perfidy

While smoking and reading Niall Ferguson's excellent book, Colossus, the Price of America's Empire, I ran across this excellent paragraph. Ferguson is discussing unilateralism and multilateralism (which he defines as "a vague phrase usually intended to refer to the United Nations, but sometimes in reality flattering a few nations opposed to American policy):

Yet this is in many ways a false dichotomy. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not without a legitimate basis in international law and was supported in various ways by around forty other states. No country was so opposed to the regime change that it was willing to fight against it, other than with that least expensive and effective of weapons, rhetoric. On the other side, the French government can hardly be protrayed as an exemplar of "multilateral" virtue, any more than the United Nations Security Council can be regarded as the sole fount of legitimacy in international relations. The crisis in Iraq arose from deep ambiguities in the way the UN - and especially the Security Council - behaved in the thirteen years prior to 2003. These were the years when, with the cold war over, a "new world order" was supposed to emerge, in which the UN, supported by the United States, would play a crucial role. Those who today exalt the United Nations and excoriate the United States have selective memories. For the cardinal sins of omission on the part of the former far outweigh the venal sins of commission on the part of the latter.

Later, in discussing the makeup of the Security Council, he says:

The UNSC, rather like the regular conferences of the foriegn ministers of the great powers during the nineteenth century - is a convenience, a clearinghouse for the interests of some (though not all) of the great powers of today. When it does legitimize American policy, it is positively useful. When it does not, on the other hand, it is no more than an irritant. And perhaps by providing a stage upon which former empires can indulge their own sense of self-importance, it renders them less powerful than they might otherwise be - precisely because their presence is a subtle irritant to the ascendant economic powers of the present that are, for purely historical reasons, not permanent council members. Today the other four permanent members of the UNSC have economies with a combined gross domestic product of $4.5 trillion. This is slightly less than half of the GDP of the United States. It is also less than three-quarters fo the combined GDP of the three largest nonmembers of the Security Council: Japan, Germany and India.

I am not yet finished with the book, but it is clear that Ferguson believes that there is an American empire, that it is not necessarily a bad thing, and that he seriously doubts that America has either the will or persistance or mindset to truly make a good showing of it.

I have been well pleased with several of Ferguson's other works, including Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals and various op-eds over the last few years. This one is turnign out to be no exception.