Nothing could take the U.S. out of the superpower business sooner than the measure to limit U.S. contributions to United Nations peacekeeping that the House International Relations Committee approved Tuesday on a partisan vote of 23 to 18.
By charging the cost of U.S. voluntary peacekeeping to the U.N., it would effectively curtail what the U.N. and the U.S. could do.
It flows from the plank in the Republican campaign proposals against putting U.S. troops under U.N. command, but goes further. It reflects a notion that the U.N. is "them," inherently hostile to "us."
This is a crusade not against some particular foreign policy as misguided, but against foreign policy per se, as though the U.S. would be better off without any.
What's wrong with this is that the U.N. is not so much "them" as as it is "us." An enemy of U.S. influence could with more accuracy accuse peacekeepers of being mercenaries in U.S. service.
A great deal of anti-Western rhetoric heard at the U.N. in the 1970s has vanished, not all. But what delegates of powerless countries say for home consumption has little to do with the mission of troops in blue helmets established by the U.N. Security Council, where the United States has a veto.
Of more than 50 U.N. peace-keeping operations in a half-century, there is not one the U.S. disapproved. Most were advocated by the U.S., sometimes twisting the arms of other countries. Many serve active U.S. policies and interests.
Whoever thinks the U.S. cannot be the world's policeman, and that anarchy anywhere harms U.S. interests, should welcome the prospect of joining with Brits and Arabs to employ Irish and Bangladeshis to keep some distant peace.
At the moment there are 63,000 soldiers in blue helmets, only some 2 percent of them American, on 17 missions around the world. U.S. taxpayers pay something under one-third of the cost. The peace they try to keep, the U.S. wants kept.
A good example is Cyprus, where the United Nations Peace-Keeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) was established in 1964 and at last count had 1,188 troops and support personnel, 12 military observers and 35 civilian police.
The goal was to prevent Greece and Turkey, two U.S. allies in NATO, from warring with each other, and to insure the independence of Cyprus. It failed to prevent Turkish invasion in 1974 and partition.
It has further failed to bring about a permanent settlement, and may be there forever. But the object was to further a U.S. policy objective that the U.S. could not attempt by itself.
Or take the United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH), which was established on paper in September 1993 and is scheduled to replace U.S. troops in Haiti by March 31 with 6,000 troops, of whom 2,400 will be American, and 900 police.
The Haiti occupation was a U.S. operation with window dressing, and now the U.N. is being brought in to get the U.S. off the hook and most of the GIs home. The majority of the House Foreign Affairs Committee would be daft to oppose that.
Why would a nationalist seeking a large American influence in the world orchestrated by the U.S. president want to cut that option?
What we are seeing looks like traditional isolationism: a general antipathy for foreign parts coupled with a desire to get the U.S. out of them.
But unlike the run-ups to World Wars I and II, isolationism isn't an option. Not when U.S. companies and tourists and scholars and lTC missionaries are everywhere, when you can fly anywhere in a day, dial Papua New Guinea or fax Beijing.
Blame optic fibers and satellites. Everywhere matters. The world can be made better or worse for U.S. interests. It cannot be left alone, because it won't leave us alone.
There has been a skyrocketing cost of U.N. peace-keeping to the U.S., from $800 million in 1990 to more than $4 billion this year.
This was triggered by a Republican president, George Bush, who upon winning the Cold War thought that with the docile cooperation of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the U.S. could extend its reach through peacekeepers.
A lot of that optimism is gone. The need to impose discipline on expectations and restraint on budgeting of operations is obvious.
But for Congress to hamstring the president's ability to approve or participate in peacekeeping is to reduce his authority and influence in the world. Is that really what Congress wants to do?
Daniel Berger writes editorials for The Baltimore Sun.