I know this is "preaching to the choir."
New world disorder
SUNDAY ESSAY
The Scotsman
GERALD WARNER
THE New World Order: is it just another piece of Gorbieguff, like Glasnost and Perestroika, or are we experiencing the birth of a reoriented geopolitical alignment? Such phenomena do, occasionally, occur. The Congress of Vienna, which liquidated the Napoleonic Empire and initiated the European settlement of which Metternich was the custodian until 1848, was one such instance. Is something similar happening today?
When that question is posed to bien-pensant commentators, their knee-jerk reaction is to babble about the United Nations, international development, the European Union, NGOs and all the usual suspects whose kleptomaniac instincts dwarf their philanthropic grandstanding. Only mal-pensant commentators, such as you are currently reading, are prepared to proclaim that the enduring motor of world diplomacy is realpolitik and that all institutions of a supranational character are either tyrannical or effete.
This reality is gaining currency. The American conservatives - and not just of the ‘neo’ variety - have the United Nations in their sights. It is even rumoured that the G8 nations, when they gather at Gleneagles Hotel this summer, intend to cut the UN down to size, perhaps even to emasculate it completely. That would be a welcome development. The UN is a gross excrescence. The efficiency of its response to the tsunami disaster is a question on which the jury is still out; but no serious observer would dispute that its creaking, top-heavy bureaucracy is a totally unsuitable mechanism for organising emergency relief work.
Yet such is the deference paid by liberals to this totem that, when the United States, Australia, India and Japan decided to coordinate their aid efforts, Clare Short denounced this pragmatic move because it would "undermine" the UN. Behind this mentality lies the progressive lobby’s detestation of nationhood and Orwellian aspiration to world government. Leftists have made a fetish of ‘internationalism’ (a great Soviet mantra in its day); hence their conversion to the European Union, since it became the Western Soviet Empire and heir to Brezhnev’s fallen Byzantium.
If there is a New World Order, the lead role should be taken by the UN, opine progressives. To that end, a squalid collection of gangsters has been awarded quasi-religious status. The invasion of Iraq was a major error of judgment by America; but it was not wrong because it lacked the endorsement of the UN. What kind of moral arbiter is a body whose 53-member Commission on Human Rights has included Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam and Zimbabwe (Libya chaired the 2003 session)? Freedom House, the human rights monitor, lists 50 of its 185 member states as "Not Free", including two permanent members of the Security Council - Russia and China.
Sometimes the UN seems to take a deliberately perverse stance, as when Iran was appointed to preside over its disarmament committee. Would coalition troops in Iraq have felt more morally justified if the President of Equatorial Guinea had paused in masticating what is said to be his favourite delicacy (executed prisoners’ testicles) to give them the thumbs-up? How much longer is this organised hypocrisy to be tolerated and subsidised?
The UN’s notorious Oil-for-Food programme in Iraq did not simply benefit Kofi Annan’s son: the $67bn it channelled to Saddam paid for weaponry that killed Iraqis and the coalition forces alike. The latest audit of UN accounts found $16.8m had gone in straightforward fraud; one project director in Somalia had pocketed $100,000. UN officials are stealing from the poorest people on earth, while beaming moralising cant at the rest of the world. The useful idiots of the United Nations Association are their apologists and dupes.
Nor can we look to the European Union - the UN’s twin kleptocracy - as the foundation of a New World Order. When Jacques Chirac praised Kofi Annan last week as "a man of integrity", it was like the Artful Dodger acting as a character witness in a pick-pocketing case. The EU is a sclerotic, dirigiste, anti-free market cartel that increasingly threatens to subvert Europe’s ability to catch up with America. The G8 nations, too, are a cartel; but their union is pragmatic, rather than institutionalised, and they represent real power.
The one, irreducible geopolitical reality today is the economic and military hegemony of the United States. Its balance of financial and armed clout should give it a longer shelf life than the Soviet Union, whose military establishment bled its command economy to death. It is true that the Iraq war has exposed weaknesses in the US military. In strategic terms, they are losing the war, the elections are a farce, there is no prospect of a credible exit; but the same applied in Vietnam, yet here is Uncle Sam bestriding the world again. It is America’s vast wealth, its successful capitalist system and its political and cultural cohesion that give it staying power.
Those last elements may implode during the course of a generation, with massive Hispanic immigration and bitter political polarisation threatening the traditional ethos of American identity. Yet, for the foreseeable future, the US is the only game in town. It is to be hoped that second-term Republicans are in butt-kicking mode at Gleneagles and everywhere else. It is time for the West to awaken from somnambulist appeasement of the Third World blackmailers.
The Dianafication of disaster has been Europe’s contribution, typified by the three-minute silence ordered by Brussels, calculatedly more than is accorded our dead soldiers who liberated the EU kleptocracies. Now Blair and Brown have adopted Africa as the tear-jerker motif for the general election. Grubby politicians kiss babies; but these two cynical opportunists have chosen to exploit emaciated infants with distended bellies as the visual soundbite for 2005. At the same time, trusting people to ignore fiscal bureaucracy when donating to tsunami victims, Gordon is raking in extra tax from the public’s generosity. A New World Order? No - just a classic scene from the brush of Hieronymus Bosch.
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