A Stitch in Haste

It seems almost blasphemous to nitpick this outstanding op-ed by Victor Davis Hanson in the Wall Street Journal (also available at OpinionJournal). Some money quotes:

[T]the U.N. is not the idealistic postwar organization of our collective Unicef and Unesco nostalgia, the old perpetual force for good that we once associated with hunger relief and peacekeeping. Its membership is instead rife with tyrannies, theocracies and Stalinist regimes. Many of them, like Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam and Zimbabwe, have served on the U.N.’s 53-member Commission on Human Rights. The Libyan lunocracy–infamous for its dirty war with Chad and cash bounties to mass murderers–chaired the 2003 session. For Mr. Bush to talk to such folk about the need to spread liberty means removing from power, or indeed jailing, many of the oppressors sitting in his audience.
…
There is no intrinsic reason why the U.N. should be based in New York rather than in its more logical utopian home in Brussels or Geneva. There is no law chiseled in stone that says any fascist or dictatorial state deserves authorized membership by virtue of its hijacking of a government. There is no logic to why a France is on the Security Council, but a Japan or India is not. And there is no reason why a group of democratic nations, unapologetic about their values and resolute to protect freedom, cannot act collectively for the common good, entirely indifferent to Syria’s censure or a Chinese veto.

My only observation is that it would have been nice to see Hanson flesh out that second part a bit more (i.e., the demographic, not to mention democratic, illogic of current Security Council membership).

It is now 60 years — more than two generations — since the end of World War II in Europe. We now have, the one-worlders would argue, a single European nation. Fine, give it a single seat on the Security Council. Why should France, with a population and economy roughly the size of Brooklyn’s, have veto power into perpetuity? Because of the war and what happened to France? By that logic Israel would have a greater claim to a permanent seat.

When the U.N. was founded, a permanent Security Council seat was given to the Soviet Union. News flash — there’s no Soviet Union anymore, so the seat should have been dissolved and not meekly turned over to Russia. Soon India will have more people than China, so why not transfer its permanent seat to India? And what about Indonesia? Brazil?

This Global Policy Forum site has a collection of links regarding Security Council reform. A good Heritage Foundation piece on general U.N. reform can be found here.

UPDATE: More bickering in Europe over the weekend as Germany pushes for a permanent seat. Captain Ed has more.

Again, it’s really quite simple: One Europe, one seat.

(Cross-linked at Outside the Beltway).

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