo, NATO governments repeatedly claimed that the intervention "would constitute the exception from the rule, not an attempt to create new international law," in the words of former NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana. But this attempt to limit the reach of the Kosovo precedent did not prevent the advocates of the Iraq war from invoking it to justify toppling Saddam. Undoubtedly, reasonable people could see the need to deal with the serious humanitarian crisis in Kosovo, and it was a partially legitimating factor that the intervention at least secured the support of a regional security organization. But reasonable people should also see that a bad precedent was set by the NATO action, and that the way the West responded to the crisis-particularly the irresponsible bombing of yet another capital city-made this humanitarian intervention quite inhumane in its methods.

THE ROAD HOME

There is no simple and direct route to the recovery of U.S. legitimacy. The years when the United States appeared as the hope of the world now seem long distant. Washington is hobbled by a reputation for the reckless use of force, and it is going to take a long time to live that down. World public opinion now sees the United States increasingly as an outlier-invoking international law when convenient, and ignoring it when not; using international institutions when they work to its advantage, and disdaining them when they pose obstacles to U.S. designs.

The United States has gone down a road in which the use of force has become a chronic feature of U.S. foreign policy, and the country's security has been weakened rather than bolstered as a consequence. It is true, of course, that the American public does not like the idea of deferring to others, but it may come to see the advantages of doing so once it appreciates that enterprises undertaken on a unilateral basis must be paid for on a unilateral basis. Ultimately, however, the importance of legitimacy goes beyond its unquestionable utility. Certainly the leaders who earned the United States' reputation for legitimacy in the post-World War II era believed it to be a good in itself. For its own sake, and for the sake of a peaceful international order, the nation must find its way back to that conviction again.