A `reluctant sheriff' with Powell-like doveish views

A rumour began to circulate in Ireland last week that the new American ambassador might be in trouble with the US Senate. That someone might want to give him a grilling at his confirmation hearing.

"Egan, Dick Egan? In trouble? You must be joking, he'll sail through," the congressman's aide said of the Massachusetts tech billionaire who is heading for Dublin. But another ambassador will also be preoccupied with things Irish from Washington.

"Haass, now that's another matter . . ."

Awaiting confirmation as ambassador, Richard N. Haass, the head of policy planning at the US State Department, last weekend took on a new role as President Bush's "point man" on the Northern Ireland peace process as well as several other responsibilities of no small significance: Iraq, US sanctions policy, and a part-share in the Middle East. Not to mention foreign policy speechwriting.

And Haass's past pronouncements on each - perhaps with the exception of speechwriting - will provide plenty of ammunition for a Senate that might wish to embarrass Mr Bush. But Haass, the author of The Reluctant Sheriff (1997), a relatively doveish analysis of what he sees as the US role on the world stage in the post-Cold War age as the lone superpower, is no reluctant polemicist and will revel, according to those who know him, in crossing swords with the senators.

Although he may face some questions on Ireland, Senate sources say there will be no serious Irish-American opposition to his nomination, but Haass could face a real grilling on Iraq and Israel, where his moderate views have alarmed the pro-Israeli hawks in both Democratic and Republican camps, some of them inside the administration.

A vitriolic article in this week's New Republic (a liberal magazine) by Lawrence Kaplan accuses Haass of being "the oil industry's man in the State Department", bought with its funding of his research to open its markets again in Iraq. Kaplan accuses Haass of being responsible in the last Bush administration for its willingness to stand up to Israel by threatening to withhold loan guarantees and of playing down the threat of Saddam Hussein. His article is nothing less than a call to arms against the nomination.

But the reluctant sheriff is a good metaphor for what we know of the President's foreign policy, whose articulation in key areas will be Haass's responsibility - a conservative scepticism of traditional enemies such as China and North Korea, but a light touch and generally leaving the world's rowdies to sort themselves out.

Very much in the mould of the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who gets on well with him, Haass is a supporter of "effective multilateralism", and does not believe the US should go it alone on the world stage. US primacy cannot last forever, and he argues the US must lead by building coalitions of countries or institutions that would concentrate on doing two big jobs - preventing aggression between nations and promoting free trade.

"If we can just get those two things right, we will have a solid foundation for peace and prosperity," he says.

Some argue that the purpose of US foreign policy should be to maintain US hegemony. "They want to prevent the rise of competitors. That is both impossible and unwise," he has argued. "We should be aiming to co-opt competitors and, where possible, transform them. Our goal should be to build a world to our liking that we can sustain at a reduced cost."

America, he argued in The Reluctant Sheriff, should attempt to build an international order based on four premises: less of a reliance on force to resolve international disputes; reducing the number of weapons of mass destruction; settling for a limited doctrine of humanitarian intervention; and maximum economic openness.

On China, for example, he insists economic engagement is the best way to change the country and that the neo-conservatives are "wrong and shortsighted" by trying to isolate Beijing, a strategy which will neither produce human rights there nor protect US strategic interests.

He has opposed the current form of sanctions on Iraq as ineffective and hitting the innocent, arguing for some years for the targeted, "intelligent sanctions" which Powell is trying to convince the administration to accept.

Haass has returned to hands-on diplomacy at the State Department after 10 years as head of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, one of Washington's most prestigious think-tank refuges for those cast aside temporarily by the vicissitudes of electoral politics.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951, his father was the vice-president for research of an investment company in New York and a stockbroker. Haass is a Rhodes Scholar and received his primary degree from Oberlin College and a doctorate from Oxford. In 1990 he married Susan Mercandetti, an independent television producer and consultant in Washington, and they have two children.

He served in various posts in the Departments of State (1981-85) and Defence (1979-80) and was a legislative aide in the US Senate, rising to prominence in the Bush Senior National Security Council as its Middle East and south Asia specialist under Brent Scowcroft during the Gulf War.

He has also been director of National Security Programmes and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The prolific Haass is the author or editor of nine books on American foreign policy, including The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War; Conflicts Unending: The United States and Regional Disputes; Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy; and Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post- Cold War World.

He is also the author of a book on management entitled The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur: How to Be Effective in Any Unruly Organisation, an expertise that may come in handy if the administration's foreign policy tensions are as deep as is suggested.

Although he has published little on Northern Ireland, some of his past comments, notably his chapter on the issue in Conflicts Unending (1990), have raised eyebrows in the Irish-American lobby here, although most accept such views reflected conservative mainstream wisdom at the time. They are certainly imbued with a pessimism that, with hindsight, appears unnecessarily like a counsel for inertia.

He has more recently praised former President Bill Clinton for his contribution to the North, though criticising the amount of time he devoted to it.

IN Conflicts Unending he argues that a US diplomatic intervention would have been inappropriate, even dangerous, because the situation was not "ripe for anything beyond the most modest achievements" - yet we know now that secret channels were already open between the British government and the IRA. "Progress and reconciliation in Northern Ireland can only be achieved at a painfully gradual pace," he argued.

And he criticises the British government for its failure to recognise the strength of Protestant opposition to initiatives such as Sunningdale and the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

"A case could be made," Haass argued, "that bringing the Irish dimension of the Northern Ireland problem to the forefront was certain to alienate virtually the entire Protestant population, not simply the most irredentist. London might have done better to emphasise power-sharing, for which support exists in both communities."

Nationalists will find disconcerting his failure to acknowledge that the British army may have played a role in its lack of acceptance in their community, and his contention that support for the RUC was on the increase.

But the emphasis on continued confidence-building measures and investment as crucial to a stalled process chimes well with current thinking across the board and by most accounts, Haass is a good listener.

As he will discover, that is an essential prerequisite.