Replacing the United Nations
GELERNTER, DAVID
Replacing the United Nations Make way for the Big Three. BY DAVID GELERNTER If it were working properly, a world organization like the United Nations could offer the United States official...
...Russia will be a great power again someday...
...that is, freedom to operate behind a wall...
...Russia doesn't deserve a place in a new world-leading triumvirate—but that is exactly why it would be such a powerful gesture to offer her one...
...Admittedly this is easier said than done, both for the well man and the sick one...
...Including Russia (but not China or France) in the ruling committee might impart just the right soupgon of anti-Americanism to the new organization, which must be credible yet not intractable...
...Today it is still a non-contender...
...But the Europeans themselves—especially France and Germany—have long seen United Europe as a "counterweight" to the United States: a way to balance our resolution against their indifference, our sympathy for Israel against their sympathy for suicide murderers, our naive ideas about planting democracy everywhere (which are so painfully American, so Woodrow Wilson...
...But it was easy to condemn Israel...
...Nonetheless: By December 1956, 11 years after the U.N...
...D-Day was the most spectacular piece of aggression in history...
...Yet Russia is uncertain of what she wants...
...But Russia's fluid condition gives us an unusual opening...
...He saw the pattern...
...Too often it can't do the right thing, and so it does the wrong thing in order to do something...
...Churchill was on to something...
...Of course this is insulting...
...Israel's best friend at the time was France...
...Why build it this way, around a Big Three...
...By 1956, the U.N...
...Membership would be limited to democracies or aspiring democracies that spend at least some agreed percentage of GDP on their militaries...
...The great essayist E.B.White was a leading booster of the United Nations, probably its most articulate American defender ever...
...will hit clean and fight fair...
...she is open to persuasion...
...the Soviets ignored them...
...But this is nonsense, because "aggression" has no ethical meaning in itself...
...But why should France keep those unearned privileges when she grows more neo-Vichy all the time...
...What if we never even ask...
...It was all amusing for a while, but grows thin...
...This is still true, and the friendship still stands...
...The U.N...
...it can be good or bad...
...But (of course...
...at last welcomed Yasser Arafat to its podium...
...By the end of November," the historian John Lukacs wrote in 1961, "the silence of a near-graveyard settled over the tragic scene of Hungary...
...But we should pity a friend's misfortunes, and not mistake the disease for the man...
...She might vote against us in the new Big Three as readily as she does in the U.N...
...During and after the Second World War, Churchill preached his vision of "the great English-speaking democracies" retaining their separate identities but joined in one commonwealth with shared citizenship...
...Once its brain has been replaced, the former-U.N.'s body (the police forces, aid organizations, bureaucracies) could easily be reconstituted within the Big Three...
...Wasn't Vichy just as "authentic" as the Free French...
...But why should we be...
...Six months earlier, Palestinian terrorists had murdered 22 schoolchildren at Ma'alot...
...And why not offer Britain a choice?—a way to formalize her foot-in-both-camps situation...
...The United States should pledge to the United Nations its strong support while it prepares a substitute...
...Today it is an impediment to world safety...
...And if the experiment fails, the U.N...
...What if it never even gets started...
...They would announce: We are going to have a meeting and talk things over...
...In 1956, Hungarian freedom-fighters had just recently rebelled against their Soviet masters...
...Petain would be proud: A brave new France that is tight with the Germans, hostile to England, intensely wary of the United States, no friend of the Jews, contemptuous of Eastern Europe, thoroughly defeatist and desirous above all of avoiding trouble and keeping peace in the neighborhood...
...then again, she might rise to the occasion...
...Of course," we will say, "we are solidly behind United Europe...
...for many good reasons must acknowledge that there has never been a hyperpower heavyweight before, and that the idea of one remains frightening to many world-politics fans...
...He got a standing ovation...
...BY DAVID GELERNTER If it were working properly, a world organization like the United Nations could offer the United States official sanction for an upcoming bout, and assure the world that the heavyweight champion (no matter what kind of lowlife he is up against) will play by the rules and rein himself in...
...Today much of Britain's intellectual elite seems as rudely and ignorantly anti-American as any in Europe...
...It should deny vigorously the whole time that it has ever dreamt of replacing the U.N...
...We should be laying the groundwork for a U.S.-aligned and not Old-Europe-aligned Russia...
...but international prestige is worth even more, especially to a humbled former champion...
...It is what every member is pledged to suppress...
...We may pass some resolutions...
...Or Britain does...
...In December '56, the U.N...
...simply carries on, chastened...
...We show our solidarity with Britain, help coax Russia onto the right side of history, and liberate world councils from overlordship by the evil, the nasty, and the irrelevant...
...Wasn't this (perhaps) the real France all along...
...Thus, the right world organization for today—as the U.N...
...An expectant hush descends, the boys smile debonairly and then break into their beloved old standby: "Israeli aggression can no longer be . . ." In November 1974, the U.N...
...was embarrassing even to its best friends...
...Russia is a big country with a vivid history...
...The core of the new organization— call it the Big Three—would be a Britain-Russia-America triumvirate...
...All the same, conservatives who hate the U.N...
...ambassadors would simply adjourn one afternoon to a neighborhood brownstone...
...Without aggression there would be no great generals, champion chess players, top scientists, effective businessmen, important artists...
...its problem is with the U.N...
...is no good...
...Now is the time to start thinking post-U.N., not merely because the Security Council has made such a mess of Iraq but because we have remarkable opportunities...
...Official U.S...
...The U.N...
...This pattern doesn't always hold (the U.N...
...And they would of course add: However big it may happen to grow, our new organization will never replace the United Nations...
...One of the preconditions of membership in the United Nations should be that the member himself will not David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...couldn't stop them...
...We still win big just by talking about it...
...America's problem is not with the idea of a world organization...
...The United States is wisely led today, but hasn't always been...
...To condemn aggression," White wrote, "is to decide in advance of an event the merits of the dispute...
...No one liked it...
...Obviously the same holds for Iraq and other brutal dictatorships today...
...Neither country wanted it...
...It should be replaced...
...This will drive the French crazy and make everyone understand that we are serious...
...What if Russia turns us down...
...If Russian tanks felt like raping Budapest, the U.N...
...He understood that American-British friendship is a rare thing in world history, and that one strong, proven friendship is worth vastly more than a milling throng as a basis for international peacekeeping...
...The U.N...
...against their thoughtful, sophisticated disgust with mankind...
...in its present shape reflects the obsolete assumptions of 1945...
...not a hopeful sign...
...was born, even White was fed up...
...does good occasionally), but it is more than sufficient to damn the institution as a failure, because it is woven in, not printed on...
...Putin has been disappointing on Iraq, but we need to look beyond Iraq...
...The new organization, unlike the U.N., would be founded with no chatter or charter...
...The U.N...
...shut his door in the face of the Club...
...made no sense, he concluded, if members were allowed to do whatever they felt like behind the locked doors of their own "internal domestic affairs," no matter what kind of shrieking and hollering the neighbors reported...
...was (perhaps) right for 1945...
...A politically united Europe (first promoted by Winston Churchill) is (allegedly) a rich, peaceful, stable, responsible Europe...
...Afterwards we will issue a report and have a press conference, and meet again when we feel like it...
...Now Zionism will get out of this world," Arafat explained sweetly, gun at his hip, "under the blow of the people's struggle...
...No organization that includes Russia could possibly be America's cat's-paw...
...The United Nations should never have admitted the Communist nations on their terms," he wrote...
...The three countries' U.N...
...After some initial hesitation, the Red Army arrived to reinstate its puppet government and crush the rebellion beneath its tank treads...
...Condemning Israel turned out to be such fun, it became the U.N.'s signature act, like the Whiffenpoofs singing "We are poor little lambs...
...We gave France (for example) a central role and a veto because France had once been a great power, and had suffered under the Nazis...
...An equally fundamental problem: "Aggression," White noted, "is the keystone of the Charter...
...Russia would make the triumvirate global...
...The United States has repeatedly proved that it follows the rules and fights fair...
...Yes, that means money...
...The idea never caught on...
...had just finished condemning Israeli aggression in the Sinai—a nice piece of work in which President Eisenhower lined up with Nasser and the Soviets...
...passed resolutions...
...A B3 resolution won't pack quite the multilateral punch of the Security Council, but it will pack plenty...
...The underlying principle: No credible world organization could include only countries we like...
...But what if the new world organization doesn't work...
...And there will be plenty of time, too, to gather junior members...
...policy favors a united Europe...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 26
