Jesse Helms: Man of Vision
by Clay Risen

"Most Americans — I must be candid — do not regard the United Nations as an end in and of itself. They see it as just one aspect of America's diplomatic arsenal, and to the extent that the UN is effective, the American people will continue to support it."

So said Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) during his address to the United Nations Security Council late last month. The address was historic not only because it was the first of its kind ever by an American senator, but also because it was one of the most bluntly hostile speeches delivered at the UN since Khrushchev.

Mixing explicit threats with good ol' boy logic ("I hope you have a translator who can speak 'southern'"), Helms made clear his opposition to such UN efforts as the International Criminal Court as well as its attempts to make the U.S. pay its massive amount of arrears.

Helms even threatened to pull out of the UN if it does not tow the line of U.S. foreign policy more closely - a threat that, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms could easily make good on.

It's easy enough to discredit Helms's position as unoriginal "America First" claptrap, standard fare from the right wing for the last 50 years. But Helms' speech has a further significance, one that will have a lasting relevance for world affairs.

It is the first, but certainly not the last, speech marking the emergence of a new trend in U.S. foreign policy, that of New Reaganism. Helms may have fired the first shot, but this year's campaign season will provide ample opportunity for others - from George Bush, Jr. to Pat Buchanan - to call for a return to the good old days, when the United States roared and everyone else listened.

As a foreign policy, Reaganism was based on the idea that because only the United States could defeat Communism, it deserved an unassailable, unlimited position at the top of the international food chain. While the rest of the world had to play according to the rules, the United States was allowed to do whatever it saw necessary to defeat the Soviet Union - from providing arms and training to Suharto's Indonesia to propping up Apartheid-era South Africa. It used and abused international organizations like the UN, and held to multilateral treaties only when it served the "National Interest."

Reaganism worked mostly because despite all of its ugly downsides, other countries were willing to throw their support behind the United States against the Soviets. But once the Cold War ended, most of our allies have set off on their own courses - the incredible strides made recently by the European Union, for example - and the United States has been left, through both the Bush and Clinton administrations, flailing around for a new definitive course of action.

Whereas Bush and Clinton tried to paint the United States as a sort of first among a world of equals, New Reaganism seems to see the last ten years as a series of mistakes - Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo - that would not have happened had the United States taken a more unilateral, no-questions-asked approach. In his speech, for instance, Helms referred to the UN peacekeepers' failure to contain the violence in Bosnia until the United States and NATO intervened as evidence of the need for a more America-centric world foreign policy.

New Reaganism also operates on a philosophical level. Whereas Bush and Clinton believed in the Kantian notion that the world worked best when everyone, even the United States, played by the same rules, New Reaganism reverts to a sort of Hobbesian every-man-for-himself, where the strongest country has the paternalistic obligation to protect the rest from each other, and at the same time is exempt from the rules the rest play by.

Helms said as much in his speech; in what amounted to a revolution in the field of oversimplification, he said that the International Criminal Court "claims sovereignty over American citizens without their consent —I guarantee you it's not going to happen."

It's important to realize that this attitude isn't nostalgia, but rather a timeless, recurring theme in American foreign policy — whenever things are going well for us, we figure that it's evidence of our international superiority, and we begin to call into question the treaties and obligations we signed on to when we were down.

In the 1920s it was the League of Nations debacle, in the 1950s it was the establishment of puppet international agreements like the International Monetary Fund and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Given the strength of the United States economy and the spread of US-style democratic capitalism around the world, we can expect to hear more of the same from Helms and the right wing in the coming year — particularly in the context of the election.

Years from now, people may look back on the Helms speech as the klaxon call for a radical realignment in American foreign policy. Just don't be surprised if this time the rest of the world doesn't follow suit.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.