Margot Lynn/The Hoya Harvard International Affairs Professor John Ruggie spoke in the ICC Auditorium on April 6.

Increasing hostility against Americans in Iraq and growing anti-American sentiment worldwide have proven U.S. unilateralism unsustainable, said John Ruggie, the Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University in a speech on April 6.

Speaking to a capacity crowd in ICC Auditorium Ruggie, who also serves at Harvard as the Weil Director of Center for Business and Government, said that global politics have begun to hamper American unilateralism.

Ruggie described the underlying dynamics of American exceptionalism, which he said stem from “the domestic drawbacks of multilateralism.”

According to Ruggie, presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan have tried to minimize the embarrassment of exceptionalism in human rights during the Cold War, an attitude that he said was the result of “opposing international human rights instruments we ourselves proposed.”

Moving to the Bush administration, Ruggie said that Bush was no longer subject to “disciplining effects” of the Cold War, which was evidenced by the administration’s resistance to international treaties and organizations like the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court and the Biological Weapons Convention.

The continuation of such policies, he concluded, were unsustainable.

Ruggie supported his argument with two recent examples where he said American unilateralism proved to be costly “not only to others but also to ourselves,” pointing to the Iraq war.

Ruggie said there is no automatic relationship between power and legitimacy, and “only others can endow the use of power with international legitimacy,” he said. “Others look for evidence that power is deployed in commonly shared goals and norms.”

He said emerging global civil politics prevented leaders from supporting the war in Iraq. He called the lack of support from democracies “a dilemma” for the United States.

The United States could not only convince Germany and France on the legitimacy of the war in Iraq, but also countries like Mexico, Chile and Turkey.

“The foreign leaders have to think what their people think about them,” he said, before alluding to the recent ouster of the ruling party in Spain that had supported the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq. “Ask former Spanish Prime Minister Aznar.”

U.S. corporations will also pay the costs of American unilateralism, he said, and soon they will start to resist the policy. He said boycotts for these companies are spreading from the iddle East to Europe.

“Criticisms from international business and different segments would kick in quicker if it wasn’t for 9/11,” Ruggie said. “9/11 gave the Bush administration license to act its precept more extensively than otherwise.”

His second example was the U.S. policy toward the Kyoto Protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

“Bush’s resistance externalized the cost to other social actors,” Ruggie said.

He said half of the states have adopted their own standards to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, and 50 different state standards would “drive [oil] companies crazy.” He said the companies themselves want the congress to adopt common national standards.

The lecture was the third annual Goldman Sachs Distinguished Lecture.