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The United States has a long and shameful tradition of holding itself above both international opinion and, more importantly, law, while demanding that other countries play by all the rules.

As the United Nations has become more internally democratic, and non-Western nations have made inroads, we have responded by turning away from the UN. Most importantly, we have been threatening to skip out on our membership dues, and we have been very slow in paying (incidentally, forcing the UN to beg before multinational corporations.)

Our war in Yugoslavia was a slap in the face of the UN and the world. In addition to violating the NATO Charter (which expressly states that NATO exists solely to defend Western European soil from an invasion, not to provide a pretense of international consensus for US agression) and our own Constitution (which reserves for Congress exclusively the power to start a war), our attack of Yugoslavia was in violation of the UN Charter, which forbids any member state from attacking another member state, excepting self defense, without the permission of the UN Security Council. Permission which we did not attain.

The Clinton administration further alienated the rest of the world by exacerbating the international AIDS crisis by pressuring developing nations to recognize American drug monopolies, supporting the death penalty and by opposing the International Criminal Court and a treaty to band landmines.

US arrogance has never been so plain, however, as in the administration of George W. Bush. His rejection of the Kyoto protocol and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty undermine our credibility, attack the environment and threaten a costly and dangerous world nuclear arms race. The US has finally gotten to the point where even our friends don’t like us anymore.

Despite written pledges of support from 41 countries, the secret ballots only came in at 29, and for the first time in 54 years of UN history, we will not have a seat on the Comission on Human Rights. Of the fourteen seats up for a vote, three were reserved for Western nations, and these went to France, Austria and Sweden.

Expect the official response from Washington to be sour grapes. We tend to ignore or reject any institution that doesn’t treat us like a king. For example, Representative Henry Hyde (R.-Ill.), chairman of the House International Relations Committee (you might remember him as the chief House prosecutor in the Clinton impeachment) has already threatened that excluding the US “may have the unfortunate result of turning the human rights commission into just another irrelevant international organization.”

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