Can We Save the U.N.?

Question–how could anyone have expected the U.N. to establish and enforce principles when its members don’t share any?

Rabbi Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center has an outstanding op-ed about North Korea in the (Singapore) Straits Times, clearly the best English language newspaper in Asia. The Rabbi gives the U.N. both barrels, richly deserved and fully loaded with 00 heavy steel shot. How is it, he asks, that Kofi Annan speaks of preventing genocide–even of its need to admit its own prior failures to prevent it–yet completely ignores the ones that it could still stop (notably, in North Korea) if it had the will. Which leads back to the first question.

Ironically, today comes hope for an answer. This superb article is the best thing I’ve ever heard coming out of the U.N. Ever.

Until today, I thought my wife and toddler were the only ones to have heard someone make the serious suggestion (OK, rant) that we should slowly distance ourselves from the U.N. in favor of a standing international council of democracies. The next best thing would be the emergence of a powerful bloc of democracies within the U.N. The eventual object would be to strip dictators of the right to claim to represent their people while using the U.N. as a tool of grievance-deflection. Today, the keys to “multilateral” legitimacy are held by the butchers of Tienanmen, the murderers of Chechnya, and a certain snobbish, impotent European nation that hasn’t won a war against anyone but Greenpeace since the Middle Ages. Can’t humanity do better than this?