Essay: Going It Alone

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The bombing attack against Libya is the most dramatic example to date of an important theme in the foreign policy of the Reagan Administration: a determination to use American military power against enemies anywhere in the world, regardless of whether the U.S. has the support of its allies. Being a superpower often means not having to say either please or sorry.

Pundits and political scientists have a fancy, almost tongue-tying bit of jargon for this tendency: global unilateralism. That phrase has been bandied about by both admirers and critics of the Administration, as well as by others who are ambivalent about official American attitudes and behavior.

Several other examples of global unilateralism look, in retrospect, like dress rehearsals for this latest, most spectacular and most controversial military clash in the Reagan era. In 1981 the U.S. Navy made quick work of Gaddafi's air force over the Gulf of Sidra, and late last month the U.S. bloodied those waters again. There were also the 1983 invasion of Grenada and last year's interception of an Egyptian airliner with the Achille Lauro hijackers aboard.

The new American penchant for going it alone is also apparent in two more general commitments of the Administration: the so-called Reagan Doctrine of support for anti-Communist guerrilla movements and the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars.

The Reagan Doctrine holds that the U.S. should bypass nervous and sometimes unreliable foreign friends in order to harass and, if possible, overthrow Moscow's clients in the Third World. SDI, as originally conceived by Reagan in 1983, was a deus ex machina of global unilateralism: a made-in-the-U.S.A. system for effectively disarming the Soviet Union and any other foreign threat to the U.S. (including, in a number of scenarios, a nuclear-armed Gaddafi or other Islamic firebrand.

These policies--whether quick-and-dirty one-shot actions such as Sidra I, II and III or long-term strategies such as the Reagan Doctrine and Star Wars --have evoked mixed reactions abroad. Denis Healey, the British Labor Party's most prominent spokesman on foreign policy, has continually protested global unilateralism in so many words. Last week Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, sensing a new buzz word in the Esperanto of Uncle Sam bashing, denounced the U.S. for "neoglobalism." At the same time, public remonstrations from the chancelleries of Europe and elsewhere have often been modulated with whispered encouragement to Washington to keep up the good work. The point about global unilateralism, however, is not whether others like it or not, but that the U.S. no longer cares quite so much one way or the other.

. While the Reagan Administration has given global unilateralism both doctrinal and operational standing that it did not have before, the phenomenon has been around for decades. After World War II, the U.S. found itself with global interests, global responsibilities and global reach. It also had in the Soviet Union an adversary of far-reaching ambitions and capabilities. Yet American alliances were, and remained, essentially regional. In the '50s and '60s, the U.S. worked hard to give its allies a sense that they were partners in the U.S.'s worldwide mission.