When Henry Kissinger visited Paris in early June, an unwelcome invitation was delivered to him at the Ritz. A judge investigating the disappearance of five French citizens in Chile 25 years ago invited the former Secretary of State to attend his chambers to answer questions about what the Americans knew about the coup that toppled Allende and its aftermath.
By a strange coincidence, only a week beforehand, an Argentinian judge conducting a similar inquiry had made a similar request. Neither invitation was taken up.
In the week during which there has been enormous, enthusiatic ballyhoo here about the success in bringing Slobodan Milosevic before the International Court in The Hague, the story is a salutory reminder that official America is more than ambivalent about the novel idea of universal jurisdiction on which the court is based. In fact, it is downright hostile to it, a case made strongly in Dr Kissinger's latest attempt to formulate a US foreign policy strategy for the 21st century.
What the US objects to, it should be noted, is not Milosevic's trial, but the possibility that such a court could take a hard look at the US's own conduct of wars.
Indeed, the case that Dr Kissinger himself should face war crimes charges for his role as Secretary of State is made by the journalist Christopher Hitchens in a new book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2). He cites the illegal US bombing of Cambodia, the pattern-bombing of Vietnam, and US support for the Pinochet coup and for other murderous regimes in South America.
Dr Kissinger argues that, "historically, the dictatorship of the virtuous has often led to inquisitions and even witchhunts".
His argument against universal jurisdiction is an important part of his case that the US must break from a Clinton foreign policy expressed as moral imperatives. He advocates a return to a policy based on a new definition of national interest.
In a series of essays on strategically important regions of the globe, Dr Kissinger urges the US to use its unquestioned pre-eminence to contribute to regional power balances and hence stability. Intervention driven by humanitarian concern, however well-intentioned, he argues, is a recipe for entanglements. The Balkans, from which the US will find it difficult to extract itself, is a case in point.
"On one level, the growing concern with human rights is one of the achievements of our age and is certainly a testament to progress toward a more humane international order," he argues. "But its advocates do their cause no favour by pretending that it can be separated from all traditional notions of foreign policy, and that American self-restraint in the pursuit of its historic values was thoughtless or immoral."
It's an argument that places him closer to the pragmatists in the new US administration than to those with more unilateralist tendencies. Like Richard Haass, the head of planning at the State Department and "point man" on Northern Ireland, he argues that the US must build and cultivate alliances rather than rely on its unique superpower status to establish its hegemony.
"The Australian scholar Coral Bell," Dr Kissinger writes, "has brilliantly described America's challenge: to recognise its own pre-eminence but to conduct its policy as if it were still living in a world of many centres of power."
It is a formula close to that of Mr Haass's concept of the US as the "reluctant Sheriff".
But while Dr Kissinger describes well the new challenges facing the post-Cold War world, his prescriptions are traditional and he is at his weakest in considering the very real political effects of globalisation. His vision of global politics is very much that of the traditional nation-state model of sovereignty.
Yet, as the extradition of Mr Milosevic confirms, the traditional reluctance to embrace universal juridiction is breaking down rapidly.
Last year, five Chinese nationals sued the former Chinese prime minister, Li Peng, in a US court for his role in the Tiananmen Square massacre. And while visiting the UN in September, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was served with a civil suit saying he ordered killings, torture and terrorism in his country. A sum of $400 million was sought in damages.
In Brooklyn, a federal judge is considering claims of Canadians and Israelis in addition to Americans against a French railway that transported people to Nazi death camps.
Last year, a jury in federal court in Manhattan ordered Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, to pay $4.5 billion in damages to people who were raped, tortured and killed in the Balkan conflict.
In February, the Treasury Department authorised the release of $96.7 million from Cuban assets frozen in the US. The money went to the families of three Miami-based pilots who were shot down by Cuban fighters in 1996, who had sued Cuba in federal court in Miami under a 1996 law.
Now a Cuban-American woman is using the same courts to sue Cuba for rape. She claims that a Cuban secret agent tricked her into marriage as part of his infiltration mission and is demanding compensation from those same frozen assets.
But, as Prof Jack Goldsmith of the University of Chicago law school warns, Americans have not considered the consequences of applying US law all over the world. "The United States loves to export our values," Mr Goldsmith told the New York Times recently, "but not if it gives other countries the power to review what we do"
The truth is, like it or not, Kissinger may in future have to be a little careful about where he travels abroad.
(1) Henry Kissinger - Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Towards a Diplomacy for the 21st Century. Simon & Schuster. (2) Christopher Hitchens - The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.
