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Later in May 2002 the United States did sign a treaty with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to reduce nuclear warheads, but many believe the treaty actually increases potential dangers, since we have no way of verifying what happens to the decommissioned warheads. Russia’s nuclear stockpiles are notoriously poorly guarded and are an obvious source of weapons and potential weapons for terrorists. The administration has paid so little attention to the problem that in August 2002 a private foundation, Ted Turner’s Nuclear Threat Initiative, paid $5 million to secure from a poorly guarded reactor in Belgrade enough highly enriched uranium to make two and half nuclear bombs. Warren Buffett later contributed $2.5 million for the same purpose. The Bushies seem to be privatizing nonproliferation efforts.

Also in May, at the U.N. Special Session on Children, the behavior of the U.S. delegation again appalled the rest of the world. Siding with Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Iraq, the United States objected to sex education for adolescents, tried to restrict information on sexually transmitted infections and contraception to heterosexual married couples, and fought to redefine “reproductive-health services” to exclude abortion. The United States also blocked a move opposing capital punishment for adolescents. Then we objected to a section calling for services to children in “post-conflict situations,” meaning children injured and traumatized by war, because our delegates were afraid that might include girls who had been raped and who could be offered an abortion or even emergency contraception (which is entirely legal in the United States).

Meanwhile, the Bushies continued their pattern of sending career ideologues rather than career diplomats to international conferences. They stripped $34 million out of the United Nations Population Fund and withheld $3 million from the World Health Organization’s Human Reproduction Program. The United Nations estimates that this will eventually result in 800,000 additional abortions around the globe, since it cuts money for family planning.

The move against the Population Fund has become the focus of a rather extraordinary effort among American women to replace the money dollar by dollar. Two women, Lois Abraham, a lawyer in New Mexico, and Jane Roberts, a retired schoolteacher in California, decided that American women needed to act to replace the money. They announced, starting by e-mail to their own friends, that they wanted 34 million women to send a dollar each to the fund.* As Jennifer Block noted in The Nation, Bush has since earmarked almost exactly that amount—$33 million—to encourage abstinence-only sex education here at home. At the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Bush was the only major leader who did not attend) and at the Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference American delegates again and again gave the impression they thought it was “my way or the highway.”

On June 1, 2002, in a speech at West Point, Bush announced the doctrine of “preemptive war.” “Unilaterally determined preemptive self-defense” is indeed a concept. As Tony Judt wrote in August 2002, “It paints once more the picture of an American leadership deaf to criticism or advice. It is a leadership that seems all too often contemptuous and bellicose, and, in the words of El Pais, fuels ‘public alarm’ by its obsessions and self-serving warnings of imminent Armageddon.”

The speech was based on something called the National Security Strategy, one of the most radical and chilling foreign-policy statements ever made by this country. It commits the country to spend untold billions to dissuade any and all other countries from “a military buildup in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.” We are also committed to “rid the world of evil.” That could take a while. This is frankly ridiculous and has

already led to glaringly inconsistent policies. Quite a shift from John Quincy Adams’ “We go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

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