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Idealism at the UN
An article from Policy Review, titled Idealism at the UN, by Michael J. Glennon, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University, and the author of Limits of Law, Prerogatives of Power: Interventionism After Kosovo

In ... 2003 .... United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan ... proceeded to appoint a group, the "High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change" to recommend reforms. The panel consisted of former governmental officials and in pursuing its task met at various points around the world. Hopes ran high that its ideas would breathe new life into an organization that needed, in Annan's word, "radical" change. In December 2004, it issued its report.

For a Burkean realist with any sense of institutional conservation, making the most of the United Nations is a useful project. Lots of capital, financial and otherwise, has been invested in the organization over the past 60 years. To the extent possible, humanity should profit from its investment. Even if the objective were merely to advance individual states' national interests, the UN may be a useful tool for doing so. In any event, it is hard to fault an organization that recognizes the need to reform itself, especially one that has borne the hopes of humanity so heavily as has the United Nations.
Realists, Burkean and otherwise, must also recognize that there are times when a project needs to be either written off in toto or broken up and the useful pieces salvaged, the ineffective allowed to die. It's fairly common for businesses to get caught up in white elephant projects, obvious and sometimes spectacular failures, and keep on slugging because of that reluctance to walk away from the sunk costs. The same occurs with government, as anyone knows who's listened to NPR...
Sadly, however, the core recommendations of the panel's report, concerning the use of armed force, rest upon wishful thinking rather than empirical evidence. The report evinces a view of a world governed by objective, universal morality rather than by competition for power and shifting national interests. .... The report, in short, exhibits all the familiar shortcomings of old-style Platonic idealism, ignoring the real-world incentives and disincentives to which states actually respond.
Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-02-05
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=55666