The Wilsonian UN--R.I.P

The League of Nations, precursor to the UN, was created after World War I. Woodrow Wilson's idea was that peaceful nations would give up considerable warmaking sovereignty to a world body that would act to keep the peace. If a country committed aggression, the League would lead its members to thwart or defeat the aggressor. But the League was utterly ineffectual. It failed in the 1930s because Britain and France were unwilling to take forceful action against Germany and Italy, not to mention an increasingly militaristic Japan. The League was the first casualty of World War II.

What Wilson and his disciples could never fully grasp is that "collective security" does not come about through a diplomatic version of the Immaculate Conception. Great powers make collective security a reality. Without that leadership, the League--and now the UN--descended into vociferous impotence, irrelevance.

During WWII, the Allies begot the United Nations, thinking they'd figured out how to deal with the League's fatal shortcomings. First, the U.S. became a member of the new organization. People believed that had America only heeded Wilson's call and joined the League, WWII never would have happened. That's why the UN is located in New York, not Geneva; its presence in the U.S. was to be a safeguard against America's lurching back into isolationism.

Second, the Security Council, a diplomatic version of an executive committee, was created to guide this large entity. The Council was to have five permanent members, made up of the powers that, at the time, were thought to matter. Franklin Roosevelt and others assumed the interests of the five would be similar. The Cold War quickly put an end to that illusion as it became clear there were only two powers that ultimately mattered--the U.S. and the Soviet Union--and that their interests were diametrically opposed.

In 1950 the UN voted to intervene in Korea when the North invaded the South only because Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union was boycotting UN meetings at the time. The Soviets weren't there to exercise their veto. They never made that mistake again.

With few exceptions, the UN has been a sideshow. It could never, as Wilson naively envisioned, meaningfully move against a major power. When the U.S. wanted to intervene in Kosovo in 1999, it ignored the UN after the Russians made it clear they would exercise their veto. Instead, we got NATO's blessing for military action.

In the first Gulf war, the U.S. was able to win the UN's nod. But it's hard to imagine that we and the British would have let Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait stand even if we hadn't gotten UN approval. In fact, the first President Bush had to be persuaded to ask for formal congressional approval.

The comforting notion that the UN is somehow the legitimizer, the ultimate arbiter of international affairs, despite its sorry record, has been blasted away. France, aided and abetted by Germany, Russia and China, has destroyed that illusion. International law means nothing unless it is enforced. The President is right: The Security Council did not live up to its responsibilities.

The UN won't cease to exist. It will still run refugee and health care programs. It will hold conferences around the world to pontificate on various global ills, real or imagined. It may play useful roles in building up civil institutions in war-torn areas, although it has exhibited little competence in that endeavor in Bosnia. The UN could even play the role of peacekeeper in parts of the globe that have no real strategic importance, such as it could have done--and murderously did not--in ethnically divided Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

But the old Wilsonian notion of a governing world body has been laid to rest. This hardly means the world is about to descend into anarchy. Since Sept. 11, 2001 the U.S. has recognized that it must take a proactive role in dealing with terrorists and the rogue states that succor and provide sanctuary to them. We will, on an ad hoc basis, seek to enlist others in helping to fight the forces of darkness and, more broadly, in creating conditions where our liberal values of democracy--of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--can sink deep and lasting roots.

Present at the Creation--Again

At the end of World War II, the U.S. faced unprecedented international challenges and responsibilities. Dean Acheson, who was Secretary of State in the Truman Administration, aptly entitled his memoirs, Present at the Creation. We are now on the cusp of a new "at the creation" era. As Vice President Dick Cheney correctly observed, "We had certain strategies and policies and institutions that were built to deal with the conflicts of the 20th century. They may not be the right strategies and policies and institutions to deal with the kind of threat we face now." New institutions and arrangements will arise from the force of circumstances, just as they did after WWII. The late-1940s and early-1950s was an era of enormously creative statesmanship: the Marshall Plan; the Bretton Woods international monetary system, which put an end to the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s; the industrialized move toward freer trade via the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which later morphed into the World Trade Organization; and the creation of the most enduring, successful military alliance ever, NATO. Our intervention in Korea in 1950, though frustrating and ill thought-out, showed our adversaries we were willing to shed blood to stop their overt aggression. The Soviets never attacked a NATO state.

NATO, not the UN, has exemplified what effective collective security is all about. Under NATO's treaty, an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. What has given the agreement force is the U.S. Without us, NATO would have been ineffective and irrelevant, and Stalin would have dominated all of Europe. Because of the security NATO provided and our push for liberal political and economic policies, western Europe and Japan made stunningly rapid recoveries from the rubble of World War II. Our successful occupations of Japan and West Germany enabled democracy to be established.

Will we be as creative today? Why not? The U.S. had no advance blueprint for much of the post-WWII order--few U.S. policymakers foresaw the Cold War--but, more often than not, we responded to crises and opportunities successfully--a vivid contrast to the responses of the 1920s and 1930s.

• The UN. Let it continue to do humanitarian work. And it can be useful leading peacekeeping missions in various troubled states, such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Sudan.

• NATO. We should start pulling our troops out of Germany and should station them in southern and eastern Europe, where they are needed and wanted. As the recent assassination of Serbia's Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic demonstrated, the Balkans will continue to be unstable, turbulent.

• The European Union. Its expansion from 15 members to 25 should create pressure for making the EU what it always should have been--a vast free-trade area with open borders and, for most members, a common currency. French fantasies of Paris becoming a superpower, with Jacques Chirac as a modern Sun King, are over.

• North Korea. South Korea should encourage North Koreans to come to the South via China (see Fact and Comment, Mar. 3). China must understand that if Beijing doesn't play a role in stopping North Korea's lunge toward nuclear powerdom, we won't discourage Japan from developing its own nuclear capabilities in response.

• The IMF. This destructive agency's prescriptions of higher taxes and currency devaluation must be scrapped. Washington must realize that the IMF's dictates have all-too-real political consequences. Its misbegotten policies helped wreck Turkey's economy. Angry citizens there voted in an overtly pro-Islamic government that pretty much gave us the finger when we asked for its help in Iraq. We should preempt the IMF and directly urge troubled countries like Brazil to adopt pro-growth policies--stable money, low taxes, property rights, ease in the setting up of new businesses--until the IMF gets the message. Paying IMF bureaucrats in the currencies of the countries they advise instead of in income-tax-free dollars (as they currently are) would be one way to reform this antigrowth monster.

• Iran. The reigning regime of clerical fanatics is the most active state sponsor of terrorism, and Iran is on the brink of manufacturing nuclear weapons. It is also far along in the development of ballistic missiles that could reach Europe and eventually the U.S. We should encourage street demonstrators to overthrow the dictatorship. The ayatollahs may respond with violent repression; we must then be prepared to consider taking a forceful role--including a military one--to enable a regime change to take place.

• China. Beijing will require a deft handling of the carrot-and-stick approach in the hope that internal economic liberalization will create forces for eventual democratic political reform.

Currently pundits are obsessed with the problems, the daunting challenges that face us. But if we are guided by right principles, as we were after World War II, and are filled with renewed vigor, as we were in the 1980s, these problems can be the spur to policies, arrangements and institutions that will lead us and the world to a new plateau of peace and freedom and prosperity.

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"When the U.S. wanted to intervene in Kosovo in 1999, it ignored the UN after the Russians made it clear they would exercise their veto. Instead, we got NATO's blessing for military action."

The fact is Europe has made the decision to "Let George do it." That is, to leave their defense, and the cleaning up of their messes, to us. They have no intention of--or capability for--projecting military power. Nor do they have the ability to raise their own defenses without taxing themselves into oblivion.

Thus, Old Europe exploited the UN for political posturing. That's all. Zip else. Chiraq, for example, couldn't give a rat's be-hind about going through the UN, unless that is a convenient tool for trying to stick it to the US on an issue Chiraq opposes.

BTW, from henceforth, I will refrain from calling Chirac "Chiraq." I am in no mood unwittingly to diss the Iraqi people, who have suffered enough.

An excellent article.

I think Forbes' assessment of not just the UN, but the other organizations and countries is also right on the mark.

And I like his suggested solutions too, and he maintains an optimism that yes, indeed we can handle all the problems.

Unlike the doom and gloom Democrats.

PLEASE everyone....the pressure is on the government to relent on their hard UN stance. If ever there was a time to write, phone, and fax every politician you can think of, it's now! There will never be another chance to do away with this corrupt, inept and evil organization.

Articles suggest that the pressure is on to include the UN...the Axis of Weasels is putting pressure on the world to demand the UN takeover Iraq. Colin Powell himself is calling for a more gentle stance toward the UN.

Please help counter the pressure! Get the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US!

BTTT

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