Have the USA, Britain and Spain dealt the UN a death blow by taking unilateral action against Saddam without the explicit endorsement of a further UN resolution, contributing to, rather than reducing global insecurity?

The answer is no. The split between the permanent members of the Security Council is serious, but it does not constitute a stake through the heart of the UN, which will return to business as usual as a talking shop and aid agency.

There is, however, a battle going on for the soul of the UN. If is to regain its place at real the heart of efforts to make the world a safer place, it has to rise to three big post-Cold-War challenges: how to regain credibility dealing with newly nuclear nations; how to play a role in the war on terror; and how to rein in those who see it as a convenient means of constraining US power.

Since its founding, the UN has played a positive role as a force for stability. It provided a mandate for military intervention in a few regional conflicts (Korea, First Gulf War) and validated intervention by others in a number of other situations (Bosnia, Kosovo). But these were not the most important contributions of the UN to world peace: the UN's key role was to provide a forum during the Cold War for the two sides to berate each other in public and do business in private. All of its structures were designed with this in mind. And it worked: the two superpowers and their nuclear allies never came to direct blows, their huge nuclear arsenals were never used.

As for the smaller countries, they got to sit on committees, tap into aid programmes, sidle up to those with their hands on the levers of power. They largely played the role of the audience in a televised political debate: nice for the participants to have lots of support, nice when audience members behave themselves, nice if they enjoy the evening. But not really an essential part of real decision-making, which was firmly in the hands of the Permanent Members of the Security Council.

France, treated like a major power when they manifestly weren't one, for reasons now known only by avid readers of Churchillian history, was included in the party mainly to balance numbers. They were expected to know enough to avoid a confrontation with either side. The superpowers, for their part, avoided confrontations by abstaining from voting in areas of the other's sphere of influence, with the exception of a few exciting moments, most memorably the Cuban Missile Crisis.

All of this gave sufficient illusion of world unity, or at least of unity amongst the leading nations of the world, for the UN to work. It also allowed the UN to do a great job in many locations as a multinational aid agency, and in policing peace agreements once combatants had laid down arms - a role which players on all sides of the political divide greatly valued. Occasionally the UN mandated an active intervention, but rarely. The problem was that long-running, serious conflicts get to be that way because both sides have powerful allies, and powerful allies on both sides tends to mean the UN is deadlocked. The nature of a multilateral organisation is such that it can only take action against an errant member with no friends - but they tend to get sorted out by their immediate enemies first.

Providing a meeting-place for the world's great nuclear powers was important enough to guarantee the UN a role when the major threat to world peace was a falling-out between those powers. Ever since the end of the Cold War, however, the UN has been facing new threats to its relevance.

The Nuclear Problem

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Kim Jong II in jaunty mood. Are you feeling safe yet? Even the seemingly mad North Korean leader wants to talk to the US, not the UN

The first new threat to the relevance of the UN is the failure of attempts to stop nuclear proliferation. Policing the resulting mess has become almost exclusively a US domain, leaving the UN looking increasingly irrelevant on one of the core issues of international security. This, by the way, was already the case well before the current crisis at the UN over Iraq.

Despite attempts by the great powers and the UN to restrict membership of the nuclear club, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have muscled their way in; others are queing up to join them (in particular, friends of Pakistan). Yet the UN, as it stands, presents no coherent approach to countries falling between Permanent Membership and Non-Proliferation. In the corridors and council-rooms of the UN, no extra weight is given to these new nuclear powers, in order to avoid giving an instant benefit to any country crossing the nuclear threshold. But since no difference is acknowledged between, say North Korea and Iran in terms of their ability to cause damage to their neighbours, is it surprising if there is important business of which the UN is merely a spectator?

Under cover of the heat and noise of the Iraq situation, with the world's powers seeminly split as never before, North Korea broke the agreement it reached with the Clinton regime in 1994 and reactivated its nuclear programme. Why was the North Korean non-proliferation deal signed bilaterally with the US in the first place? The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is one of the shining successes of the the UN and of multilateral diplomacy, yet we see that the North Koreans talk nuclear turkey only with the US. Indeed in the last few days North Korea has issued a statement saying explicitly that it would ignore (or consider as a casus belli) any UN resolution sanctioning its nuclear programme. It continues to press for a unilateral meeting with the US.

Similarly, Pakistan and India. In July 2002, it took intervention from US Secretary of State Colin Powell to talk these two back from a potentially nuclear confrontation. And can anyone doubt that if Israel is ever to be persuaded to part with its own nuclear capability, the only player it would ever listen to would be the US?

Supporters of the UN as the cornerstone of world peace have some explaining to do as to why the UN has failed in this key area of international security. It is incumbent on them to propose substantive organisational reforms to allow the UN to function as a forum for policing nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear responisibility. If they do not do so, then we must accept that the UN can continue to have only a circumscribed role on these issues in future. This is not a consequence, by the way, of the disastrous diplomatic run-up to the war on Saddam: it has essentially been the case since the end of the Cold War, and its implications are only now emerging.

For my part, I would welcome reforms of the UN that would restore it to a meaningful role moderating the behaviour of potentially-irresponsible nuclear powers. I am not optimistic, however, that the UN can muster either the political unanimity or the economic carrots required to modify the behaviour of a North Korea or a Pakistan.

The Terrorism Problem

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The second challenge to the relevance of the UN in the post-Cold-War environment is the threat posed by international terrorism, particularly terrorism supported by Arab dictatorships.

The UN's over-riding philosophy is that safeguarding sovereign integrity is the fundamental principle behind all peacemaking and peacekeeping. Dictators, kleptocrats, violent theocrats, misguided ideologues or downright psychopaths are allowed to do terrible harm to their own populations, according to the UN's logic, but they cannot threaten world or regional peace as long as they are kept within the borders of their own countries.

The flaw in this approach became brutally clear on September 11th. We learned that there were NO LIMITS to the scale of outrage terrorists were prepared to perpetrate - that there are people out there susceptible to no civilising influence whatsoever. Overnight we stopped seeing terrorism as just a scary annoyance, occasional outrages that, while tragic, could never divert the main flow of the great civic societies. We realised that terrorism can threaten the very fabric of our societies: where we live, where we work, where we travel, how much freedom we allow ourselves, and we want the threat dealt with.

It also, in the aftermath of 9/11, became clear that behind the terrorists lay a jungle of support whose roots could be traced back to a number failed states in the muslim world, dictatorships every one. The UN failed to take the initiative, constrained by the political correctness of treating all its member nations as equally viable, having equal legitimacy, and so constrained itself to the sidelines in the inevitable efforts by the great powers, led inevitably by America, to address the problem.

Terrorists are taught, not born. But the UN offers no tools with which to dismantle terrorist production lines.

Terrorists are not romantic figures, fighters against brutality, forced reluctantly by the overwhelming strength of their opponents to attack soft targets. In fact they are, almost without exception, not fighters against brutality at all: most are cynical professionals, deployed to further the most brutal of agendas, using the most brutal of means, and with the least chance of discovery or reprisal.

When you and I wake up to the news of a new terrorist horror, it is hard to see the perpetrators as anything other than grotesquely misguided or psychopathic. The violence seems so random, so bestial, so unrelated to any target that could confer advantage on the attacker. What bravery, what military genius, to strike a nightclub, an office building! But watch events unfold over the following days, however, and they fall into a pattern: expressions of repugnance, condemnations of bestiality and promises of retribution from those attacked; expressions of pride (silent or gloating) from the terrorists and their backers. And, above all, further polarisation between the two civilian populations on either side.

It is this polarisation of civilian populations that is the main goal of terrorism. It is possible that there is also an element of Schadenfreude at seeing the strong humbled, but the masters behind the masks are not driven by sentiment or hatred, they are driven by tactical calculation. They know that, simply put, their people are more docile in the face of an external threat - and what is easier than to create one by sending a few poor deluded souls to set some bombs and run away. Or, even easier, set some bombs and not run away!

The terrorists themselves are as likely to be driven by thoughts of the exciting, leisured lifestyle they will live prior to their attack, or by mystical feelings of messianic heroism, or by Freudian urges for revenge on a father figure, or by delusional desires to rape 72 virgins in the afterlife, or whatever. But for the masters behind the terror, the resulting chaos allows them to demand the unquestioning allegiance of their people, the opiate of dictators and demagogues through the ages, and gives them a license for brutal repression.

The evil mind behind 9/11 was that of Osama Bin Laden. But noone should think that as soon as Al Qaeda is eliminated the threat from the forces that led to its creation will have been dealt with and everything can return to normal.

If the hunt for Osama Bin Laden found nothing else, it found that there is no shortage of dictatorships offering sponsorship and support to a wide variety of terrorist and near-terrorists. It is not only regimes like Saddam's in Iraq, or the Taliban in Afghanistan who have been tolerating, encouraging, or sponsoring networks of international terrorists.

• Syria hosts a "Press Office" of Hamas in Damascus (responsible not for murdering civilians, we are told, but only for publicising their murder); it also supports Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad - organisations openly supporting the killing of civilians.
• Iran provides the main financial and training support for Hizbollah.
• Elements close to Saudi Arabia's Royal Family are deeply implicated in the web of funding that supported Bin Laden on condition that he kept out of Saudi Arabia; even though Saudi Arabia deports provocative mullahs rather than allow them to build domestic followings, there have been numerous attacks on Western workers - the Saudis claim without proof that they are related to alcohol smuggling, not terrorism.
• Yemen has long been a haven for those planning terrorist activities, as well as suicide attacks on military assets such as the USS Cole.
• Sudan has provided bases to the Eritrean Islamic Jihad group since 1993, helping them to launch murderous attacks against foreigners in neighbouring Eritrea to discourage them from investing there.
• Somalia has long provided a home for al-Itihad al-Islamiya, Al Qaeda's strongest regional ally.
• Algeria's Salafist Group of Preaching and Combat was recently caught trying to destroy a fifteenth-century fresco in the Church of San Petronio in Bologna, northern Italy, because it depicts the prophet Mohammad in hell; one of the successes of European security services in 2002 was to apprehend terror cells of Algerians developing Ricin-based weapons.
• In April 2002, when a bomb at a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, killed 21 people including 11 German tourists, officials initially tried to claim it was a freak accident.
• Libya has admitted downing Pan-Am flight 103.
• Pakistan's security services worked closely with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and there are strong suspicions their members continue to shield wanted terrorists; attacks on India, including one on the Parliament building and numberless attacks within Kashmir, have been planned and launched from within Pakistan with the tacit approval or even encouragement of the regime; Pakistan's madrassah system is designed to recruit, indoctrinate and train future extremists and terrorists.
• And no list would be complete without the Palestinian Authority: Yasser Arafat's ability to rule the Palestinians without opposition or elections rises in lock-step with the severity of reprisals against attacks on Israeli civilians, a fact that surely explains why he has allowed Hamas to continue to operate with virtual impunity from territory he controls, and encouraged his own Fatah organisation's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to complete with Hamas in launching attacks, and Marwan Bargouti's Tanzim militias to continue their tactic of sniping from behind packs of stone-throwing children.

  This is by no means a complete list. There are others with bigger budgets who are in the business of compiling such lists, but the point is made. There is a whole litany of dictatorships trying to create external enemies that allow them to remain in power, repressing their people.

  It is crucial to note is that none of these state-sponsored or state-tolerated terrorist programmes serve any military or defense purpose whatsoever. Their entire rationale is to rally repressed populations by creating the impression of an external threat. This is nothing to do with the great religion of Islam - it is not even correct to call it Islamic fundamentalism. The perpetrators of the actual terrorist outrages may well believe they are fighting a religious war for the furtherment of a radical form of Islam; but those who pay the bills, shelter the terrorists, train them and drive recruits into their arms and cynically exploit them are not doing it for the sake of religion. They are fostering a pathological interpretation of a great religion for purely secular reasons: the pursuit and retention of power.

  External threats help keep dictators in business, as George Orwell understood so well decades ago. Whip your audience into a frenzy about a foreign threat, and you get to portray yourself as a popular leader (without the inconvenience of elections) and you get a mandate for repression without negative consequences. Should we be surprised, then, that so many dictatorships have hosted, or even set up, international terrorist networks in their territories which serve to generate reactive hostility in the state's neighbours and around the world?

  America and Israel are, of course, the most frequent targets, but by no means the only ones: multi-ethnic India, Catholic Philippines, liberal Australia, secular Turkey, non-partisan Africa, peaceful Hindu Bali - anyone who can be portrayed as an enemy of Islam to an audience starved of information is at risk. "Old" Europe thinks that it can escape the threat by appeasing the terrorists and turning a blind eye to their activities, even when they have been planned in European capitals under the noses of our security services. This may have avoided major direct attacks within Europe so far but, although it may have earned the temporary gratitude of the terrorists, you can rest assured it has not earned their love and respect.

  From the point of view of their sponsors, these terrorism programmes have been hugely successful. The West's (and particularly the USA's) predictably hard-line reaction to terrorism has played a major role in generating the widespread sense of threat felt by people in the Islamic world, which has, in turn, shored up the support for their dictatorial leaders.

  I am writing this on a day of extraordinary events in the Middle East. The television is alive with images of Iraqis jubilating at the liberation of Baghdad from the yoke of Saddam Hussein's evil regime. They are in no doubt who it was that created such misery for Iraqis. But the most extaordinary pictures are not the pictures of Iraqis dancing on the fallen statues of Saddam Hussein. Who would not celebrate after surviving such an evil regime? No - the most extraordinary images are those of the reaction from Iraq's Arab neighbours. Even in relatively liberal Amman, Jordan, news of Saddam's demise is being greeted by a glum, depressed silence. Instead of rejoicing that 23 million Iraqis are finally free to strive for a new life, the public in Iraq's neighbours are sad that Saddam didn't survive, that he didn't teach coalition forces a lesson, win great and unexpected victories, kill thousands of coalition soldiers. Such is the extent to which the culture in these countries has been pathologised by their leaders: they really do believe that it is the Americans who are their enemy, DESPITE visual evidence of American troops risking death to liberate Iraqis from tyranny, DESPITE evidence of the scale and murderousness of that tyranny, and DESPITE evidence of the Iraqis' huge relief at seeing the end of Saddam's regime.

  But what makes these terrorist programmes, encouraged or merely tolerated by dictators throughout much of the Islamic world, a global threat, rather than a series of local ones? First, they feed on each other, since they all share similar goals: the polarisation of world opinion against one or more Islamic polities. Hence they blur together, as evidenced by the widespread rejoicing in the Palestinian territories on receiving news of September 11th. Second, the pooling of resources by various states with violent anti-western agendas multiplies the threat many times over. Metcalf's law states that the value of a network increases in proportion with the square of its members. Grow your terrorist network from 100 to 1000 members, and you make it a hundred times harder to combat. Grow it to 10,000 members and you may overwhelm the security forces of the world's democracies. And third, of course, is the threat that as more and more of the sponsoring states have access to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, it is only a matter of time before these turn up in the hands of their terrorist tools.

  So international terrorism is one of the great modern threats to world stability; it is a byproduct of repressive dictatorships; so why is the UN not playing a leadership role in stamping it out?

  The way to combat terrorism is either to eliminate the dictatorships which sponsor it, or to disrupt the production lines which produce its operatives. Either remove from those who would choose to use them the means to indoctrinate, recruit, fund, train and equip terrorists; or remove them from power. The UN's charter, however, does not allow for any discrimination against dictators. And playing any meaningful role in addressing the "production lines" of terror in many of its member states would require nothing less than a root-and-branch reform of its Charter, structures and working practices.

  Woe betide any Permanent Member of the UN, and America in particular, who tries to force resolutions on UN members requiring them to undertake essential reforms of their internal affairs, such as eliminating indoctrination from schools, guaranteeing a free media, depoliticising and secularising the legal system, pushing through democratic changes, enacting banking reforms to block the flow of funds to terrorist and marginal-terrorist organisations and so on. Evil dictators and western peace activists would be competing to see who could condemn them more vehemently as neo-colonialists and cultural imperialists.

  The single most important change required of the UN would be to give weight to countries in proportion to their domestic democratic accountability. Dictatorships that deny their citizens' human rights, that use schools and state media to preach hatred, violence and expansionism, that are nothing more than organised kleptocracies, that don't allow dissemination of independent information, that don't have an independent judiciary, should simply not have voting rights or rotations on powerful UN committees.

  It is an absurdity of monumental proportions that Libya is currently chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights, that Iraq is Chairing the UN Conference on Disarmament. It is beyond absurd, it is tragic, that Syria currently sits on the Security Council. Syria, a brutal dictatorship, a country in occupation of a large part of one of its neighbours (Lebanon), a country that openly condones, through their support of organisations such as Hamas, the perpetation of attacks on civilians. Allowing countries like Syria (and Angola, Guinea and Cameroon) to serve on the UN Security Council acts as nothing less than an endorsement of their political and social systems which will do nothing but prolong the misery of their people and the threat of exported violence to ours. Kick them off right now!

  Rogue states should be allowed nothing more than observer status until such time as they clean up their act and pass some basic tests of human rights and democratic accountability. If it is in the business of rewarding rogue states with seats on powerful committees, then the UN is part of the problem, not the solution. If the UN wants to regain its role at the heart of efforts to promote world peace, it must to be about holding countries like Syria, Zimbabwe and Myanmar to account, not treating them as the equals of important and responsible nations like Italy, Germany, Mexico, Canada, Brazil and Japan.

  Of course such a change would require an act of unified political bravery by the Permanent Members of the Security Council. One of them, China, is a repressive single-party state in occupation of neighbouring Tibet - expect no support there. Such changes would also be fiercely resisted by the dictatorships, violent theocracies and kleptocracies that make up the majority of the General Assembly of the UN. So I am not optimistic about root-and-branch reform.

  But if the UN is to be at the heart of the fight for world peace, it must play its part in forcing its rogue members away from the path of dictatorship and terrorism. That it has failed to do so up to now should not be blamed on the Americans or the British. The UN's relevance (or otherwise) is in its own hands.

  
  

  The "French" Problem

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  Ronald MacDonald taking a beating. Oh how they must wish it were President Bush himself...

  The third and final challenge if the UN is to regain its relevance, is to put a stop to the second-, third- and fourth- league countries hijacking it as a means of constraining American power. This is the struggle for the soul of the UN which caused the deadlock over Iraq: as soon as President Chirac made it clear that his agenda was to prevent American action at any cost, the game was up and the French were on the sidelines.

  The Cold War is over and it has left America as the pre-eminent world power. In some countries this is seen as a threat, even though their leaders can never articulate the reasons. Blaming someone else for your own failings is comfortable, safe. It wrestles order from a chaotic world without requiring difficult changes in behaviour, without confronting painful facts. It sells newspapers and it gets votes.

  Whom do you blame in this global, connected, world for anything that isn't working out? Unless you are really losing touch with reality (in which case it has long been traditional to blame the Jews), you blame the biggest guy on the block. It's clear the guy with the most power must have the most power to ruin your party, so he's the most plausible person to blame. Hence, if you aren't really in the business of fixing your country's problems in the first place, you feel threatened by America.

  Lead amongst countries who point the finger for all evil at America is, of course, France. Never mind that it spent most of the last century being rescued and protected by the US. With the cold war over and Germany apparently in its thrall, France clearly no longer feels the need to hide under the American shield, and has set out to build a global coalition of those who feel similarly threatened.

  In one sense, of course, America is indeed a threat to these countries: it is hard to cling onto your cherished illusions of grandeur if your military can achieve nothing without American help, if your finest companies are dwarfed by American corporations, if your once-proud institutions are creaking and the world doesn't want to watch your films. It's a picture the British recognise: they too found it hard to accept throughout many decades of decline from its colonial peak, until the 1980s saw the country finally accept a realistic view of its place in the world.

  In September 2002 France sent 2000 troops to try to pacify the Ivory Coast, its former colony, where fighting had broken out between government and rebels, claiming over 300 lives and threatening more. Since then France has been trying to broker a peace agreement between rebels and government and claims to have killed 30 rebels in January 2003 alone. It has not asked for, or received, a UN resolution. The reason why France and her acolytes feel threatened by US military power is that they worry it will prevent them from playing these sort of colonial games.

  The truth of course is that unprovoked, America poses no threat to these countries. Unless a country actively tries over an extended period to cause harm to Americans, or provides material support to those who do so, America will not take military action. One can get into endless debates about the nature of provokation offered to America by this or that regime in the past, and about the appropriateness of this or that military response. The facts speak for themselves: America is hard to provoke to war. America did not enter WWI until April 1917, nearly 3 years after its start. It entered WWII in December 1941, over two years after Britain. The first gulf war was only begun after a painstaking process of coalition-building; the War on Terror only began after more than a decade of provocation by Osama Bin Laden, culminating in 9/11. Contrary to popular leftist beliefs, the US has not spent its history with its finger poised on the trigger, pointing at friend and foe alike. America did not change its nature with the election (or even the annointing by his brother, if you are a conspiracy-theorist) of George W. Bush. Taking action without an immediate casus belli is not the same as taking action without provocation.

  It should be absolutely clear to the most paranoid French observer that France has nothing to fear militarily from the US. Germany of today owes its very existence to American reconstruction after WWII, to the continuing presence of American troops there during the cold war, to the Allied airlift into Berlin, to the siting of cruise missiles in Germany which helped defeat the Soviet Union. Where is the American threat? Even Russians, traditional opponents of America during the cold war, realise that there is no chance of unprovoked American aggression against their country. Yet those leading the charge to hamstring American power, and countless others against whom America harbours no ill intentions, feel threatened by the scale and power of the American military, and claim they would feel safer if there were a rival power in the world. There is no logic to their position, just populism.

  When the Chinese knocked a US spy plane out of international airspace, forcing it to land and then refusing to return it, a friend of mine told me she was glad. The Americans, she explained, "needed to be taught a lesson", and it was "great that the Chinese have shown they won't be bullied". The US is not a perfect society by any means, but is there any squabble in which they are likely to take the wrong side against China? How can it be good for the world when a one-party state with a history of violent regional ambitions and domestic oppression can flex its muscles against the world's most powerful democracy, the standard-bearer for individual rights? So unwilling am I to consider dictatorship and democracy morally equivalent that since that discussion I am one conviction stronger and one friend shorter.

  The UN also offers a way of interfering with American enonomic power, not just military power.

  It matters not that anyone who feels threatened by the strength of the American markets has fundamentally misunderstood the way the world works. The most cursory look at stock market performance in any period of the last century reveals the obvious: when the American economy thrives, so does that of the rest of the world. This should not be a surprise. One core fallacy of the economically illiterate left is that it operates on nineteenth-century assumptions about world trade, i.e. that it is zero sum: what one nation wins, another must lose. In fact the vast bulk of most countries' economies consist of advanced products and services which are emphatically not zero sum. e.g. if a drug is developed in Switzerland, it soon becomes available worldwide (after some wrangling about price). The World Cup is paid for by advanced economies, but enjoyed by all. Development of mobile phones was only possible because of the wealth of the West, now you can buy one for a few pounds in Nairobi. This is the real world economy.

  Even the grand scions of European industry, however, feel threatened by American economic strength. The main justification for the European Economic Community (as it was called before it morphed mysteriously into the EU) was that size matters. Unless their markets were unified, unless European companies amalgamated into European champions, they would never be able to compete with their American counterparts. As evidence, much was made of the fact that European economies had undergrown the American economy by 1-2% per annum since World War II. Twenty years and much amalgamation of markets and companies later, and European companies continue to undergrow their American counterparts by 1-2% per annum. Europe has discovered that size might matter but bureacracy does too.

  Unprepared to undertake the necessary liberalisation to unleash the capabilities of your own companies, the next best thing is to tie the hands of the Americans. Look at Kyoto. No nations were expected to take painful actions about emissions except the United States - why? In whose interest is it for American industry to bear all the cost of avoiding global warming? If you really care about environmental degradation, why not help developing countries bypass the energy- and steel-rich phases of development? Or, even better, focus on population growth, a proven key driver of pollution? Or prepare measures to alleviate the impacts of global warming, in addition to working to eliminate its causes? Or invest meaningfully in those developing countries where the negative impact of global warming will be felt? The answer is that, for many, Kyoto has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with shifting the blame for the world's woes to America.

  Or what are we to make of the economic blackmail of US drugs companies, carried out in the corridors of the UN, pressuring them to invest heavily in drug research, only to be forced to give those drugs away in developing countries and watch them flow back into the grey market and undermine their domestic sales?

  Sadly, public opinion during the Iraq crisis showed more vividly than ever that plenty of Europeans really do believe that the world would be a wealthier, healthier, and happier place if the US's pre-eminence is checked by a confederacy of venal states non-democratic states. Even more sadly, many European politicians, rather than demonstrating leadership and explaining why America has been Europe's key ally for so long, chose to take the easy nationalist-populist path.

  Chief villain is of course France's President Chirac, who considered restraining the US a better use of the UN than resolving the canker that was Saddam's regime. The really big problem with the UN is not that America and its close allies, the UK, Spain and Australia and Denmark, have somehow created a crisis out of nothing by willfully engaging in a violent military/commercial adventure.

  The core problem is that a sizeable number of UN members, led by a Permanent Security Council Member, no longer see it as a forum for the equitable resolution of the world's international problems, but as a means of circumscribing American power. Lacking power themselves, they seek to use the UN to tie the hands of the world's only superpower. The challenge to the UN's role as a world peacemaker was not precipitated by Bush and Blair, but by Chirac and Schroeder.

  And even if you believe that American power does need circumscribing (which I don't), you still have to explain why you expect America to acquiesce. America was struck a devastating blow on 9/11, and it will not now accept limitations on its power to respond to to any threat it perceives. There may be no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda - my own view is that there are weak links, but other regimes are more deeply implicated - but that's not the point. As far as the struggle for the soul of the UN is concerned, the point is whether it was sensible for France to try to marshall other UN countries into a phalanx for the express purpose of binding American hands over any issue touching on security.

  Personally, I hope that the French start rebuilding bridges sooner rather than later. But it will be up to them, not up to the the Americans, to make the first moves. If they do not, and if they persist in trying to try to remake the UN as a forum for circumscribing American power, they will indeed drive it into the ground. They have massively overplayed their cards, and they must now bear the blame for the current impasse at the UN.

  If the French pursue their anti-American stragegy, they will also split the EU: if asked to choose, the Brits, Eastern Europe, the Iberians, Italy, Scandinavia and Holland will all choose America, not France as their key relationship. Germany, we have seen from its sponsorship of the UN resolution restarting the Food for Oil programme, has started its own process of bridge-building. Turkey, interestingly enough, in the short-term might be the only key player with more to gain from France than from the US, since gaining EU entry is so important to it. They will go off the boil when they realise how implacably opposed Giscard d'Estaing and his constitution-writing cronies are to its entry. And it is to be hoped that America rebuilds its relations with Turkey as soon as possible, even if it means depriving the poor Kurds, once again in the their long history, of full statehood.

  If, instead of building bridges, Chirac continues along the route of orchestrating world anti-Americanism, it risks moving from the 2nd to the 3rd league of nations, given the current and likely future weakness of the French economy; it will end up as band-leader of a coalition of minor french-speaking dictatorships and 4th leaguers, trying to maintain a semblance of French influence in an increasingly unconvinced world.

  Personally, I hope the French have the sense to step back from this future. If they do, then the UN will quickly return to the roles it has played well in the past: acting as an aid agency and peace-keeper once conflicts are over; helping mediate between the great powers; providing mandates for intervention in regional conflicts, occasionally proactively, more often reactively. Otherwise, there are plenty of decent Californian, South African, Australian and Chilean wines. But no-one else makes a decent Chablis.