29/05: United (League of) Nations
Category: America and the World
Posted by: an okie gardener
Once again, the United Nations has shown itself incapable of living up to the hopes of FDR, and earlier Woodrow Wilson. The UN has proved incapable of stopping the genocide in Darfur. So, President Bush has announced that we will begin to take actions, beginning with economic sanctions. (Link from Gateway Pundit.)
As a general rule, nations operate by the law of the jungle--self-interest determines actions. The UN is a collection of nations each serving its own self-interest. (China has announced that they will continue to support the genocidal regime; they want oil and influence.) The surprise is not that the UN has been unable to stop the genocide in Darfur, the surprise is that the UN has ever accomplished anything positive.
The exception to the self-interest rule are democracies. If the voters possess some sense of idealism, then those nations may act in ways outside (rarely in contradiction to) their own self-interest. We have no real national interest in Darfur; our economic interest is served best by stable oil prices; our national self-interest probably would lead us to support the oil-producing government of the Sudan. The actions President Bush has announced are idealistic, not pure self-interest.
The time has come for us to move forward away from the United Nations, and toward a consortium of democracies. Most of the UN member states represent governments not accountable to their own people. Read the Declaration of Independence again, and the preamble to the Constitution.
By the way, the ongoing genocide in Darfur also demonstrates the humanitarian impulses of Arab governments (alert for the sarcasm impaired), and the inability of Europe to act in concert beyond its boundaries. (Though if The Sudan were a former French colony, action probably would have been taken unilaterally by France before now.)
As a general rule, nations operate by the law of the jungle--self-interest determines actions. The UN is a collection of nations each serving its own self-interest. (China has announced that they will continue to support the genocidal regime; they want oil and influence.) The surprise is not that the UN has been unable to stop the genocide in Darfur, the surprise is that the UN has ever accomplished anything positive.
The exception to the self-interest rule are democracies. If the voters possess some sense of idealism, then those nations may act in ways outside (rarely in contradiction to) their own self-interest. We have no real national interest in Darfur; our economic interest is served best by stable oil prices; our national self-interest probably would lead us to support the oil-producing government of the Sudan. The actions President Bush has announced are idealistic, not pure self-interest.
The time has come for us to move forward away from the United Nations, and toward a consortium of democracies. Most of the UN member states represent governments not accountable to their own people. Read the Declaration of Independence again, and the preamble to the Constitution.
By the way, the ongoing genocide in Darfur also demonstrates the humanitarian impulses of Arab governments (alert for the sarcasm impaired), and the inability of Europe to act in concert beyond its boundaries. (Though if The Sudan were a former French colony, action probably would have been taken unilaterally by France before now.)
Joab wrote: