An Alternative to the UN

Let's say you started a book club with your friends, and over time the club grew quite large. In the process, you have a falling out with some of your friends - in fact you almost come to blows. Others who you still have a lot in common with just really want to hang out with different people, and tend to talk about you behind your back.

Over time, the rest of the club waits to see which book you want, then picks a different book deliberately to spite you. In fact, sometimes they stamp on the book in front of you just to show contempt.

The people who are particularly close to you - especially when they agree with you - are singled out for the same treatment, and some of them aren't even allowed to help decide which books are to be read by the club.

For all of this, you have the distinct privilege of paying 1/4 of the costs of the club. Would you stay in it?

So why do we stay in the UN? Steven Den Beste publishes an article translated from L'Express, which ends with this interesting paragraph:

In the name of their credibility, and of their diplomatic survival, the UN and its Security Council can't afford to miss the opportunity to bring back the all-powerful America into the fold and to retake some semblance of initiative on the critically important Iraq dossier. But it remains to measure their theoretical power, once more, by the measuring stick of concessions from Washington.

By this logic, the UN is powerful only when it makes the US weak. Accession to US wishes is ipso facto proof of UN weakness, even when US wishes comport with the establishment and maintenance of international order, for which purpose the UN was founded. This feeling appears to be very common in the UN and in Europe, and sadly is hardly unknown in the US.

I can see the benefits of this arrangement to the UN, which gains the moral authority, financial backing, political strength and military power of the US. I can see the benefits of the arrangement for second-tier states like France, which get to "punch above their weight." But I don't see where the US gains from having these leaches hanging off of us. The UN no longer provides us any mechanism for gaining the assistance of wavering states, nor does it provide us with moral cover for self-defense, nor does it provide us with other loci of stability and order (so as to reduce the amount of commitments we have to make, thus freeing up our troops for warfighting needs).

The run-up to the Iraq war has shown that the US needs to quit the UN, and the aftermath has proven the point. So what could the US do instead, in order to provide some measure of international security and order?

It's time for the US to form an association of like-minded states, exclusive of the UN and receiving the lion's share of our money and attention, with the following characteristics:

• All members must be free-market economies and have representative governments (it should not be too difficult to come up with measurable tests to determine if these conditions are met).
  
• All members must commit at least certain set amounts (based on their size, GDP and/or other factors) to regional stabilization, self-defense and/or assistance with intervention, stabilization and peacekeeping missions agreed by the organization.
  
• All members must commit to abide by the group's decisions, or be expelled. No vote should be required to expel an errant nation. This should be triggered by factors known in advance.
  
• All members must commit to aide in security actions of the group. Presumably, the group would be committed to fighting terrorists, preventing WMD proliferation and the like.
  
• Within the group, there should be agreed standards for border control. This would make possible the free movement of people between these countries, without passport or even visa. Freedom of movement within, and residence in any member state of, the group would be a requirement of group membership.
  
• Similarly, the group should be a free trade area. This would require that standards be set and maintained by each member state as to tarriffs and subsidies.
  
• Each member state would be obliged to come to the aid of the others when those states face attack by an external enemy, in pre-defined ways.
  
• No member state would be allowed to remain in free-trade agreements outside of the group, unless the agreement was with the entire group. (This would prevent the temptation for one nation to become a portal for goods to the detriment of other members.) This is in fact not dissimilar to the reason for having common border security arrangements.
  
• There would have to be a limit to the percentage of GDP (or some other measure) consumed by the government of each member state - the same limit for all member states - to ensure that the free-market inside the group doesn't end up subsidizing the more socialist states at the expense of the more free-market states.
  

I'm sure that other such requirements could be crafted. The point is to ensure that the group is a group of free nations - both economically and personally. Such a group should supercede other treaties, organizations and arrangements, for the most part.

Right now, I could see this group consisting of the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Australia, perhaps India, Israel, Taiwan, perhaps S. Korea, perhaps Spain, perhaps Italy. Such a group - containing as it does the most important economies in the world with the exception of China - would be a wealth-creating and freedom-maintaining engine for all of its members. It would also, by its very nature, provide powerful incentives for borderline countries (the perhaps's mentioned above, plus countries such as Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Russia, continental Europe and so on) to change the conditions keeping them out, so that they could get in on the benefits of being in the group. In other words, even without robust intervention abroad to fix crises and prevent threats to world order, such an organization could act as a force for stability and peace.

It's worth a try - it certainly wouldn't be worse than the current situation.

Posted by Jeff at September 17, 2003 09:06 PM | Link Cosmos