Many Americans are disgusted with the UN and would cheer if President Bush withdrew from the UN. Charles Krauthammer writes:
There were wars and truces and treaties before the UN was created - as there will be after its demise. No need to leave the organisation formally, Mr President. Just ignore it. Without us, it will wither away.
Richard Perle, an advisor to the Pentagon, states:
The chronic failure of the security council to enforce its own resolutions is unmistakable: it is simply not up to the task. We are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognise that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure of the UN.
American independents have always been leery of the United Nations. However, this concern is now shared by more people than ever.
Calls for ending or curtailing U.S. involvement in the U.N. came from Charles Krauthammer, Mona Charen, William Kristol, Linda Chavez and David Gerlernter. These are not Birchers; they are mainstream pundits.
Even those in the US who support the UN - fewer and fewer each day - have to cringe when they read the news. Some examples from just this week involve Ritter and Cuba.
The United States does not have the military means to take over Baghdad and will lose the war against Iraq, former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter said. "The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated. It is a war we can not win."
At least Ritter is no longer officially part of the UN. The same cannot be said for the UN Human Rights Committee headed by Libya of all countries.
A resolution presented Wednesday to the top U.N. human rights body does not include a condemnation of Cuba's record, a rare move that immediately drew protests from rights campaigners.
Hardly a way for the UN to win American friends at a time when many Americans are seriously questioning future US membership in the UN. At the same time the French are screaming that the UN must be in charge of the establishment of a new Iraqi government. The US said no. Interestingly enough, so did Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) umbrella opposition group.
But this issue of the UN involvement's in the formation of the next Iraqi government is a sideshow compared to the future of the UN itself. Will it join the League of Nations? Will it proceed as if nothing had occurred? Will it continue to exist with a smaller role?
Before I make my predictions, let see what the rest of the world think about the UN.
From the Hindustan Times
Last September, President Bush ungallantly pointed out that the council, like the proverbial emperor, has no clothes. However weak his multilateral credentials, on this he is right: the council has shed credibility for so long that more worldly leaders have forgotten what it looks like. His warnings about the UN morphing back into the League of Nations have fallen on deaf ears in capitals that would prefer a weak council to a strong one dominated by the US. They are as ambivalent about American power as Washington is about the international organisation.
In Russia, the Moscow Times discusses what they call Bush's Brezhnev Doctrine
Russia and France, supported by China and Germany, deadlocked the UN Security Council by threatening to veto any ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. All that Russia and France really accomplished was to seriously undermine the authority of the UN and cripple existing international law. As the United States this week finally and firmly assumed its role as undisputed world hegemon, the old world order created in 1945 began to fold. It was France and Russia that gave the existing system the kiss of death by exposing its emptiness and fundamental immorality.After the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty was formulated proclaiming the right of the Soviet Union to invade satellite states in order to support pro-Moscow "socialist" regimes. Now a new Bush-Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty may become the basis of international law. The United States now claims a sovereign right to invade any other country to change a nasty regime, if the president and Congress agree to it. The UN, France, Russia and other "veto holders" can go and get stuffed if they do not like this new emerging world order.
The move to stop a ratification that Moscow needs more than Washington reflects the confusion of our elite as we see the old world order, in which we were an important player, collapse as a result of our own -- together with France's -- diplomatic insanity.
Xin Xu, a graduate student in political science who recently earned her bachelor's degree in law from Nankai University in the People's Republic of China stated:
China is afraid the United Nations is going to turn into what the League of Nations was in its powerless days before World War II.
(Just as the world is going through a massive reorganization, so is China. This Shanghai Star article not only showed that many Chinese are starting to understand the US, but also demonstrates China's growing tolerance for various opinions within China. We do indeed live in interesting times.)
From Nairobi, E.D. Mathew expects that not only will the UN continue, but that it will administer Iraq.
...this is not the first time we hear rumours of the UN's sad demise. Four years ago, when NATO and the United States bombed Yugoslavia over its conduct in Kosovo without UN's approval, it was widely announced that the world body was dead, or at least had become irrelevant. However, after the war, when arrangements had to be found to administer Kosovo, the matter returned to the Security Council. Soon, Kosovo was placed under UN's tutelage.
Mexico's UN ambassador sees the current mess as an opportunity for Mexico - which takes over as head of the UN security council next week.
He has also been making startlingly ambitious comments about the future of the UN, in a breach with Mexico's tradition of non-involvement in global affairs. "Mexico thinks it is necessary to revise and limit the power of veto," he said this week, adding that this would have to be in the context of a profound re-ordering of how the UN worked.
I think he is having delusions of grandeur. Why would any of the five veto powers (especially France) agree to this? And if even one disagrees, the requested change will simply be vetoed. I doubt it will even come up for a vote.
From the Taipei Times (Taiwan):
Every time a problem arises, the UN depends on the US to act as a "global policeman" before Iraq will begin to toe the line. But Iraq always reverts to its former behavior. This time they were cooperating with UN weapons inspectors only because they had been squeezed like a tube of toothpaste by intense US military pressure.The powerlessness of the UN is hardly limited to its performance on the Iraq problem. Does the UN really love peace so much? When China fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait, threatening to first destroy Taiwan and then rebuild it, did the UN step up and make any statements? Why didn't they urge Beijing to patiently use political means to solve the problem? What has the UN done to safeguard the rights of Taiwan's 23 million people or ensure that they are free of the terror stemming from China's military threat?
I selected quotes from around the world (and provided the links) in an attempt to show the greater context. These quotes should not be that surprising to those who follow international perspectives (much different than following international news). Even the head of the UN admits the problem, although he obviously hopes it can be fixed.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted on Wednesday the world was bitter at the United Nations' handling of the Iraqi crisis and said it was time for the big powers to unite on the needs of the Iraqi people. "All of us must regret that our intense efforts to achieve a peaceful solution through this council did not succeed," he said. "We are living through a moment of deep divisions, which, if not healed, can have grave consequences for the international system and relations between states."
Tim Giago, a UN supporter, predicted the UN would be useless if the war to liberate Iraq started (March 13, 2003):
The United Nations is now the sole agency standing between war and peace in the Middle East. If the laws and the options offered by the United Nations are discarded as meaningless by the United States, the entire organization is then discredited. It becomes a toothless tiger unable to cope with the military aggressions of nations worldwide.
The UN has always been a toothless tiger that depended upon its strongest members to enforce its claims in the rare instances where the UN could muster the willpower to ask for force. That is why Iraq ignored them for twelve years.
Conclusions
It is clear that one of the reasons that America is disliked by many is because of the great power America holds. This is not just a fear of the strong, but a very natural and honest frustration that the fate of the UN is largely in hands of the US. If the US - by itself - withdrew from the UN, the UN will instantly become irrelevant. It would probably hang around for years to come (like the League of Nations), but it would treated with even less respect than it was before the current war. No wonder other countries resent America. Even the most fervent supporters of the UN recognize that its continual existence depends upon the United States - a country that may decide that their best interests are served by withdrawing from the UN. Of course, many of these UN supporters also don't believe the US would ever do such a thing - it is inconceivable in their eyes.
I see two potential futures for the UN. If the members of the UN security council are logical, they will support the US plan to allow the UN a supporting role which would largely focus on humanitarian aid in Iraq. This would be in line with Charles Dougherty prediction that:
The U.N. will function as a humanitarian and cultural organization. It will not die like the League of Nations. It will simply become irrelevant in major foreign policy conflicts.
Interestingly enough, this depends upon the UN Security Council as well. France and Russia have threatened to stop this limited involvement for reasons of their own. Many of the decisions of the UN council have been based on emotion, not logic. If France and/or Russia manage to stop the UN from serving in this role, the US may ignore the UN altogether.
This leads to the other potential future. A world where the US either officially withdraws from the UN, or just ignores it (and retains its veto power). Given President Bush's loyalty to Blair, I don't expect the US to officially withdraw from the UN any time soon. As much as I would personally like to see the UN join the League of Nations, I suspect my tax monies will continue to be wasted on supporting the UN for quite some time. The only way I would predict the US to withdraw (officially or unofficially) from the UN is with the help of France and Russia.
Bottom line: The UN will remain in its current form for a long time. It will be treated with less respect than before, but since it was always a paper tiger, most people won't notice any difference. The only way I see the US dumping the UN is if it gets some 'help' from France and/or Russia.