REBEL ALLIANCES:

Why US shapes new global rules (The Monitor’s View, 3/06/06, CS Monitor)

The US-India deal, which brings India only partly into the norms of the Non-proliferation Treaty, is really a bilateral pact driven by the US. It’s also a US statement about the NPT’s failure to block bomb-building efforts by Iran and North Korea.

Another current example of the US trying to bend or create global rules is its demand to the United Nations on how to fix that body’s Human Rights Commission, which has included such members as Cuba and Sudan. A plan for partial reform pushed by UN leaders, reflecting compromise with the UN’s many nondemocratic states, is unacceptable to a White House that doesn’t want such a halfway step.

Many other examples add up to a US campaign to define the world in an American image, such as who controls the Internet’s protocols, by not putting Saddam Hussein on trial in the new international criminal court, and by forming a group of nations outside the Kyoto treaty to tackle climate change through technical fixes. It’s even tried to redefine the Geneva Conventions for the terrorist age by holding “enemy combatants.”

One of the President’s most important legacies is