Michael Glennon, in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (May/June 2003), addresses some of the fundamental changes brought about by Bush's initiative and weakening of the UN stranglehold on US as it handles foreign affairs. An excellent treatise I recommend for all to read.

Here's an excerpt:

No one can doubt the utility of checks and balances, deployed domestically, to curb the exercise of arbitrary power. Setting ambition against ambition was the framer's formula for preserving liberty. The problem with applying this approach to the international arena, however, is that it would require the United States to act against its own best interests to advance the cause of its power competitors-and indeed, of power competitors whose values are very different from its own. Hertzberg and others seem not to recognize that it simply is not realistic to expect the United States to permit itself to be checked by China or Russia. After all, would China, France, or Russia -or any other country- voluntarily abandon Preeminent power if it found itself in the position of the United States? Remember too that France now aims to narrow the disparity between itself and the United States-but not the imbalance between itself and lesser powers (some of which Chirac has chided for acting as though "not well brought up") that might check France's own strength.

There is, moreover, little reason to believe that some new and untried locus of power, possibly under the influence of states with a long history of repression, would be more trustworthy than would the exercise of hegemonic power by the United States. Those who would entrust the planet's destiny to some nebulous guardian of global pluralism seem strangely oblivious of the age-old question: Who guards the guardian? And how will that guardian preserve international peace- by asking dictators to legislate prohibitions against weapons of mass destruction (as the French did with Saddam)?

It covers a lot of ground and is succinct in pointing out the failure of the grand experiment and why we were foolish to ever bequeath part of our sovereignity and superpower status to a global body, such as the UN, with its many failings.

There's other articles in it, Morality and Foreign Policy, How to Democratize Iraq and Trusteeship for Palestine that make it a don't miss issue.

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