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The Lessons of History
MUSIC:
BUSH: All the world now faces a test and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment.
BUSH: Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding or will it be irrelevant?
MUSIC: dips under
ED: When George Bush made that challenge a year ago he was rubbing a sore almost as old as the United Nations itself; American disappointment with the UN's perceived short-comings is a hardy perennial of modern diplomatic history. And because the UN's lifetime has coincide with a period of pre-eminent American power, the love-hate relationship between the United Nations and the United States has been at the heart of almost every crisis the institution has faced. In this second programme in our series on the UN I will be trying to shed some light on its current crisis through the prism of its past.
MUSIC: PEAKS AND ENDS
ED: Washington's disillusionment is all the more keenly felt because the UN was above all an American creation. President Roosevelt first turned the phrase United Nations in 1941 to describe those countries fighting Hitler - and this unique experiment in global governance was created at conferences at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington in 1944 and then San Francisco in 1945. Archie Mackenzie was a member of the British delegation at both.
MACKENZIE: The war in Europe was just ending. VE day came just three weeks after we had arrived in San Francisco so there was all the optimism from that and then secondly there was the impact of California on delegates who had come from blackouts and rationing and all the rest of it and it generated a almost a euphoria, an optimism.
ED: It was a victors' club; countries had to make a formal declaration of war against Germany or Japan before they could send their foreign ministers to join the roll call of delegates from powers new and old, great and small who gathered in San Francisco to sign the new UN charter.
LP9265 UK (Lord Halifax) (26.6.45): Here today I am proud to set my name on behalf of the United Kingdom to this great Charter of the nations in the certainty that my country will always honour it to the full and with the hope that it will indeed prove a might instrument of peace in the years to come. CHINA (Wellington Koo) : Ladies and gentlemen this is a great day for us all. USSR (M. Gromyko): [Russian]
ARCHIE MACKENZIE: I think it was quite a natural and a helpful optimism. Natural because we were reaching the end of the war and helpful because it created an atmosphere in which we made much faster progress than anyone could have anticipated. I mean we did the whole thing in two and a half months. There were 111 articles in the Charter that we agreed on and today to do the same job would take years.
ED: The Charter was inspired by utopian aspirations - but it also reflected political reality. The old League of Nations had failed partly because America refused to join, and partly because it had no real way of enforcing its will. The new UN would have a Security Council with the power to decide on questions of war and peace; the price of ensuring that everyone joined was a veto for the handful of nations that then dominated the international landscape.
LP9265 US (Edward Stettinius): This is not the end. It is only the beginning. The great task lies before us and it is our solemn and our sacred duty to see that the United Nations comes into being and fulfils its promise.
ED: The passion of America's commitment permeated the new institution -
Sir Brian Urquhart became one of the UN's earliest officials, working as personal assistant to the first Secretary General.
INTERVIEW: SIR BRIAN URQUHART
When I joined the UN I was absolutely astonished at the sort of evangelical feelings that the US mission and the US government had about the UN. It was something you really couldn't criticize. I was very pleased with myself after 6 years in the army, I thought I knew everything, and said one day the charter is wonderful but I really can't think why governments should so completely change that they should actually obey it. It just doesn't seem likely. I got the most tremendous rocket, actually from Alger Hiss who was then the chairman of the American delegation and a very grand figure in the State Department and he said it's cynical young people like you who cause wars. So I was a little bit annoyed about that. But they had put together with enormous care an organisation which addressed aggression, economic depression, and supposedly disarmament. These were the 3 pillars of the original UN and they had taken huge care to fix the US Senate which was the trouble the first time with a very complicated formula, including the Veto and the Security Council. You know and I think, greatly to their credit, they believed that this was going to be a sort of major fundamental change.
The idea presumably behind the Security Council was that that would provide the teeth that the League of Nations never had.
That's right. But of course the moment you got a sort of head on confrontation, ideologically and otherwise, between the permanent members of the Security Council, that went out the window.
Did people worry about what the impact of the veto might be when it..
Yes, lots of people worries about it at the beginning but then I think in the Cold War people began to see that there was an upside to the Veto. That you couldn't really the nations of the world into war with a superpower on a majority war which would be so it was just as well to have a veto but the main political function I think of the UN was after the cold War became an absolutely irreducible reality was providing a way of keeping regional conflicts out of the sort of East-West hostility orbit where you risked having a nuclear conflict if things went wrong
So a sort of diplomatic wet blanket if you like sitting on the fire?
Yes a fire blanket really and also to contain things and keep them away from the real major danger of the world. The absolutely awful prospect which was on everybody's mind in those days, in the back of most people's minds, including children, there was the idea that one day you might wake up and see the whole world just go.
How quickly did people begin to realise that the world for which it had been designed wasn't there any more?
Well I think the actual Cold War problem became very clear, certainly by 48 in the Berlin Blockade, but it was clear even before then. I mean the Soviet Union had been devastated by the war and it saw in its extensible partner the US this colossal power, hugely admired country, and they hated it. So there attitude became more and more frozen and more and more generally doggedly hostile.
ED:
At the 1960 General Assembly Soviet impatience with the institution boiled over in spectacular fashion. The Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev demanded that the Secretary General be sacked and the UN headquarters be moved out of America - and when the Soviet Union was criticised by the ambassador from the Philippines, Khruschev called him "a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism", took off his shoe and started banging it on the table.
MUSIC:
PETROVSKY: When Khruschev banged his shoes, I was his chief of protocol.
ED: Vladimir Petrovsky, was a young Soviet diplomat at the time.
PETROVSKY: I was sitting behind and I will tell you quite frankly all of us were a little bit shocked. The people feel very much uneasy. And I will tell you the reaction in the Soviet Union the reaction was very negative to this Khruschev behaviour but what was very interesting the reaction in the west was a little bit different because for the first time they saw the Soviet leaders who behave in a much more natural way.
KHRUSCHEV:
ED: The brogue-brandishing was a symptom of a deeper problem. Because both Russia and America had that veto, the Cold War more or less paralysed the Security Council. Vladimir Petrovsky served in the Soviet diplomatic service from the fifties right through until the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.
PETROVSKY: This how to say veto of course prevented the United Nations from certain actions. It set the limits for the activity of the United Nations. Mainly I think it was negative. It was still mainly negative. The use of the veto has a negative effect.
ED: American disenchantment settled in as the Cold War years crept by. The process of de-colonisation swelled the membership, and many of the new nations joining saw the UN as a mechanism for containing American ambitions. What's more, the wars the UN was supposed to end went on - in south east Asia, between Israel and her Arab neighbours, between India and Pakistan, all over Africa and in Afghanistan. Congress baulked at paying America's UN bills.
And as the final chapter of the Cold War began, Ronald Reagan appointed one of the most sceptical and tough minded UN envoys America has ever fielded - Jeane Kirkpartick was also the first woman to do the job.
INTERVIEW: AMBASSADOR JEANE KIRKPATRICK
You know the Soviet Union was the great power in the UN. They were much stronger and much more skilful in operating there than the US or any of the democracies.
Is there an argument for saying that the United Nations was in fact quite successful during the Cold War period because it contained it?
Well I think it is very important to always be clear that it was not the United Nations acting that solved problems in the Cold War it was the United Nations providing an arena in which the principle powers and everybody else could in fact meet with one another, argue and explain and try to deal with questions and I think it was useful as such but I don't think it was useful as a problem solving institution. It is not the business of the United Nations to solve problems, it is the business of the powers to solve problems but it is absolutely essential to have an arena in which they can do so or try to do so.
People have talked during the recent crisis over Iraq in terms of the Security Council being able to confirm legitimacy on international action. Do you think that idea had any meaning during the Cold War years?
No and I don't think it has much meaning today if I may put it so bluntly. You know in the United States we declared our independence from Great Britain with a declaration of independence and that declaration of independence which was written by Thomas Jefferson contains our doctrine of legitimacy and it says, I'll remind you, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To protect these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That is our American doctrine of legitimacy. . .What makes government legitimate and the decisions of governments legitimate is the consent of the governed. The Americans have never endowed the United nations with some supreme legitimacy or capacity to confer legitimacy but every time I heard someone say something like that in the course of the last discussions I felt that it was a mistake and that it was very important that we Americans be clear ourselves and make clear to each other and to the world that that is not our doctrine of legitimacy.
So to that extent the power of the United Nations is always going to be circumscribed?
It isn't power anyway. The United Nations doesn't have power. It was not created to have power. The United Nations has some capacity to serve some very important purposes in the world. That's different than power. Governments have power.
ED: The turning point came with breath-taking speed.
In November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. Suddenly America and Russia began to talk the language of co-operation not confrontation, and the ideological heat went out of conflicts all over the world.
The UN seemed destined to be the centrepiece of that shiny new world order which was so much talked about by President Bush senior in those heady days. And within less than a year there was an opportunity to road-test a model for managing the conflicts of the future; Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
MUSIC:
KUWAIT ARCHIVE 85449: The British embassy in Kuwait have asked British personnel in Kuwait to stay indoors. A British embassy statement says that in current circumstances there is less risk in staying put.
KUWAIT ARCHIVE: President George Bush: What is at stake is more than one small country. It is a big idea. A new world order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind. Peace and security, freedom and the rule of law.
MUSIC: FADES UNDER
ED: For six painstaking months American diplomats poured all their efforts into making the UN system work; first they turned up the diplomatic heat on the Iraqi leader, and then they built a solid coalition of support for war.
The case wasn't difficult to make - Iraq had acted in breach of everything the UN stands for. And the political landscape was propitious; for Russia a new relationship with America mattered more than anything else, and the Americans got the war resolution they wanted.
86558: Air raid siren
86558: Patriot intercepts scud
86882 Norman Schwarzkopf: At zero four hundred hours local this morning coalition forces began a major ground, naval and air offensive to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
86932: Multi launch rocket system act
86914 President George Bush: No-one country can claim this victory as its own. It was not only a victory for Kuwait but a victory for all the coalition partners. This is a victory for the United Nations, for all mankind, for the rule of law and for what is right.
ED: Once Iraq had been driven out of Kuwait and the objective endorsed by the Security Council had been achieved, America stopped fighting; at the time it really did look like a model war for the new world order, American power harnessed in the service of international law.
After all that has happened since, the first Gulf War looks more like a one-off - the product of a unique set of circumstances.
James Baker served as George Bush Senior's Secretary of State, and he was one of those who last year publicly urged George Bush Junior to seek UN endorsement in the way his father did in 1990.
INTERVIEW: FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE JAMES BAKER
Well there were a number of factors not least of which it was our view that the operation would be more broadly supported by the American people if it was also supported by the Security Council and was thus an international action rather than just a US action. Now I have to tell you that we would never have put a resolution on the table for a vote unless we knew in advance that we had the votes to achieve that resolution. We waited in fact until the United States was in the chair as president of the council so we were in a position where we could pretty well control the process in the Security Council itself and I don't think we would have called for a vote unless we had known in advance that we had the votes. It was our view that we had the authority to do what we did notwithstanding Security Council approval and I think President Bush was committed to doing it in any event.
It was the end of the Cold War, the President was talking in terms of a new world order. To what extent was that a factor in your calculations and to what extent did you see this as a new model for the way international problems were going to be sorted out?
Well I don't know that we saw it as a new model for the sorting out of all international problems,. I think the time was unique. Communism had collapsed, the Cold War which most of us had known all our adult lives had ended, everybody in the world pretty much wanted to get close to the United States - we were the only remaining superpower - but the course was pretty well set in the first few days when we were able to get the Soviet Union to stand with us to condemn Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and to join with the United States in supporting an arms embargo against Iraq. That was unprecedented
The period that we've been talking about was I suppose, it's arguable, perhaps the high point of the United Nations - the moment at which its powers seemed most effective. How would you describe its status today after the divisions over Iraq?
Well I think that the United Nations was hurt by the divisions over Iraq, I think that NATO was hurt by the divisions over Iraq, I think the European Union was hurt. All of these organisations in my view were diminished to some extent but not irreparably.
Just finally looking back on the last few months. Would you have done it that way? I mean it's so different from the way you did it for the first Gulf War.
We you can't really answer that, you are not privy to the intelligence, you are not there dealing with the issue on a daily basis. I was one of those who encouraged the President to go to the UN in the first instance in last fall or Summer or early fall when there was a debate internally in the administration about whether to just go in unilaterally and do it. I mean I don't think you can argue that the United States just went off here unilaterally and did this. There was a substantial coalition, you had some very major countries involved, including Italy and Spain, and the United Kingdom and others and America - the United States administration did everything in the world it could to get the UN to sign on.
ED: America's second-time around romance with the UN proved short-lived; the cause of the break-up was abrupt and traumatic, and it's haunted American policy makers ever since.
In 1992, in the last days of his presidency, George Bush Senior sent troops on a humanitarian mission to Somalia. The country was threatened by mass starvation, and the civil war had made the distribution of aid almost impossible.
SOMALIA 96742: Relief supplies unloaded. Peter Biles in Mogadishu Jul 92: It is a scene of complete madness. They are all armed, they are waving their guns in all directions. They have got Kalashnikovs. They've got jeeps which have been cut down and mounted with machine guns. There is even a lorry there with an anti aircraft gun on the back.
Fx: fighting. "For goodness sake"
ED: There was a UN peacekeeping force in place, but it seemed impotent in the face of anarchy. America's combat troops stormed Somalia's empty beaches under UN auspices, authorised by the Security Council to "use all necessary means" to establish "a secure environment for humanitarian relief". Dr Kenneth Menkhaus was a special political advisor to the UN operation there.
MENKHAUS: The first thing that was significant is that this was the first time that the United States committed itself to what appeared to be a humanitarian intervention - that's a very misused term - but in this case it was clear we had no national interest, this was an attempt to do the right thing. Here was a test case where we could go in, be the pointy edge of an intervention, then hand it over to the United Nations and succeed in bringing peace, restoring peace and order to a country that had none to set a precedent, to learn lessons and also to create perhaps a preventive culture where war lords elsewhere might think twice before creating these conditions because they would see that the UN could and would come in.
ED: It did, indeed prove to be a test case but not in the way that anyone had planned.
MUSIC:
CD96743: Act warning by US soldier, rockets: Attention attention. US armed forces at work in the area. Please evacuate the area now (fx rocket)
ED: A new president, Bill Clinton, took on the mission George Bush had begun, and over the summer of 1993 American policy in Somalia became steadily more ambitious and aggressive. The search for the warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed drew American troops ever deeper into the country's civil war, and on October 3rd a contingent of United States Rangers were trapped under fire in a hostile area of the capital, Mogadishu.
CD96743 NEWS: The Americans say as many as 12 of their men were killed in yesterday's fighting in the Somali capital Mogadishu between United nations Forces and supporters of the faction leader General Aideed.
ED: In fact 18 American soldiers were killed and 84 wounded, and more than two hundred Somalis died in the day's fighting. The body of an American ranger was dragged round the streets of Mogadishu, and the image was broadcast on CNN television.
MENKHAUS: The pictures themselves were unbelievably powerful. I was in Somalia at the time - I wasn't in Mogadishu though, I was in another city when it happened and at the time the description of the operation going awry sounded like bad news but really not that different than a number of other bad incidents we'd had over the past three months. It was just seen as one more setback. It was only when I got back to Mogadishu the next day and saw the CNN coverage that I realised that this was a fundamentally different situation, when you have dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets with Somali crowds cheering, you understood then that this was a public relations disaster. And something major was going to have to happen.
ED: The attack by the Rangers had been ordered by American, not UN commanders, and the strategy behind it was dreamt up in Washington, not the UN headquarters in New York. But in the eyes of politicians on Capitol Hill, there was no doubt who was to blame.
CAPITOL HILL (ex TV): I don't want a bunch of dummies at the UN telling our young boys where they should be going, what their mission should be. Congressmen or Senators - ex TV: Lets get out of Somalia today, not in six months or a year. Our troops should not be used to fulfil the grand designs of United Nations bureaucrats.
MENKHAUS: What that led to then is a Clinton administration which couldn't afford politically afford to even touch UN peacekeeping in subsequent months and years and as we all know the double tragedy of Somalia is that it was followed six months later by the genocide in Rwanda where the US stood by and did nothing and silently coerced the UN into standing by and doing nothing all because of Somalia.
INTERVIEW: BOUTROS BOUTROS-GHALI
ED: It was the nadir of the relationship between the United States and the United Nations, and a catastrophic reversal for the United Nations Secretary General.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali took office amid the euphoria that followed the end of the Cold War and the success of the Gulf Campaign. The number of peacekeeping operations mushroomed - at one stage there were 80 thousand UN troops in 17 operations on four continents - and a month after Mr Boutros-Ghali began work the UN's big five - Britain, America, France, Russia and China - endorsed a rethink of the whole field of peace and security. He concluded they were looking for something much closer to the UN's original ideals.
Just one month after I begin to take this job the Security Council met at the level of the head of state and head of governments and at the end they have adopted a resolution asking the Secretary-General to prepare a paper to offer basic change in the field of peace keeping, in the field of preventive diplomacy, in the field of the different action of the United Nations and this - and in the same times they were saying that the Secretary-General had a very important role to play so this gave me the illusion that the United Nations will be able to play a new role in the post-Cold War era.
And you saw a very activist role didn't you for the United Nations, including possibly a United Nations Army?
BOUTROS: Exactly, this was and so in the case that you will have a crisis, we will be able to have at our disposal between twenty to forty thousand soldiers.
What was your interpretation of the American attitude to the UN in those very early days?
BOUTROS: At this time, at this time and maybe this was another mistake. I was not aware that since the end of the Cold War, the United States being the only superpower, they will have a different attitude. At this stage they was very much in favour.
Let's talk about one of the things that went wrong during that first year, Somalia. The public perception in America was that the UN was to blame for everything going wrong. Do you think that was fair?
Yes this is a classic. One of the reasons why the United Nations have been created is to be a kind of scapegoat. In the case of the problem is easy to be solved the country, any country will be interested to play the role of mediator so that it would be can say to its own public opinion 'I was able to solve the disputes between A and B somewhere in Africa and somewhere in Asia. They will give the baby to the United Nations in the case that the problem is not easy to be solved.
There is a depressing conclusion you could draw from Somalia, I don't know whether you have thought of this, but plainly the UN can't operate without the United States because it is the world's only superpower but the lesson of Somalia could be interpreted as the UN can't work with the United States - it all goes wrong when you try that.
I will tell you, I have a very long discussion with the America administration and when we were involved in the problem of Rwanda I say 'Why don't you allow us to do a peace-keeping operation without your presence?' and the answer was 'No. First of all we will have to share at least 30 per cent of the budget of this peace keeping operation even if we don't participate but what is more important that in a case you have a difficulty you will come and ask us to come to help you? And we will be compelled to help you and we will be involved indirectly in this peace-keeping operation. So they say 'As we will be involved directly or indirectly in any peacekeeping operation, thus, you need our agreement to any peace-keeping operation.' And there is some logic behind this.
ED: America's radical rewriting of the rules for foreign intervention really began when the Balkans blew up.
The UN's stock sunk steadily as the conflicts there gathered momentum - the spectacle of blue-helmeted peacekeepers standing by while tens of thousands died in Bosnia provoked outrage in the United States.
Then, in the spring of 1999, came the Kosovo the crisis. When Slobodan Milosevic defied American demands Bill Clinton faced a dilemma; the Russians made it plain that if he tried to get a war resolution through the Security Council they would veto it. The President's solution was to sidestep the UN altogether and turn to NATO instead.
ARCHIVE:
Fx: Air raid
ARCHIVE: Dozens of targets have been hit in the first night of NATO bombing against Yugoslavia. The authorities in Belgrade have declared a state of war. They claim women and children were killed in the raids.
Fx: jet
CLINTON 24/3/99 Ex VC26331: The dangers of acting now are clearly outweighed by he risks of failing to act the risks that many more innocent people will die or be driven from their homes by the tens of thousands.
ED: Unlike the recent campaign in Iraq, this operation was supported by most of America's allies in Europe - its champion claimed it had moral legitimacy, whatever the position according to the letter of international law. Bernard Kouchner was a minister in France's socialist government at the time.
KOUCHNER: In fact it was so obvious that we had to intervene that I forgot about the clearance of the Security Council but now I know that the NATO bombing started without this clearance. Of course this is better with the approval and the clearance and the vote of the international community if the international community is represented by the Security Council but sometimes, sometimes this is difficult to get unanimity or a majority.
ARCHIVE:
Fx: cruise missiles
ARCHIVE 24/3/99 Ex VC26331: The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has said he should have been consulted more closely about the air strikes. He made his comments as member of the UN Security Council gathered last night for an emergency meeting.
BLAIR: Ex VC26331: Britain is a peaceful nation. We are a peaceful people who take no joy in war. But we know from our own history and from our own character that there are times when we have to stand up and fight for peace.
ED: In the end there was a UN resolution endorsing the NATO campaign in Kosovo - it was passed retrospectively, some time after the fighting was over.
As a model for pursuing peace and security, the Kosovo campaign was a very long way from the meticulous multilateralism of the first Gulf War eight years earlier. And its architects were not the Republican cold warriors of the Reagan years or the assertive neo-conservatives of today's administration; they were Democrats, natural UN enthusiasts like Madeleine Albright, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of State at the time and had earlier served as his UN ambassador.
INTERVIEW: SECRETARY OF STATE MADELEINE ALBRIGHT
Well I think even before we came into office - there were obviously a lot of questions as to whether the UN was taking the whole operation seriously enough and whether the international community was reacting properly to the horrors that were increasingly evident.
You were advocating quite a big step though weren't you, both in terms of the idea the intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign state, of another state and also in the use of American power in a way that wasn't necessarily or obviously acting in the same direction as America's national interest?
Well I wouldn't put it that way. I mean my whole theory that I had operated on previously and reflected in many aspects of my life or my history was that if the United States stayed out of things, ie Munich, terrible things happened. When the United States got involved World War II better things happened. When the US allowed - or whatever word you want to do - when it happened that the Soviets liberated Czechoslovakia terrible things happened and so I believed basically in the goodness of American power and the necessity where possible for us to apply it. Now I . . the question is whether this had anything to do with US national interest. I believe that it did because I do think that having a undivided and stable Europe is in US national interests and what was going on in the Balkans was making that difficult to accomplish.
Nevertheless when it came to the question of Kosovo and going to war over that you were prepared to do that without the authority, the specific authority of the United Nations. Did you feel uncomfortable about that?
No. First of all there were a number of United Nations resolutions dealing with the dangers in Kosovo including that basically did say that what was happening in Kosovo was a threat to peace and security and that was a resolution that set up the issue. Then the thing that distinguished what we did in Kosovo totally from what has been happening with Iraq is that we had the consensus of Nato so we were going with the consent of a multi-lateral organisation already and I did and do believe that it is not necessary for Nato to have a UN authorisation to act.
But it wasn't, the action in Kosovo wasn't endorsed until after the war was over was it. It was retrospectively endorsed by the United Nations?
No there was a pre . . Well we went to the UN as quickly as possible in order to internationalise the post war situation - in order to avoid exactly what is happening now - to be able to have a kind of layered approach where the US was obviously in there as was Nato but so was the EU, the UN, OSCE etc.
But do you think that by taking action without specific and prior authorisation from the United Nations, you may at least have prepared the ground for what happened intellectually over Iraq even if you wouldn't completely compare them.
We had always said that we would act multilaterally where we could and unilaterally if we must. That has been a policy that is not particularly novel. I think that those who wish to interpret what we did as a precedent for Iraq are wrong because basically it was a completely different situation and it was very important to us to be able to go in with Nato in contrast to Iraq where they specifically Nato was left out.
How serious do you think the damage is that has been done to the United Nations as an institution by the crisis over Iraq?
Well I think it has been very unhelpful to the UN. But I think what is important to understand here is the damage done to the UN and the Security Council specifically is not just the fault of the United States. I was stunned when President Bush said that it didn't matter what the United Nations would do but I was equally stunned when Jacques Chirac said that there was no resolution that they wouldn't veto so I think they both damaged the UN - much more serious for France because France relies on its position as a permanent 5 member to validate its international position, we have one anyway.
MUSIC:
ED:
That sense that America - uniquely now - has a power and reach that depend entirely on its own resources was of course the driving force behind the row over Iraq at the United Nations earlier this year. Even the other permanent members of the Security Council - certainly France and Britain, but Russia and China too - rely in some measure on their places at the UN's top table to project themselves as world-class powers.
But the UN is still evolving, still a work in progress, and every so often that idealistic American instinct which blossomed in the creation of the United Nations comes into bud again. Next week I am going to trace the way the UN has been developing a whole new front in global governance, in the field of international justice; that, like the UN itself, began as an American idea.
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