By Rami G. Khouri
The Daily Star, Lebanon

Why does most of the world continue to lose respect for the United States and its conduct of foreign policy? Two developments in the past week shed some light on this, and – not surprisingly – they both relate to Washington’s relations with Iran and Israel, an arena in which American rationality, fairness, consistency and integrity go out the window, and hysteria takes over the controls.

Last Friday, President Barack Obama announced that his analysis of global oil trading led him to conclude that there were sufficient supplies of crude oil in the market for the U.S. to implement previously announced sanctions on countries that buy oil from Iran. If third countries do not reduce or stop their oil purchases and commercial dealings with the central bank of Iran, those countries would not be allowed to do any business with the United States.

Two rather extraordinary aspects of this decision deserve noting. The first is the presumptuous American attitude that Washington can decide on its own whether the global oil market is sufficiently robust to allow the U.S. to unilaterally issue orders to other sovereign countries about where they can or cannot buy oil from. This American sense of global arrogance already extends to several other domains in which lawmakers in Washington – most of whom are deeply ignorant of the world beyond their borders – presumptuously issue reports and rankings about the status of human rights, religious freedoms, press freedoms, democracy or other such issues around the world.

The United States does not see itself as a leading power among equally sovereign states around the world; it sees itself as the definer and guarantor of global behavior, and the enforcer of norms that it sets on its own. Most of the world rejects and resents this.

The second more problematic aspects of the oil sanctions and commercial trading decision is that the U.S. will now enforce a secondary boycott against countries that buy Iranian oil via transactions with Iran’s central bank.

My problem with this is not that the U.S. should not impose such a secondary boycott, which all countries are free to use. My problem is that the United States explicitly and vehemently opposed such a secondary boycott when the Arab countries did exactly the same thing in relation to third-country companies that invested in or appreciably assisted the Israeli economy because of the active state of war between Arabs and Israelis. Washington rejected this rationale and said that the Arab boycott had to be opposed and busted.

Now the United States applies exactly the same principle, totally abandoning the values that it summoned when it opposed the Arab boycott of Israel. The continuing insistence by Washington that its foreign policy should operate according to a different set of rules than the rest of the world – especially when Israel is concerned – is a major reason why so many people and governments around the world look at American foreign policy with disdain and disrespect.

Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2012/Apr-04/169134-the-infernal-us-iran-israel-triangle.ashx#ixzz1rBmqaCIK
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)