Pentagon Reaffirms Globocop Role
by Jim Lobe
Inter-Press Service


WASHINGTON -- March has been a bad month for the world's multilateralists who, encouraged by several early appointments to the State Department and a successful presidential tour of Europe, had hoped that George W. Bush would temper his unilateralist instincts in his second term.

But culminating in Friday's release by the Pentagon of a new ”National Defense Strategy of the United States of America”, the last few weeks have showered a bracing dose of cold water on that notion.

Combined with the nomination earlier in the month of super-unilateralist John Bolton as Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, as well as the U.S. withdrawal from the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for cases involving the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the Strategy strongly suggests that Washington's interest in its traditional alliances, multilateral institutions, and even international law is on a downward trajectory.

The 24-page public document, signed by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is designed to lay out some of the basic assumptions of the U.S. role in the world, particularly as regards peace and security, that will guide the Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR), an important exercise carried out every four years that steers U.S. strategy, the Pentagon