Opinion - News Analysis

The United Nations in a divided world

By Sudhanshu Ranade

The title is catchy; but misleading. Divided as they might be among themselves on a whole range of issues, the nations of the world have in recent decades been more united than divided in their support for the United States. This unity was founded on three things, as Henry Kissinger pointed out (with somewhat uncharacteristic candour) in his book about `whether at all the United States needs a foreign policy' (U.S. Diplomacy for the 21st century, Simon and Schuster, 2001). First, people can be bought. The mere fact of America being rich and powerful was not by itself sufficient; because `money is like manure; it only works if you spread it around'. Second, the U.S. can usually ensure some sort of multi-polar consensus by bilaterally promising recalcitrant countries (or regions) to help them along — or at least hinder them no more. Third, global support is unnecessary for ensuring global supremacy, subject to one important qualification - because of which the U.S., until very recently, made it a point to handle potentially threatening issues and events in various parts of the world with great delicacy; before they became potentially threatening.

But things changed rapidly after the Bush administration took over the reins of power. Both the U.S. and the world were now to be run on the basis of that `good old rule, that simple plan; for him to take who has the power, for him to keep who can'. In substantive terms, this was not really all that much of a change. But dark clouds began to gather when the U.S. President, George W. Bush, turned out to be too honest, naïve, deluded, or simply in too much of a hurry to be bothered about keeping up appearances. Even now after his blunt and all too public fracas with the Security Council of the United Nations, he seems to half believe that the enthusiastic welcome of the liberated Iraqi people will make the world realise that it was he that had been right after all. Mr. Bush's coterie shares this belief (indeed, it is they who passed the infection on to him in the first place); either that or they honestly believe that the U.S. is strong enough to go it alone. Either way, they are in for a big surprise.

Many efforts were made in the 1990s to lay the foundation for a multi-polar world. But opposition to the only remaining superpower was slow to develop, because of the who-is-to-bell-the-cat problem. But it is worth stepping back to make that journey through the 1990s once again, more slowly this time, gazing out from the window at the literature on the `new world order' that was churned out over this period by the various Centers for International Affairs located at Harvard, Princeton, the MIT and so on. This literature was squarely focused on how the U.S., together with its allies in Europe and elsewhere could (i) `manage' the meltdown of the Soviet Union; (ii) `engage' China; and (iii) `pacify' West Asia. Reading this stuff, I was intrigued by its candour. Why on earth were the Americans going out of their way to communicate their plans to their intended targets? The answer is that they were not in fact doing any such thing. Even as they ostensibly sought to recruit the European Union into the task of shaping a new world order, they were clear in their own minds that it was the European Union itself that most urgently needed to be tackled if the U.S. was to retain its `hyperpower' status. There would be lots of time later to deal with China, Russia — and Saddam Hussein.

Viewed from this perspective, the much-touted eastward expansion of the European Union and the NATO in the 1990s was intended more to weigh down the European Union than to clip the wings of the former Soviet Union. If this assessment is correct, it would provide a more plausible rationale for the outright refusal of both the French and the U.S. to work for a compromise. It would also explain why Dr. Kissinger went out of his way to point out in his book that despite the cordial and cooperative relations that the U.S. had with individual European countries, America was out of the loop so far as policy-making in Brussels was concerned. This, Dr. Kissinger warned, was something the U.S. needed to worry about, and work on. In short, the war against Saddam Hussein is also in a sense a war against the `old Europe'. Realisation took a long time to dawn on me; as, I am sad to say, is usually the case. Perhaps Mr. Bush, too, will learn one day. But I was lucky; for him it is already too late.

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