United Nations

There is a great deal of food for thought in Power and Weakness by Robert Kagan, from Policy Review. (via bruce sterling). It’s a long but good article.

... The United States is a behemoth with a conscience. It is not Louis xivs France or George IIIs England. Americans do not argue, even to themselves, that their actions may be justified by raison dtat. Americans have never accepted the principles of Europes old order, never embraced the Machiavellian perspective. The United States is a liberal, progressive society through and through, and to the extent that Americans believe in power, they believe it must be a means of advancing the principles of a liberal civilization and a liberal world order. Americans even share Europes aspirations for a more orderly world system based not on power but on rules after all, they were striving for such a world when Europeans were still extolling the laws of machtpolitik.

But while these common ideals and aspirations shape foreign policies on both sides of the Atlantic, they cannot completely negate the very different perspectives from which Europeans and Americans view the world and the role of power in international affairs. Europeans oppose unilateralism in part because they have no capacity for unilateralism. Polls consistently show that Americans support multilateral action in principle they even support acting under the rubric of the United Nations but the fact remains that the United States can act unilaterally, and has done so many times with reasonable success. For Europeans, the appeal to multilateralism and international law has a real practical payoff and little cost. For Americans, who stand to lose at least some freedom of action, support for universal rules of behavior really is a matter of idealism. ...

Item in the New York Times: As U.N. Meets, bin Laden Tape Sets Off Alarms. This is a good note. Lots of news out there, but this one should raise some alarm bells. The take-home message for me is:

Osama Bin Laden has read his Sun Tzu
He is cultivating his friends and his enemies with great care. He seeks to eliminate any means to rally global sentiment against him. He seeks to end the UN because it has the capability to act against him. The UN was to be the successor – the successful successor to the original League of Nations, which failed to prevent the Second World War.

Osama Bin Laden and his group effectively read and use the media
From the way he manages to get his message out, to his awareness of the news on CNN, Al Jazeera, and how he uses that to craft his message he is a madman who uses the media with as much savvy as any Hollywood PR man. We must understand what he’s doing, and as I have said before, we must play that game as well.

It is not enough to have justice and right on your side, you must also be able to communicate that fact. Can we do it?

Related posts on this theme: msnbc in arabic, us leaflets need better design

I am dismayed that this hopeful post was somewhat unfounded. I was hopeful to see the US engaging in a smart PR/information war in the middle east is not succeeding as we might hope.

I wish we were playing our cards better. We suffered a calamitous and vicious attack, at the hands of people who truly seek to take over a huge slice of the world – and we end up characterized as lunkheaded baby-killers.

These times demand a higher standard of conduct for us. I think it’s possible to decimate our enemies, re-orient who our friends are, and rejoin the community of nations in a serious way (i.e.: acknowledge the World Court, pay our UN dues, etc). But we’re screwing up our opportunity to do so.

Meanwhile, the American people is distracted by anthrax.