The UN turns 80 today. Awful though it may be, its founding marked an astonishing global milestone: the abolition and widespread rejection of wars of conquest.
Back in my long-lost youth, there was an anecdote that made the rounds, attributed to one of the early SecGens (I believe it was Dag Hammarskjold): "Here at the UN, everything disappears. If there's a conflict between two small countries, the conflict disappears. If there's a conflict between a large country and a small one, the small country disappears. And if there's a conflict between two large countries...the UN disappears!"
The UN has about as much to do with the "de-moralization" (for want of a better term, but certainly far more descriptive--even in your own terms!--than "criminalization") of war since 1945 as the League of Nations had between the wars, during which time most of the nations of the world signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact which was supposed to outlaw war for all time. How'd that work out?
And even if you assign some role to the UN, it is no more significant than any role that might have been played by the Concert of Europe--the 19th-century version of the UN or the League--in maintaining the so-called "Long Peace" between 1815 and 1914. The real result was that international conflict--including wars of conquest--were simply exported from Western Europe to other, less-developed parts of the world.
But let's get back to the UN. No wars of conquest? How about Israel's being the target of not one, not two, not three, but FOUR separate, coordinated, international attempts to eradicate it from the map? That would be 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 (I am old enough to have lived through the last of these as a teenager: at the time we all thought we were going to die in a nuclear exchange after it seemed the USSR might actively intervene on the side of its client state, Egypt).
And the UN's role in all that? Lots of speeches; meaningless resolutions (necessarily so: the USSR stood ready to veto anything actually meaningful); and--after the dust had settled--patrolling the battlefield and bayoneting the wounded.
Since I mention the USSR's pivotal role in preventing the UN from acting, let's talk about the conflict in which they figured that out: Korea. The ONLY reason the US was able to get UN backing for its defense of Korea from the North's aggression was that the Soviets--unaccountably--decided to boycott the Security Council, allowing the other four permanent members--the US, UK, France and the ROC--to prod the UN into "action."
Would the NORK attempt to "reunify" the Korean Peninsula count as a "war of conquest"? I certainly do: no less so than the North Vietnamese conquest of what was by 1975 a sovereign nation, the Republic of Vietnam. And what role did the UN play in Korea? As a fig-leaf for a US-led international coalition. That's all. The UN needed the US, not the other way around.
You said a couple of things that are in fact quite correct: the post-War "peace" was largely if not entirely underpinned by two factors: the Bomb, and the United States. Indeed it's the combination of the two, as I daresay if the post-War order had seen the USSR as sole owner of the Bomb rather than the US...let's say we'd likely not be having this discussion. But the UN role? Negligible at best, toxic at worst.
I normally find myself largely in agreement with you. But not today.
1. I literally spent 2,300 words saying that the UN is NOT responsible.
2. I literally spent that same space pointing out the limitations of the point, and the necessity of American power for it to be successful at all.
Nevertheless, the point stands. It is the overwhelming belief of most of the world now that conquest is unacceptable. For that to be even a minority belief in a single Western country in 1825, or 825, would have been beyond improbable.
I think you got a bit fixated on the evils of the UN as an institution. Which I addressed.
Whether I think the UN is good, bad or indifferent is not the issue. The issue is that what we have to thank is not the UN but the Pax Americana. Had you made and emphasized that point, we would not need to be having this conversation.
Russia/Ukraine; India/Pakistan; PRC/ROC; NORK/ROK; Iran/most of its neighbors plus Israel. The list goes on of countries that see conquest as perfectly acceptable policy TODAY. And of course--to reiterate--it doesn't even address relatively recent events such as North Vietnam conquering South Vietnam or Iraq conquering Kuwait. If that says to you that "...It is the overwhelming belief of most of the world now that conquest is unacceptable" I'd be interested in how you square that circle. And even if your point were correct--which I beg leave to doubt--who cares? It's actions that have meaning, not "beliefs." You might have a colorable argument that *Western democracies* believe this, but we're not "most of the world." Not by any stretch of the imagination.
I'll remind you that I led off my initial response with Hammarskjold's puckish description of the UN's role in international conflict resolution. I don't think anything has changed except that the UN has degenerated into a cesspool of anti-American, anti-Israeli, and more broadly anti-Western imbecility.
I'm old enough to remember when the UN passed a resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism, and only a handful of countries stood with the US and Israel in opposing this filth. Others cringed behind the cowardly aegis of abstention. And this was in 1975, only thirty years after the end of the War: no one could plausibly pretend they weren't aware of the Holocaust.
Any institution in which that can happen carries no moral authority whatsoever as far as I am concerned.
The Pax Americana is literally the point of much of the article.
But the article is also about the change in international law and how it and a variety of other factors have changed the way people think about these things.
I have no doubt that you could write a great article on the topic you've chosen: you mostly just did above. I'd probably be happy to publish it. Good stuff.
But (1) you continue to misrepresent what I said about the UN as an institution, and (2) you seem to want me not to make points you haven't already decided are correct.
Clearly we're in violent agreement on nearly all of this, so I'm not really sure why.
Fair enough. And I appreciate your proffering the olive branch, as I agree that we are--as you and another good friend say--in "violent agreement" :-)
Perhaps I am simply, as you suggested earlier, driven by my visceral dislike for the UN as an institution. I certainly do not deny the charge: but it is more out of concern for the association than anything else. There is no terrible person or institution about which one cannot say, well, they did this good thing: as they used to joke in my long-lost youth, Musso made the trains run on time.
On a more serious note, when I was studying Soviet Russia in grad school in the late 1970s, we were told with a straight face that Great Stalin was a terrific guy because he industrialized the Soviet Union. The Harvest of Sorrow, the White Sea Canal...I didn't find out about those until much later in life. And we were only a few years past Solzhenitsyn's revelations: the term "gulag" had not yet really penetrated common discourse. I only knew it because my father was a Russian scholar.
But I honestly don't think that the "international consensus"--assuming one exists, which I still beg leave to doubt--has any practical significance. I believe it was George Orwell who observed that everyone's a pacifist between wars: it's like saying you're a vegetarian between meals.
Among other things, I studied international law, and one of the reasons I'm rather cynical about it is the obvious disconnect between theory and practice, especially as even in the 1970s we were moving away from a regime of customary law to a regime of positive law: the UN mice voting to bell the American cat.
As to my polemical style, it can be slashing. I fully realize this and if I offended, I humbly beg for your forgiveness as that was not my intent.
Back in my long-lost youth, there was an anecdote that made the rounds, attributed to one of the early SecGens (I believe it was Dag Hammarskjold): "Here at the UN, everything disappears. If there's a conflict between two small countries, the conflict disappears. If there's a conflict between a large country and a small one, the small country disappears. And if there's a conflict between two large countries...the UN disappears!"
The UN has about as much to do with the "de-moralization" (for want of a better term, but certainly far more descriptive--even in your own terms!--than "criminalization") of war since 1945 as the League of Nations had between the wars, during which time most of the nations of the world signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact which was supposed to outlaw war for all time. How'd that work out?
And even if you assign some role to the UN, it is no more significant than any role that might have been played by the Concert of Europe--the 19th-century version of the UN or the League--in maintaining the so-called "Long Peace" between 1815 and 1914. The real result was that international conflict--including wars of conquest--were simply exported from Western Europe to other, less-developed parts of the world.
But let's get back to the UN. No wars of conquest? How about Israel's being the target of not one, not two, not three, but FOUR separate, coordinated, international attempts to eradicate it from the map? That would be 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 (I am old enough to have lived through the last of these as a teenager: at the time we all thought we were going to die in a nuclear exchange after it seemed the USSR might actively intervene on the side of its client state, Egypt).
And the UN's role in all that? Lots of speeches; meaningless resolutions (necessarily so: the USSR stood ready to veto anything actually meaningful); and--after the dust had settled--patrolling the battlefield and bayoneting the wounded.
Since I mention the USSR's pivotal role in preventing the UN from acting, let's talk about the conflict in which they figured that out: Korea. The ONLY reason the US was able to get UN backing for its defense of Korea from the North's aggression was that the Soviets--unaccountably--decided to boycott the Security Council, allowing the other four permanent members--the US, UK, France and the ROC--to prod the UN into "action."
Would the NORK attempt to "reunify" the Korean Peninsula count as a "war of conquest"? I certainly do: no less so than the North Vietnamese conquest of what was by 1975 a sovereign nation, the Republic of Vietnam. And what role did the UN play in Korea? As a fig-leaf for a US-led international coalition. That's all. The UN needed the US, not the other way around.
You said a couple of things that are in fact quite correct: the post-War "peace" was largely if not entirely underpinned by two factors: the Bomb, and the United States. Indeed it's the combination of the two, as I daresay if the post-War order had seen the USSR as sole owner of the Bomb rather than the US...let's say we'd likely not be having this discussion. But the UN role? Negligible at best, toxic at worst.
I normally find myself largely in agreement with you. But not today.
1. I literally spent 2,300 words saying that the UN is NOT responsible.
2. I literally spent that same space pointing out the limitations of the point, and the necessity of American power for it to be successful at all.
Nevertheless, the point stands. It is the overwhelming belief of most of the world now that conquest is unacceptable. For that to be even a minority belief in a single Western country in 1825, or 825, would have been beyond improbable.
I think you got a bit fixated on the evils of the UN as an institution. Which I addressed.
Whether I think the UN is good, bad or indifferent is not the issue. The issue is that what we have to thank is not the UN but the Pax Americana. Had you made and emphasized that point, we would not need to be having this conversation.
Russia/Ukraine; India/Pakistan; PRC/ROC; NORK/ROK; Iran/most of its neighbors plus Israel. The list goes on of countries that see conquest as perfectly acceptable policy TODAY. And of course--to reiterate--it doesn't even address relatively recent events such as North Vietnam conquering South Vietnam or Iraq conquering Kuwait. If that says to you that "...It is the overwhelming belief of most of the world now that conquest is unacceptable" I'd be interested in how you square that circle. And even if your point were correct--which I beg leave to doubt--who cares? It's actions that have meaning, not "beliefs." You might have a colorable argument that *Western democracies* believe this, but we're not "most of the world." Not by any stretch of the imagination.
I'll remind you that I led off my initial response with Hammarskjold's puckish description of the UN's role in international conflict resolution. I don't think anything has changed except that the UN has degenerated into a cesspool of anti-American, anti-Israeli, and more broadly anti-Western imbecility.
I'm old enough to remember when the UN passed a resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism, and only a handful of countries stood with the US and Israel in opposing this filth. Others cringed behind the cowardly aegis of abstention. And this was in 1975, only thirty years after the end of the War: no one could plausibly pretend they weren't aware of the Holocaust.
Any institution in which that can happen carries no moral authority whatsoever as far as I am concerned.
The Pax Americana is literally the point of much of the article.
But the article is also about the change in international law and how it and a variety of other factors have changed the way people think about these things.
I have no doubt that you could write a great article on the topic you've chosen: you mostly just did above. I'd probably be happy to publish it. Good stuff.
But (1) you continue to misrepresent what I said about the UN as an institution, and (2) you seem to want me not to make points you haven't already decided are correct.
Clearly we're in violent agreement on nearly all of this, so I'm not really sure why.
Fair enough. And I appreciate your proffering the olive branch, as I agree that we are--as you and another good friend say--in "violent agreement" :-)
Perhaps I am simply, as you suggested earlier, driven by my visceral dislike for the UN as an institution. I certainly do not deny the charge: but it is more out of concern for the association than anything else. There is no terrible person or institution about which one cannot say, well, they did this good thing: as they used to joke in my long-lost youth, Musso made the trains run on time.
On a more serious note, when I was studying Soviet Russia in grad school in the late 1970s, we were told with a straight face that Great Stalin was a terrific guy because he industrialized the Soviet Union. The Harvest of Sorrow, the White Sea Canal...I didn't find out about those until much later in life. And we were only a few years past Solzhenitsyn's revelations: the term "gulag" had not yet really penetrated common discourse. I only knew it because my father was a Russian scholar.
But I honestly don't think that the "international consensus"--assuming one exists, which I still beg leave to doubt--has any practical significance. I believe it was George Orwell who observed that everyone's a pacifist between wars: it's like saying you're a vegetarian between meals.
Among other things, I studied international law, and one of the reasons I'm rather cynical about it is the obvious disconnect between theory and practice, especially as even in the 1970s we were moving away from a regime of customary law to a regime of positive law: the UN mice voting to bell the American cat.
As to my polemical style, it can be slashing. I fully realize this and if I offended, I humbly beg for your forgiveness as that was not my intent.
Wonderful writing supporting truths. TY, Rod.