Panel discussion: can the U.N. survive?
Opening remarks of Dr. Tlili (continued)
I submit, Ladies and Gentlemen, that the statement of the Secretary-General is of historical importance. We might look back at it— whether this generation of statesmen fails or succeeds in taking up his challenge. We might look back and say, Kofi Annan fulfilled not only his political duty to the Member States of the United Nations, but his moral, and I underline the word moral, duty to humankind. The reason, in my view, is simple. Only wisdom, which is a moral virtue, can, in the end, make a difference in the decisions made by the leaders of the only and most powerful superpower that ever existed in history— today's United States.
Yale historian Paul Kennedy, in a seminal essay published in the aftermath of September 11 (more precisely, on February 2nd, 2002) in the Financial Times, reviewed the military, economic, technological, and cultural assets of the United States as of that date. He concluded that they are unequalled in history and will remain so for some time to come.
The same conclusion was reached more recently by Gregg Easterbrook, Senior Editor of The New Republic, in an article in the New York Times of April 27 of this year. Easterbrook demonstrates, with all the figures at hand, that the naval race, the aerial arms race, the electronic arms race, and all other aspects of the arms race are over and won definitively by the United States.
Thus, Ladies and Gentlemen, the challenge for the Secretary-General, for all of us, is: What the world should do if the United States, with so much power, and regardless of the political and ideological bend of the U.S. administration, Democrat or Republican, decides that its national interest compels it to act on its own without the clear approval and/or support of the Security Council? Not an easy question, you will admit, and that is why I spoke of the moral nature of the challenge that Kofi Annan posed to the international community.
How to square the circle? How, on the one hand, to recognize the unique, unprecedented power status of the United States while, on the other hand, preserving the integrity and relevance of the United Nations and its Charter? Who or what will prevent any American president, Democrat or Republican, from deciding unilaterally on pursuing, by means of his choice, the country's own interests?
Let me give you Paul Kennedy's answer: in one word that answer is wisdom. I quote from the same essay:
America's spectacular position in the world in military, economic, technological, and cultural terms may be equaled by a wisdom in the executive and the Congress and judiciousness in the people in the decades to come. It might even produce a leadership that might sometimes, only sometimes, be willing to give way in international quarrels, not because its own case is a bad one, but because it is important to show magnanimity and tolerance toward those who lack U.S. strength and privileges. That would be a real act of statecraft.
Returning from Yalta on March 1st, 1945, that is a month before his death, Franklin D. Roosevelt— precisely a man of vision, of great statecraft— a sick man who knew his days were numbered— addressed the Congress of the United States. At a time when the United States was emerging victorious from the war, as my friend and colleague at the World Policy Institute Stephen Schlesinger shows clearly in his book the Act of Creation— and I invite you all to read it, it's a very interesting book— at a time when the country was, according to Schlesinger, as powerful as it probably is today— Roosevelt showed precisely that wisdom. He called on the Congress to lend its support to the new structure for peace that he conceived as the only way of preserving future generations from the scourge of war. He told Congress: "The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one nation; it cannot be just an American peace, or a British peace, or a Russian peace, or a Chinese or a French peace. It cannot be a peace of large nations or of small nations. It has to be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world."
Roosevelt was also aware that the search for peace would remain a work-in-progress because of the evolving nature of history, conditioned as it is by all the factors— military, economic, technological, and cultural— that Paul Kennedy lists. Roosevelt did not think of his work as a final answer to humankind's yearning for peace:
It cannot be what some people think— a structure of complete perfection, at first. But it can be a peace and it will be a peace based on the sound and just principles of the Atlantic Charter— on the concept of the dignity of the human being, and on the guarantees of tolerance and freedom of religious worship.
Roosevelt's challenge, ladies and gentlemen, that challenge of 1945, and Kofi Annan's challenge of 2003, are two versions of the same moral challenge that I addressed earlier. It is this moral challenge— power versus wisdom, realism versus idealism— which, I hope, will be at the heart of this evening's debate.
We could not be luckier than to have tonight's distinguished panel to think about this problem.
To my right is Michael Glennon, author of an impressive essay that he published in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, which, I should confess, triggered my thoughts about these issues. Michael Glennon is a professor of International Law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He has taught law at several other universities and was Legal Counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A member of both the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations, he is the author of several books and a frequent television and radio commentator on public affairs.
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Iran and the Middle East: How to Shape a Security Regime Acceptable to All Regional Actors
Panel discussion at New York University on Wednesday, March. 26, 2008 6:30—8:30 pm
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