Multilateral When Possible, Unilateral When Necessary Principle

The Multilateral When Possible, Unilateral When Necessary Principle describes a U.S. approach that invokes multilateral cooperation without surrendering the option of unilateral action. Noam Chomsky treats it not as a departure invented by George W. Bush, but as a persistent policy posture: a coalition may be assembled, yet the United States reserves the authority to decide and act for itself. His critique links that posture to strategic interests and asks whether cooperation can count as genuinely collective when partners are expected to support U.S. decisions without shaping them.

Earlier Formulations

Chomsky locates an explicit precedent in 1993, when Bill Clinton informed the United Nations that the United States intended to act, as before, multilateral when possible and unilateral when necessary. In his account, this was not simply a formula announced and left unused: the United States proceeded on that basis. Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, reiterated the position, and in 1999 Defense Secretary William Cohen said the country relied on the unilateral use of military power to defend its vital interests.

The interests named in this policy were broad. They included securing unrestricted access to essential markets, energy sources, and strategic resources, while leaving Washington room to define what fell within its remit. Against that record, Chomsky describes Bush’s approach as an intensification of familiar practice rather than a wholly new doctrine. Its greater reach, he says, had already caused serious concern among allies before the September 11 attacks.

Coalition Without Shared Authority

After September 11, the United States sought an international coalition and offered countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia a range of political, military, and financial measures in exchange for support. Chomsky allows that coalition-building might moderate the administration’s rhetoric, but doubts it would change the policy itself. The distinction is between having partners and sharing authority: in his account, coalition members were expected to remain quiet and compliant, not to participate in decisions.

He argues that the administration continued to reserve an unambiguous right to act as it chose while carefully avoiding recourse to international institutions where the law would require it. Some U.S. actions might be presented as evidence of a changed, more cooperative stance, but Chomsky considers that display unconvincing. Governments, he adds, might accept it because doing so suited them or because they were accustomed to accommodating power. The principle therefore appears less as a promise of joint decision-making than as a conditional offer of cooperation on terms set in Washington.

Law, Force, and Selective Cooperation

Chomsky places the principle against the postwar framework limiting the use of force. Under the United Nations Charter, as he summarizes it, force is barred except in self-defense against an armed attack, pending action by the Security Council to protect international peace and security; reprisals are prohibited. He argues that the September 11 attacks did not constitute an armed attack against the United States in the sense of Article 51, and that the self-defense rationale could not be invoked if international law’s basic principles were understood to apply equally to the United States.

His contrast is with a lawful international response based on evidence and collective action. Nearly the whole world, he says, called on the United States to provide proof of Osama bin Laden’s involvement. If such proof were assembled, he expected support for a major international operation under United Nations auspices to arrest and try him and his associates. Chomsky also says the Taliban had indicated possible diplomatic means of dealing with the matter, but that those proposals were rejected and force was chosen instead. In this framing, unilateralism is not only a question of who joins a coalition; it concerns whether the United States accepts legal procedures and institutional limits that might constrain its own actions.

He invokes Nicaragua as a sharp example of the asymmetry he sees in the system. In the 1980s, the United States attacked Nicaragua, causing tens of thousands of deaths and devastating the country, alongside economic warfare. Nicaragua went to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in its favor and ordered the United States to cease its actions and pay substantial reparations. The United States rejected the decision and intensified its attacks. At the Security Council, it vetoed a resolution calling on states to observe international law; the General Assembly later adopted a similar resolution, opposed by the United States and Israel for two consecutive years. For Chomsky, this history makes the language of international cooperation inseparable from the question of whether the powerful will accept rulings and limits when those limits apply to them.

Strategic Interests and Global Reach

The principle’s practical stakes, in Chomsky’s account, extend beyond the immediate military campaign. He describes U.S. policy as protecting access to markets, energy, and strategic resources, and presents Afghanistan as part of a wider contest over Central Asia rather than the central prize in itself. Proposed pipelines there had for years figured in U.S. efforts to control the region’s resources. After the war in Afghanistan, the United States established major military bases in Central Asia for the first time, improving its capacity for intervention and complementing a network oriented toward the Gulf. Before the war, Chomsky notes, Diego Garcia had been the safest base in that system.

He also connects unilateral power to military credibility. The Bush administration, he argues, viewed the new phase of the War on Terror as an opportunity to consolidate its already overwhelming military superiority and promote global dominance. During a visit to the United States, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz urged the administration to take greater account of Arab responses to U.S. support for Israeli repression. Chomsky recounts that U.S. officials answered that they did not care what he or other Arabs thought. He cites an official’s comparison of the force used in Afghanistan with Operation Desert Storm, and a former military official’s view that firmness would command respect and prevent further challenge.

Chomsky explicitly distinguishes this interpretation from knowledge of confidential records: he says it seems reasonable to imagine that the consequences had been calculated and were a principal aim of the Afghanistan bombings—to warn the world of what the United States could do to those who did not follow its rules. He compares this account with NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton explained in terms of preserving NATO’s credibility. Chomsky stresses that this meant U.S. credibility and that of its principal arms client, rather than the credibility of Norway or Italy. In this analysis, the language of alliance and collective security can coexist with a demonstration of power intended to reinforce the freedom to act unilaterally.

Continuity and Consequences

Chomsky’s conclusion is not that September 11 changed nothing. He says the fundamental international problems largely remained, but that the attacks introduced changes likely to have significant and unwelcome consequences. One of those changes was the expansion of U.S. military access in Central Asia; another was a renewed opportunity, in his view, to strengthen an existing global military position under the banner of counterterrorism.

The principle thus names both a declared flexibility and a deeper continuity. Its multilateral language can help assemble support, while its unilateral reservation preserves Washington’s freedom to define vital interests and the means of defending them. Chomsky’s central test is whether cooperation entails shared decisions and submission to common rules—or merely the participation of other states in a policy whose decisive authority remains American.