There’s a lot to chew on in this post from American Future and the column by Anton La Guardia from the Telegraph to which he draws our attention. Noting a proposal for reform of the UN, Mr. La Guardia writes:
There is much in the 80-page report of the “High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change” to interest America. It takes Mr Bush’s unilateral security policy, and tries to turn it into a new international doctrine. It seeks to convince the US that it can deal with threats more effectively through collective action than alone.
The report accepts America’s conviction that the risk of terrorists obtaining weapons of mass destruction is one of the main threats facing the world. However, it argues that other threats are as important because globalisation has linked them together. For example, poverty exacerbates the danger of states collapsing, and failed states are ideal breeding grounds for terrorists. The report accepts “pre-emptive” military action against an imminent threat as part of the traditional right to self-defence. It also adopts America’s belief in “preventive” action to stop more distant threats, but only subject to approval by the Security Council.
The entire discussion of the UN and its future leaves me with far more questions than answers.
- How has the UN Security Council contributed to collective security? US security?
- How has the UN General Assembly contributed to collective security? US security?
- However ineffective they might be, which body has been more effective in contributing to collective security? US security?
- If the Security Council is more effective—as seems obvious—how does making it more closely resemble the General Assembly contribute to collective security? US security?
Marc has a number of good questions of his own.
I can’t remember where I first heard it but someone once said that leadership is figuring out which way the parade is going and getting out in front of it. Maybe that is one form of leadership. But the parade seems to be going in the other direction right now and I’m not so sure we want to go that way. The European nations are spending a decreasing proportion of their budgets on their military to the point where they have almost no ability to project force beyond their borders. Other than the US, only the United Kingdom has a navy of real consequence.
There’s another kind of leadership and it was encapsulated in a famous political cartoon that appeared before the US had entered the war. In the cartoon a single British Tommy stood as the entire armed might of the Third Reich approached him. The caption read “Well, alone then”. It’s not the kind of fix one would want to find onesself in. It’s the kind of fix you stand up to because there is no other alternative. And, like it or nor, the US is responsible for its own security and, indeed, the security of much of the rest of the world as well.
We are the parade. And it’s not the UN that gives legitimacy to US actions. It’s the US that grants legitimacy to the UN.
I’ve been planning to post a response to a recent post by Matthew Yglesias (“Legitimacy, Moral and Otherwise), but I think you may have eliminated the incentive for me to do so.
Yglesias isn’t so much pro-UN as he is anti-US:
“. . . the alternative to letting the Security Council decide is having random countries running around acting as they please. Since the USA has by far the greatest capacity to project power around the world, you wind up with things like the American invasion of Iraq, undertaken despite the near-uniform disapproval of the world’s population.”
In other words, USA = bad, therefore UN = good
Given the unbroken string of UN failures (see, for instance, Dore Gold’s Tower of Babel), its institutionalized moral equivalency (“don’t take sides”), not to mention the oil-for-food scandal, only an ideological aversion to the US can explain a preference for the UN.
Yglesias’ post is at
yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/11/legitimacy_mora.html
There are a couple of problems with MY’s formulation. First, America is not a “random country”. Imperfect, yes. But we’ve established our bona fides enough times for a long enough period that you have to doubt either the sanity or the agenda of anyone who doubts them. If we’d wanted to colonize Europe, or Asia, or Africa we could have. After World War II there was just no one to stop us. Even the dissidents in our sole experiment in honest-to-gosh colonialism the Phillipines complained that we didn’t oppress them enough for them to make a good case. But we don’t really want colonies.
Second, it may displease those whose highest value is egalitarianism but what is right for the lion is not right for the jackal.
This dovetails rather neatly into a discussion that TM Lutas and I have been having. I’ve pointed out to him that in addition to the Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, and Jacksonian traditions in American thought (to which he adds Madisonian) there are some new, upstart traditions, mostly jazzy foreign imports. All of the homegrown versions are nationalist and believe in American exceptionalism. The import model—which likes to be called transnational progressivism but is just garden-variety Marxism doesn’t and MY, like all the bright young things, is influenced by it.
Excellent discussion. I feel very beleagured at my inability to keep up on my own blog.
Equality of states is a part of the Westphalian International Law system that has outlived it’s usefulness. Unsurprisingly, being a useless and counterproductive obstacle to effective policy, it is the one aspect of Westphalianism that transnationalist progressive statesmen and NGO’s are fighting to keep.
Not only keep but radically expand in the form of a unique veto by the UNSC over the use of force by the United States. A total and radical misreading of the historical precedent of the use of the UN charter.
“But we’ve established our bona fides enough times for a long enough period that you have to doubt either the sanity or the agenda of anyone who doubts them.”
Dave, there’s actually a pretty savvy comment in the new George Friedman (of Stratfor fame) book that I think is relevant here. Friedman says that in the 90s, America forgot that intervention creates winners and losers. So whereas we saw our interventions as humanitarian and benign, others (mostly Muslims) saw them as part of a nefarious design. In the Balkans, for instance, we never got Muslim credit for helping out because it looked to the Muslim world that we were deliberately waiting until enough of them had been cleansed before we went in and more or less ratified the status quo on the ground at Dayton. In Somalia, we thought we were engaged in a humanitarian mission, again benefitting Muslims, but in many Somalian eyes we were simply backing one clan or set of clans over another. Friedman explains that we Americans have trouble seeing or accepting this disconnect between how we see ourselves and how others see us. And perception is reality, whether we like it or not.
praktike, that’s very true and several possible reasons for it occur to me. One reason is that we don’t perceive the same things as good or that our relative priorities are different. Another possible reason, as I said in another post, we can’t get our message through. A third reason is that there’s so much distrust whether earned or unearned that there’s no way we can overcome it.
The problem with all of these is that there’s not a derned thing we can do about any of them.