REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The New Multilateralism
How the U.S., with international cooperation, brought Libya to heel.
The media have barely noticed, but the Bush Administration has embarked on a burst of "multilateral" cooperation. It's called the Proliferation Security Initiative, and in only a few months of existence it has already had more success than the United Nations in controlling weapons of mass destruction.
Just ask Moammar Gadhafi. As the Journal reported last week, the Libyan strongman finally agreed to open his country's weapons sites to arms inspectors only after the U.S. and its PSI allies halted the illegal shipment of uranium-enrichment equipment headed for Libya's nuclear-arms program.
It remains to be seen whether Gadhafi will actually dismantle his program, but at least it's been exposed--no thanks, by the way, to the U.N. agency charged with monitoring such things. Libya's nuclear program was news to the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors somehow missed it entirely--after they'd earlier missed secret programs in North Korea and Iran.
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But don't mistake PSI for a multilateral institution in the conventional sense. There's no headquarters, no secretary-general, no talkfests--and, perhaps most important of all, no French or Russian veto. "PSI is an activity, not an organization," a senior Administration official tells us. It's an action-oriented group that "needs to be agile and move fast."
As PSI grows, the U.S. official contemplates "dozens of other countries participating" in dozens of different ways. Call it mix-and-match multilateralism. Countries participate or not, depending on the need at hand and on their own capabilities. The one common thread is U.S. leadership.
Take the Libya operation, in which four nations took part. The Brits and the Yanks provided intelligence, learning in late September that a freighter bound for Libya was carrying thousands of parts for centrifuges, a key component in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. With the help of the German government and the German shipping company that owned the freighter, the U.S. got the ship diverted to a port in Italy, where it was boarded and the illicit cargo seized.
North Korea felt the force of a similar operation last August, when a Pyongyang-bound freighter was boarded in a Taiwanese port and its undeclared cargo confiscated. The freighter was carrying 158 barrels of phosphorus pentasulfide, a precursor for chemical weapons.
The North Korean caper took place under the auspices of a bilateral U.S.-Taiwan agreement, but the objective was the same as PSI's--to keep WMD out of the hands of rogue nations. In case Pyongyang didn't get the message, PSI conducted its first interdiction exercise a few weeks later--led by Australia in the Coral Sea.
Critics say PSI can't succeed without China and Russia, through whose territory or airspace North Korean arms would need to transit if PSI stops maritime shipments. Neither nation has signed up but both have told the U.S. they support PSI's objectives. We wonder if they'd really refuse if asked to interdict something by PSI nations.
Then there are those who think we'd all be safer if only we'd "strengthen" the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The new idea would have U.N. inspectors permanently monitor and control stockpiles of nuclear material. But effective arms control requires enforcement, and new, tougher NPT terms hardly matter with a U.N. that declined to act against Saddam Hussein and North Korea.
The spread of WMD is the gravest threat to world security and will sometimes need to be met with force. The U.S. needs all the help it can get, but the old global institutions aren't up to the job. The PSI is a herald of the real new world order, multilateralism with teeth.
