Kristol: U.N. Has Gone From 'Useless' to 'Harmful'

Kristol: U.N. Has Gone From 'Useless' to 'Harmful'

Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, March 11, 2003

WASHINGTON – The performance of the United Nations in the Iraqi crisis has led serious American foreign policy thinkers to conclude the world body has gone from being useless to being dangerous.

“I think we need to rethink the whole issue of the U.N.,” Fox News Channel analyst William Kristol told NewsMax.com.

Kristol is co-author with Lawrence F. Kaplan of “The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission.” Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey calls it a “brilliant and definitive” book.

“I’ve never been a fan of the U.N., but I’ve also never been excessively alarmed about it. I just thought it was kind of pointless,” Kristol told us. “But I now think we really should rethink the whole American relationship with the United Nations.”

Is withdrawing from the U.N. on the table?

“I’m open to that, absolutely,” Kristol replied. “I just think it’s a new moment, and that is an institution that has a certain rationale, I guess.

"It’s a different era. It didn’t even have that much rationale then[when the U.N. was formed]. But look, it’s one thing if it’s just useless and harmless. It’s another thing if it actually becomes harmful. And I think you can make a case that it’s actually become harmful."

Kristol’s comments are a significant indicator of widespread disenchantment with the United Nations. His family history is anything but “isolationist.” His father, the well-known analyst Irving Kristol, was a Hubert Humphrey Democrat before the Democrats made a sharp turn to the left in the Vietnam era and abandoned the anti-communist policies begun by Harry Truman two decades earlier.

The Kristols were not cheerleaders in the conservative post-World War II sloganeering, “Get the U.S. out of the U.N. Get the U.N. out of the U.S.” Bill Kristol’s comment is a fair barometer of increasing disgust with a body that puts terrorist nations in charge of “human rights” and enables “allies” who deal with terrorists to weaken America’s efforts to defend its own people. The sloganeers of a half century ago had a point after all.

“The War Over Iraq” argues that the war on terror leaves America no choice but to revert to a Cold War footing of extensive global involvement.

For decades, there are those who have said America “cannot be the world’s policeman.” Kristol and Kaplan disagree.

“A humane future,” they write, “will require an American foreign policy that is unapologetic, idealistic, assertive and well-funded. America must not only be the world’s policeman or its sheriff, it must be its beacon and guide.”

That declaration is certainly controversial with partisan Democrats and others on the left. Even some conservatives who back President Bush’s Iraq policies believe there is a happy medium between Kristol’s outlook and that of Pat Buchanan, whose writings have argued that such globalism is a recipe for disaster.

Outlining their case in careful, methodical tones, Kristol and Kaplan argue that millions of lives could hang in the balance.

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Bush 41 tried to edge away from the policies pursued by President Ronald Reagan as the latter triumphed over the Soviet Union. The first President Bush’s leadership in the Gulf War reflected what the authors define as a policy “grounded in self-interest narrowly understood.”

Bill Clinton followed that up with a policy whose guiding principle was “a wishful liberalism” that could achieve foreign policy aims “through commerce, diplomacy, and negotiations” and “following the lead of the United Nations.”

Bush 43, at least post-9/11, took a “hardheaded approach” that was a “distinctly American internationalism.” The authors appear to believe that, as the current President Bush has warned, we are in for the long haul, and that globalism likely will be required throughout the lifetimes of most living Americans.

“It is short-sighted,” they write, “to imagine that a policy of ‘humility’ is either safer or less expensive than a policy that aims to preclude and deter the emergence of new threats, that has the United States arriving quickly at the scene of potential trouble before it has erupted, that addresses threats to the national interest before they develop into full-blown crises.”

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