Wow! Jeff really hit the ground running. I found enough in his provocative first post here to feed at least a half dozen posts of my own and I’ll try to put keyboard to pixels over the next few days and get some of them out. But I want to concentrate here on his comments about the UN and NATO.
I don’t believe that NATO or the UN are broken so much as stillborn. The sad truth is that consensus is needed for government of any kind including world government and there just isn’t enough consensus about in the world right now for any incipient world government to be particularly useful. What may have appeared at one time as consensus was actually the absolute economic and political dominance of the United States in the West in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the bi-polar world that emerged thereafter. There was a consensus between the United States and the Soviet Union: each wanted to maintain its own power and neither one of us wanted to be blown to Kingdom Come.
So I won’t be sad if the two old organizations shrivel up into insignificance. What I suspect will replace them will be a kind of syndicalism—coalitions of the willing. That’s what’s been in Iraq and that’s what the United States, Australia, India, and Japan have formed in their disaster relief efforts in response to the Sumatran earthquake and tsunami. Why is there a need for a standing bureaucracy? Form, organize, deal with the problem, dissolve.
