A Go-It-Alone War Could Hurt Security Council

If you spend time talking to diplomats at the United Nations, you will find that almost all of them -- and therefore almost all of the countries they represent -- think that a war against Iraq is a terrible idea. But they also think that a war conducted by the United States outside the confines of the U.N. Security Council is an even more terrible idea.

If the council can be marginalized on a matter of such global importance, then how can it be considered relevant in the future? What is the future of the ideal of multilateralism, which council members view as a cardinal principle, if the U.S. goes it alone?

It is this concern that explains whatever success the Bush administration has had so far in gaining acquiescence for its tough line on Iraq. It has less to do with fears of Iraqi aggression than with fears of American unilateralism and a desire to keep the Security Council relevant.

But we have reached a moment where fear of war may outweigh fear for the Security Council’s future. We may soon learn whether the Security Council, and the system of alliances it represents, can continue to matter in a world dominated by a single nation bent on pursuing its own interests and values.

Is this an unduly dire prophecy? The council, after all, never approved NATO’s decision to bomb Kosovo in 1999 -- Russia would have used its veto -- and the institution survived. And the increasingly frantic efforts to find common ground between the American and French positions may yet succeed. But a war conducted outside the auspices of the Security Council could well be ruinous.

A quick and successful war, though devoutly to be wished, would reinforce for the hard-liners in the Bush administration that the council is every bit as irrelevant as they already believe it to be. And a protracted war or a messy peace would isolate the Bush administration and inflame world opinion. The chorus of “I told you so” from opponents would only drive the administration deeper into the corner of unilateralism.

Indeed, it is possible that the Security Council has already shown itself so timid, so preoccupied with process rather than action, that it is writing its own epitaph.

Bush administration officials, from the president on down, have accused the organization of the same kind of weakness that discredited the League of Nations after World War I. Both the French and the Germans seem utterly unnerved by popular opposition to the prospect of war.

But the U.N. is not the protagonist of the current crisis; it is merely the setting. After all, the administration’s drive for war has imperiled NATO as much as the Security Council, and it has forced the alliance to seek the same kind of last-ditch, face-saving solutions as the council.

The Security Council is, at bottom, just the place where the great powers -- or the great powers circa 1945 -- sit in formal conference. It cannot be any stronger than the will of the individual members or the system of alliances that binds those powers. Even the council’s greatest catastrophes -- the Balkans, Somalia and Rwanda -- were failures more of the five permanent members than they were of the institution itself, although U.N. professionals have much to answer for in those cases.

And so what is at question now is not just the future of the Security Council but something even larger: the willingness of the U.S. to bind itself to a world system it feels it doesn’t need.

Unfortunately, this cocky American self-sufficiency looks like imperial hubris. We will not thrive long in a world in which we ignore whatever bodies we cannot wholly dominate. We cannot serve as the world’s sheriff without the legitimacy that comes from those bodies.

How, for example, would we come up with a unilateral solution to North Korea or to nuclear proliferation elsewhere without the agreement of the rest of the world? How would we govern postwar Iraq? How would we raise standards for financial transparency and jurisprudence in order to combat terrorism around the world?

We are right to demand that the French keep the pressure on Saddam Hussein, even in the face of hostile public opinion. At the same time, if we are not willing to make some sacrifices in order to act in concert with others -- to recognize that our allies have interests, values and political calculations different from our own -- then we will pay more heavily down the road.

The Security Council, and the whole post-World War II system, was designed for a Cold War world of more or less equal -- or at least counterbalancing -- powers. That world has now come to an end. We stand alone; we have constituted ourselves as the guarantors of order in a chaotic world.

And so the great experiment we are witnessing is whether a nation that can afford to act on its own will nevertheless bind itself through multilateral institutions, at least in matters that implicate the whole world.

It may be that any other nation, in our position, would act with even greater scorn for the world’s opinion. But we are not, as the president often tells us, any other nation.

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James Traub is a New York writer who frequently focuses on the United Nations and international affairs.