NMIRI

The United Nations: What of its Future?

By
M. Gene Aldridge
Professor
New Mexico Independence Research Institute, Inc.
"(D)espite the U.N.'s professed aversion to war, what it really seems to object to is victory. In the U.N.'s 58-year history, two wars have been waged under Security Council auspices: Korea and the Gulf War. Both ended with less than total victories, leaving in power two of the worst tyrannies on earth, which are now two of the world's most dangerous rogue states. U.N. peacekeeping operations, too, are at best a mixed bag, with a record of failing to prevent such horrors as the Srebrenica massacre and the Rwanda genocide."

- James Taranto, Best of the Web, 3/10/03

When I was in high school our class took a trip on the B & O Railroad from Chicago to Washington and New York. It was a great trip through the heartland of America. It was an experience as a sixteen year old that really opened my eyes to the world and its possibilities. Our class was able to compare our national government with the international governance at the United Nations.

One portion of the trip was to the United Nations in New York City. I remember how astounded I was at the fact that humans had decided to work out their differences in a place like the U.N. in New York. The Security Council Chambers, to be sure, were astounding to me. The fact that people from all over the world sat in those chairs, made decisions about the world order without war was really extraordinary to me personally. It molded my decision to work internationally in international marketing. Now having experienced the world, via some 100 countries, I am deeply saddened by what I see at the U.N. They seem to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at every turn.

Since those days the United Nations has had many difficult days. What we are witnessing today, however, is the failure of human cultures to find ways in which to work out their differences. The U.N. is not working. While the long term goal of the U.N. must be to keep the peace, it cannot keep the peace if it has no backbone against nations that covet their neighbor’s success.

France is clearly on the road to isolating itself from the Western Atlantic Alliance. Germany, at the hands of expedient politicians, is looking like weak hand Luke. The Koreans are using this moment to seek help from the West, but specifically the U.S. because it knows that our resolve is greater than that of the U.N. or even China, for that matter. All the while, terrorism and rogue states like Iraq are leaving troubling footprints on the sands of time. Is this the United Nations that we thought we were developing 58 years ago? I don’t think so. So what is the challenge for all of us?

Unless we take new steps to re-think the role of the United Nations, the history of the civilized world will be written again in the blood of humankind. As President Bush has said, “The dangers of our time must be confronted actively and forcefully, before we see them again in our skies and in our cities. And we set a goal: we will not allow the triumph of hatred and violence in the affairs of men.” Shouldn’t this be the goal of the U.N. too?

What is interesting is that, we in the United States, saw violence everywhere in the world prior to September 11 events, and while we thought it was terrible, we did little about it. We supported Israel in their fight against terrorism. As a nation, we have tried to help the Palestinians too. We sent troops to Africa and to Bosnia, but we were still left personally untouched as a nation by these violent acts around the world. The Cambodian, Srebrenica, and Rwanda massacres I thought were as terrible as the killing of Jews and others during WW II. But we did little as a civilized world to really stop the violence. But the day our shores were hit, suddenly the U.S. realized how awful this violence really is to the civilized world. Unfortunately, the U.N does not get it. Neither do the nations that now sit in those chairs at the Security Council.

The dangerous shift in foreign policy is that we now may have to do what we did not want to do some months ago, begin meeting the challenges of rogue nations that decide to try and destroy the civilized world. Suppose we take the war to Saddam Hussein? Some thinking people ask, “Is Korea Next?”. What about Libya? What do we do with Syria and Iran? It looks as if Iran is working toward becoming a full nuclear power, do we take Iran on too?

Other nations like France, and many smaller nations, don’t like the civilized world being headed by the United States of America. The “perpetual peace” that many thought was at hand, is simply not here yet. Francis Fukuyama even told us that “The End of History” was at hand because the cold war was over. These authors were incorrect, I am sorry to say, in their international relations assessments because they had not factored into the equation that the U.N. was the continuing weak sister and is unable to manage the civilized world effectively and with precision in their deliberations. Without backbone, the world will continue to use the U.N. as a whipping boy for every event imaginable. Saddam Hussein is making a mockery of Dr. Blix, for example, as the inspectors play politics with the moment, not wanting to pull the trigger on war with their reports to the international body.

Security (war) is still a problem in the world and it must be addressed realistically. Of course we all want peace, but at what price to the existence of the civilized world? Prime Minister Blair of England certainly has understood, at the risk of his own political career, what the security issue is for the civilized world. No man puts his political career on the line unless he believes that there is imminent danger that could destroy the human stability that is necessary for peace. What is amazing to those of us watching this political theater is that he and George Bush are liberal and conservative. Who would of thought that a British liberal would have led the charge for the alliance in Europe?

Mearsheimer (2001) writes that there are three reasons why states will war, or to at least, act aggressively toward each other.1 One is the lack of a central authority that will protect one nation from the other. The U.N. is proving this fact everyday. Two, that states always have some military capability of some kind. Thus, Iraq’s insistence on defying the U.N. for over a decade demonstrates the lack of authority in the U.N. to enforce that which it promulgates. Three, states cannot ever be certain about the other state’s intention. We now know the intention of Hussein, his values have been clearly marked by his behavior in killing his own citizens, invasion of neighbors, and now weapons of mass destruction to so that he can garner more power by helping groups in Palestine or Afghanistan or Pakistan. But most importantly, he has defied the U.N. resolutions to disarm. In other words, the impotence of reason reigns supreme between nations and this does affect individuals, nations and future civilizations. That is why the U.N. needs new organization and management.

Folly is to be found everywhere, but most often in the halls of governments where mental standstills, failing functions of organization, and the pursuit of failure damages everything it touches. Barbara Tuchman called this the “March of Folly”.2 The United Nations, in its rush to headlong peace at any cost, has lost all sense of reason. Thus, it is marching into folly after folly. Persistence of folly is the U.N.’s chief challenge to overcome for this century. It cannot, for example, chase peace at any cost, without the parallel structure and the will of nations to rectify that instability or even the potential instability that exists from time to time in the world. Because the U.N. is weak in this respect, nations must be free to protect their own future by actions that may run counter to the will of a U.N. that is willing to chase peace at any cost.

Culture too, plays an important role in all that is done at the U.N. The culture of democracy is not easy to come by especially in nations where there is no “culture of democracy”. Our own studies on the culture of economic development in isolated cases in Mexico, for example, demonstrate clearly, that education, free market economic values, capital formation, low taxation and rule of law all combine to create positive development for states and cities that work toward these goals. If you make resolutions in an international body and its leadership is unwilling to enforce these “rules of law”, what then happens to civilization? These critical variables require a culture that embraces these values. The U.N. is full of bureaucrats from nations that embrace few of these values. Thus, a kind of mental standstill occurs that always seems to fix a problem on the pursuit of peace at any cost. Few in the U.N. want to hear anything about reexamination or re-thinking that might change the course of events. This kind of rigidity in thinking destroys government and people’s lives.

A culture of democracy and a commitment to free market values and limited government, so that the other nations can compete, is required for this new century in the U.N. Because of this wooden-headedness in the U.N. the United States and other nations cannot relinquish their power to such a body. Where is the culture of the U.N. that stimulates moral courage of the kind we now see in Prime Minister Tony Blair? I ask you, who leads if not the United States? Surely, not France or Germany!

John Adams said that government is “little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago,” I wonder if we can reasonably hope that U.N. will find its place in the world in the coming century? What President Bush and Condi Rice have done is force the U.N. to once again come to terms with its own function and future in this century. The U.S. has asked China to step up to the plate on the North Korea issue and China’s own hegemonic needs in Asia seem to be preventing them from taking a multilateral leadership role on this issue. Yet, the Chinese inaction on the challenge may require the U.S. to also take stern action in North Korea. Time will allow this issue to play out, but can nations count on the U.N. to sort these issues? Not at the present time. The U.N. seems to be afraid of victory on behalf of the civilized world. There is little hope for satisfied men and women whose arrogance only exceeds their ignorance to act.

For further reading: (1) Mearsheimer, John J. (2001), The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Norton and Company, NY-London, p.3

(2) Tuchman, Barbara, (1984) The March of Folly, Alfred Knopf, New York, p. 383.

(3) Aldridge, M. Gene, Abair, Paul, Austin James, Shelton, Jennifer. (2002). Monterrey, Mexico: Why Economic Development Works, Research for the Pan American Roundtable, March, 2002, New Mexico Independence Research Institute, Inc. published on the website at http://www.zianet.com/nmiri.

Contact the author at: gsaldridge@zianet.com

To learn more about NMIRI: www.zianet.com/nmiri

Professor, M. Gene Aldridge

New Mexico Independence Research Institute, Inc.

505 523 8700

gsaldridge@zianet.com