The Australian

Aussie Surge to Support Afghans | The Australian

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:03:00 -0400

According to Steve Coll, a US journalist with impeccable South Asia and Washington security sources, Musharraf finally began to move the Pakistani army away from sponsoring jihadist groups, but as his own political position deteriorated last year, ...

Flynt Leverett in The Australian | 'Nirvana Out of American Reach'

Communications — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 09:23:00 -0400

The energy, financial and political woes that grip the US signal a decisive shift in world power, mocking the liberal delusion that Barack Obama or John McCain can return American prestige and power to its pre-Bush year 2000 nirvana. There is no such nirvana. There is instead a new reality: the greatest transfer of income in human history, away from energy importers such as the US to energy exporters; the rise of a new breed of wealthy autocracies that cripple US hopes of dominating the global system; and demands on the US to make fresh compromises in a world where power is rapidly being diversified....

Flynt Leverett, former director of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council, says: "The international economic position of the United States has deteriorated substantially since the new millennium. The big trends in global finance and energy markets are working against the US. There isn't any solving this problem in terms of making it go away. These are ongoing realities. The energy picture is not going to change: it is here to stay..." LINK

U.S. Tactics at Odds with Contradictory Iraq Strategy

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:20:00 -0400

The long-awaited report by David Petraeus to the US Congress on the war in Iraq has provoked a debate about tactics rather than what is needed: a debate about strategy. The tactics are those of the US troop surge (a weasel word for escalation). Observers agree that the surge has had some effect in reducing violence in parts of Iraq, temporarily if not permanently. But this success, if it is a success, ignores the larger question of US strategy.

The US did not invade Iraq to provide it with a police force. The goal is not reducing Iraqi violence as an end in itself.

The tactic of reducing violence by Shia and Sunni militias and jihadists, some Iraqi and some foreign, was supposed to serve two goals: reconciling the Iraqi population to the central government and giving Iraq’s three main ethnic groups -- Shi’ites, Sunnis and Kurds -- time to agree on a stable power-sharing arrangement in a national unity government.

Unfortunately, it appears that however successful the surge may be as a tactic, the two strategic goals are incompatible. The Iraqi nation cannot be reconciled to the Iraqi government if there is no Iraqi nation, only three ethnic nations, each of which prefers a government it controls to one in which it shares power with the others.

Petraeus is a brilliant soldier and he has sought to apply the time-tested lessons of counterinsurgency in Iraq. The purpose of a counterinsurgency or pacification strategy, carried out by native troops and their foreign advisers, is to provide firm and enduring security to the people so they are not intimidated by rebels. Through time various non-military projects will win the hearts and minds of the population over to the government’s side.

It is not true that counterinsurgency efforts by outside powers supporting local allies are always doomed. The Americans, although they failed in Vietnam, succeeded in The Philippines in the 1950s and the British succeeded in Malaysia in the ‘60s. The premise of traditional counterinsurgency is that there is one government and one population. The premise is reflected in the term nation-building: there is one majority nation and a majority nation-state.

However, traditional counterinsurgency does not apply to dissolving multi-ethnic states such as Iraq, an incoherent entity created by the British from a few Ottoman provinces and artificially held together by the tyrannical rule of members of the Sunni minority until the fall of Saddam Hussein.

This is why the second aim of US strategy -- buying time for the formation of a national unity government -- is at odds with the first. If the end result of the Iraq war is not going to be a united Iraq but Shia, Sunni and Kurdish successor states that will be formally or informally independent, then it makes no sense to buy time to win over hearts and minds to a national government that will never exist except on paper. Instead, the strategy should be to accept the partition of Iraq as inevitable and to define the borders, rights and duties of the three successor states, be they independent or part of a loose and all but nonexistent Iraqi federation.

It is clear -- as it should have been all along -- that Iraq is similar to Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union: an artificial agglomerate that has broken apart along ethno-national lines once the dictatorship holding it together lost its power.

This being the case, the sheer folly of the US and British effort becomes apparent. It is as though, when Yugoslavia began breaking apart, the US and NATO had occupied the entire country and declared war simultaneously on all separatists -- Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians -- on the theory that Western forces would fight indefinitely until a centralised, democratic Yugoslav government could be restored. Or, to use another example, it is as though the US and NATO had occupied the disintegrating Soviet Union and had chosen to fight on all fronts against every secessionist movement: Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Uzbeks.

It makes no sense to say that a tactic has achieved movement towards a goal when the goal -- in this case, Iraqi political unity -- is almost certainly unachievable. As philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote: “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.”

The beginning of wisdom is to realise that the US needs a new strategy in Iraq, not new tactics in the service of an unworkable strategy. Recently the US has experienced successes in getting Sunni leaders to co-operate in suppressing jihadists in their territories. This success, however, exposes the falsehood on which the Bush administration has based its justification of the war since 2003: the claim that the US has been fighting a single group called “the terrorists”, consisting of Sunni and Shia militants as well as al-Qa’ida-linked jihadists.

The US should build on this success by reaching out to Shia militants as well as Sunni militants, on condition that they agree to capture or kill jihadists operating in their territory. Iraq has degenerated into a Hobbesian anarchy in which power grows from the barrel of a gun, as well as from the minaret of a mosque. If mullahs and militias are the real authorities in Iraq, not powerless politicians in a paper parliament, then to avert the further unnecessary expenditure of Iraqi as well as American and British lives, the US should build its policy on this fact.

The choice is not between staying in Iraq as long as it takes to create a democratic, territorially intact state and abandoning Iraq to al-Qa’ida. It is time for Washington to accept that Iraq will be divided and that the authorities in the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish successor states will include some militants who formerly fought against the US.

The goals of the US and its allies post-Iraq should be basic: preventing al-Qa’ida from acquiring bases in any of the Iraqi successor states, preventing any of the successor states from carrying out ethnic cleansing or genocide, and preventing outside powers such as Iran and Saudi Arabia from fighting a proxy war in the rubble of Iraq.

Achieving these three goals will be difficult, but at least they are not inherently impossible, unlike the present US goal of buying time for the emergence of a united, democratic Iraq by simultaneously fighting Shi’ites and their Sunni enemies.

To conclude from the limited tactical gains of the surge that this impossible strategy has a chance of success would be to ignore the counsel of another 20th-century philosopher, George Santayana: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”

Return of the Realists

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 02:11:00 -0500

The day after the 2006 US mid-term elections, a polite but important coup is under way in Washington. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld has gone. Brent Scowcroft acolyte, former CIA director and anti-neo-conservative realist Robert Gates has got Rumsfeld’s job. Democrats control both chambers of Congress. And George W. Bush has found that not only can he not stay the course in Iraq, he can’t stay the course on any policy front.

Quite uncharacteristic of his earlier tenure, somewhat desperate-sounding pleas for bipartisanship have become the President’s most often-stated phrase since voters ripped the gear shaft and steering column out of his control of the US political scene.

Top-tier neo-conservatives such as Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman and even "axis of evil" wordsmith David Frum -- who brand Rumsfeld and Bush as seriously incompetent in the latest issue of Vanity Fair -- are jumping off the Bush ship that they helped sink with the war against Iraq.

Realists are hot again and are trying to rescue Bush’s administration from total ignominious collapse out of patriotism and loyalty to his father, George H.W. Bush.

This week’s election has sent the Bush administration into a tailspin. Karl Rove, architect of the President’s resilient hold on power during the past six years, simply could not deflect a significant wave of voter dissatisfaction over Republican corruption and sex scandals, the Iraq war, terrorism and the economy.

Democrats have secured firm control of the House of Representatives and are projected to take control of the US Senate by a one-seat margin after two nail-bitingly close races in the states of Virginia and Montana.

In Virginia, the Democrats have successfully sent to the Senate an important military figure, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy, who became a Democrat recently much in the same spirit as General Wesley Clark adopted the Democratic Party before the last presidential race.

Present trends may imply that the Dems are increasingly seen as trustworthy stewards of national security policy and as more pro-military than incumbent Republicans. That’s a very big switch.

American voters are proclaiming loud and clear their lack of interest in "staying the course" with Bush’s war team. The high-fear tactics that Bush and Dick Cheney used to milk American insecurity about the so-called global war on terror reached a point of diminishing returns some time ago. In recent years, Americans gave their commander-in-chief extraordinary powers and support to confront the world’s thugs and terrorists and to make the nation safer.

But the verdict of the 2006 elections is simply that the President and his team have made matters worse.

The US, for the first time since Vietnam, is looking at a big military and political loss in the Middle East as well as a world of allies and foes who count on US support less than they once did or who are moving forward their aggressive and potentially harmful agendas.

Israel, Europe and Japan are behaving differently and engaging in military postures and aggressive diplomacy that was inconceivable even a year ago, mostly because of their perception of the weakening position of the US. States such as Iran and North Korea are aggravating the global order with disruptive nuclear pretensions, while Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez flies across the globe attempting to cultivate a sphere of interest melded from oil influence, a revived state socialism and anti-Americanism. Russia and China are back as big power players in the global game; and al-Qa’ida, the transnational Islamist terror network that shocked the American psyche on September 11 more than five years ago, is still functioning, with its two top leaders at large, inspiring radical, often tragic terrorism across the world.

Americans pay a lot for their security -- roughly half of what the entire world spends on defence -- and they are not satisfied with the "deliverables" they have been getting.

Washington believed unilateralism conveyed US power more effectively than serious multilateralism. When the US got bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq and overtly displayed its military limits, the global equilibrium, already in shabby shape after the Cold War’s end, came apart.

But all of this has been evident for some time. The neo-conservatives such as former deputy secretary of defence and now World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, former under secretary of defence Douglas Feith, former Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby and others laid the groundwork in the Bush administration for a "faith-driven" foreign policy of aggressive thug toppling and democracy promotion at the end of a gun that failed to take into account the costs and benefits of their actions, particularly the costs.

The neo-conservatives of the Bush administration -- despite the informed objections of many inside the trenches such as former secretary of state Colin Powell and outsiders such as Bush Sr’s friend and national security adviser Scowcroft -- really did believe that the Iraq war and subsequent occupation would be so easy and create so much momentum for the global US cause that anti-democratic theocrats in Iran would tremble, along with many of the world’s worst dictators, at the power and resolve of America’s democracy-promoting global juggernaut.

Bush’s team not only thought Iraq would be a cakewalk, they thought a good dozen or so other bad countries would simply reform after watching Iraq remade as the poster child for democracy building.

Most neo-cons wanted to start the Iraq war under any conditions because they believed the US could not lose and saw it as a necessary stepping stone to taking on the "real threat" in the region, Iran.

They also believed Iraq was a Romania in the Middle East and that the methodology of democracy would be easy for the downtrodden and terrorised in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to wear.

Frum once wrote that Americans needed to beware a revival of "Scowcroftism", meaning a kind of state-based realism that shies away from aggressive meddling in the internal guts of other nations.

But as the election was drawing close, it became clear that realism and realist-hybrids, with other related schools of foreign policy thought, were growing in popularity at the expense of neo-conservative influence. In coming weeks, for example, Bush family fixer and former secretary of state and treasury secretary James Baker will release a report of the Iraq Study Group, which he co-chaired with Lee Hamilton. This report, acknowledged as important by the President, is expected to be a realistic call for deal-making in the Middle East, even with parties such as Syria and Iran, to establish a "new equilibrium of interests" in the region.

Baker’s influence flows not only from the potential efficacy of his study group’s proposals but from the realisation that Bush has alienated most of the American public with ineffective and counter-productive national security policies constructed and informed by his team.

Although it is still highly doubtful that the Democrats have a serious plan for Iraq that its factionalised party supports, it is clear that the President can’t continue in the direction in which he has been heading on Iraq. If neo-conservatives have jumped ship, and if the Dems are wanting change, the most logical course for Bush is to get logical: to revive the realist wing of US foreign policy and re-establish some of his bona fides with a besieged and overwhelmed military.

On his death bed in AD211, Roman emperor Septimius Severus warned his successor and future emperors: "Keep the soldiers happy." Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush not only did not keep the soldiers in body armour and out of reckless escapades, but the soldiers on active duty in the military as well as the National Guard reserves -- and their families and neighbours and retired veterans -- may in fact have helped breathe new life into America’s diminished and now revived system of checks and balances in government.

The military and the people may have just restored the republic.

For Thriving Cities, It's Not Enough to be Cool

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The West's great cities face serious challenges, with terrorists plotting to blow them up even as jobs and capital flee to the low-cost havens of the developing world. However, from Sydney to San Francisco, the political imperative all too often has been not to look for ways to stay safe or competitive, but instead how to make cities cool and hip.

To many public officials, the key to building a great city in the 21st century lies in cultivating the arts and entertainment venues that appeal to a so-called creative class of youngish, hip professionals.

The pied piper of this theory, the American academic Richard Florida, has some cities sold on the notion that "without gays and rock bands" they are doomed to lose "the economic race" in the new century.

Across the world, cities have adopted strategies such as promoting gay districts, focusing resources on building cool downtown lofts and investing heavily in the construction of arts palaces and other such cultural ephemera. "Instead of having the arts we can afford," gushes one true believer, Andrew Refshauge, former deputy premier of NSW, "we need the arts for the economy to bloom."

Of course, this kultur uber alles approach negates the pattern traceable as far back as ancient Greece that arts and culture do not foster, but follow, the growth of economic and political power. After all, every great arts city since then -- -- from Venice and Florence to Amsterdam, London and New York -- -- emerged first as a centre of commerce and trade, and only then evolved into a centre of artistic brilliance.

The dunderheadness of this urban schemata is epitomised by the experience of San Francisco, a city consistently ranked among the highest on Florida's rankings of successful cities. Led by some of the wackiest politics this side of Havana, San Francisco has for years taxed and regulated its business community with unremitting fervour while counting on its arts and culture assets to drive its economy.

What these policies have produced instead is a city that has lost about 4 per cent of its population and 10 per cent of its jobs since 2000. Although many wealthy people still enjoy living there, the city has seen many of its largest corporations and promising young firms leave for either the surrounding suburbs or other regions.

As a result, notes native son and California historian Kevin Starr, San Francisco increasingly resembles "a theme park for restaurants." Its once diverse population is increasingly bifurcated between the nomadic rich and a sizeable population of servants as well as a large homeless population. Today the city -- -- which Starr described as "a cross between Carmel and Calcutta" -- -- has the highest concentration of inherited wealth and among the highest per capita incomes of any American city. It also has experienced one of the greatest increases in homicides and is No. 1 in terms of cases of syphilis per capita in the US, eight times the rate of New York and 10 times that of Los Angeles.

Other cool, culture-centred cities in the US also appear to be less than idyllic. Since 2000, pillars of urban hipness such as Portland, Boston and Austin have suffered anemic economic growth while key industries -- -- from manufacturing to high-end business services -- -- have migrated to such unhip cities as Las Vegas, San Bernardino-Riverside, Orlando, Boise and Reno.

A strong focus on hip culture also hasn't done wonders for a host of less-renowned cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans and Newark, which have also continued along their decades-long pattern of deterioration.

In all these places, fancy new art museums, rock palaces and overheated loft districts have failed to reverse the flight of jobs and middle-class families.

This record of failure is not limited to North America. Take the case of Berlin. In the 1990s, vast amounts were expended to turn the restored German capital into the business capital of Mitteleuropa. These ambitions foundered on the city's high taxes, regulations and a generally anti-business culture. More than 100,000 jobs have disappeared in recent years, unemployment is at almost 20 per cent, and the population is declining as people flee to the suburbs or other, more prosperous parts of Germany.

Faced with such problems, what does the mayor of the bankrupt city propose? Cutting taxes, building new infrastructure, finding ways to keep the middle class and entrepreneurs? Not quite. Mayor Klaus Wowereit pegs the future to selling his "sexy but poor" city as "the city of glamour." To him, "the most decisive aspect is to bring creative young people to Berlin." Somehow, he believes, this would turn the city's sad economy around.

Perhaps most troubling, the craze over coolness stops cities from focusing on the fundamentals -- -- such as investing in basic infrastructure, education, broad-based economic development, good parks and efficent sanitation -- -- critical to their long-term prospects. These basic functions affect the lives of most adults, including members of the bohemian, creative class, once they begin to worry about buying a decent house, expanding a business and the imperatives brought on by raising a family.

These observations apply as well to Australia. Sophisticated hip cities such as Melbourne and particularly Sydney attract praise from Florida and his acolytes. Not surprisingly, planners and policymakers have placed great emphasis on developing dense, arty urban neighbourhoods while objecting to the expansion of supposedly dull, uncreative suburban areas.

This approach has proved no more successful down under than in the US or Europe. Strict land rationing, for example, has bequeathed the Sydney region, as revealed by the latest Demographia survey, grossly over-inflated land prices. As a result, population as well as job growth have stagnated as upwardly mobile people head to more affordable places such as Perth and Brisbane.

City leaders in the private and public spheres need to recognise three basic things about making modern, successful cities. First, cities must be allowed to grow naturally into the surrounding countryside in order to allow the continuous construction of housing for upwardly mobile middle- and working-class families. Second, they must provide a tax and regulatory environment that encourages entrepreneurs to build companies and expand employment.

Third, and most important, they need to understand that economic reality matters more than artistic pretence. Perth's growth, for example, has its roots not in cultural genius but in an expanding commodity-based economy and more affordable housing choices. Brisbane, too, is capitalising on lower costs and livability to lure critical technology and entertainment activities away from more expensive, land-constrained cities such as Sydney.

Fortunately, there is no reason for any of Australia's great cities, including Sydney, to fall far behind. Blessed by nature and its history of late development, Australia still has plenty of room to grow. It possesses ample raw materials, a high standard of education and a superb quality of life. You don't have to spend millions selling yourself as hip and cool to get newcomers to settle here.

What is needed instead is an appreciation that the greatest asset of Australian cities -- -- including Melbourne and Sydney -- -- lies in the promise of the Australian dream of a single family house and a backyard. Although often anathema to planners, cultural meisters and policy intellectuals, this is the mundane prospect that will attract talent and capital from congested China, India and Europe to this still very lucky country.

The Jury is Still Out on Iraqi Democracy

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Happy days are here again. Or so say William Kristol and Robert Kagan, the co-helmsmen of America's neoconservative establishment. In their upbeat Weekly Standard assessment of the December 15 Iraq parliamentary elections (reprinted in these pages yesterday), they ridicule "sour experts" whom they assert are going far out of their way to explain why "the peaceful election of a national assembly for a fully self-governing Arab democracy was not a turning point." But the election, according to Kristol and Kaplan, was no less than an "eruption of democracy in the heart of the Arab world."

Meanwhile, another neoconservative fellow traveller, Lawrence Kaplan, writes in The New Republic that while Americans have an understandable affliction of "milestone fatigue" after all previous celebrated "turning points"

Realists Lambaste Neo-Cons

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Brent Scowcroft, one of the pillars of the Republican foreign policy establishment and best friend of George H.W. Bush, has dropped a few tons of highly destructive ordnance on George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and others on the White House war team. In this week's New Yorker, the former national security adviser's usual wry and elliptical style turned to blunt, unmistakable disdain for the policies and "decision-making process" that this Bush administration has deployed.

Scowcroft's remarks followed an even more incendiary speech at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, by former State Department chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, who has worked closely with Colin Powell for more than 15 years. Wilkerson said that the statutory national security process of the US had been taken over by a "secretive, little-known cabal led by Vice-President Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld."

Scowcroft and Wilkerson are heavyweight Washington insiders who carry the imprimatur of legitimacy because of their extremely close relations respectively with Bush Sr. and Powell. And their candid remarks come at a time when the White House is struggling to confront likely indictments against the Vice-President's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and the President's deputy chief of staff and chief political adviser, Karl Rove, for their roles in revealing the covert status of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

A serious White House scandal is raging and some political hands are ready to settle scores, particularly with neo-cons and their fellow travellers, who Scowcroft and Wilkerson believe led the US into an unnecessary war that has devastated America's power and status in the world.

For Scowcroft and Wilkerson, the biggest fault of this administration is closing itself off from the advice of those with experience and those with dissenting views. At the start of the Bush presidency in 2001, there was a clear rift between ideologically driven neo-con forces represented by the likes of former deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, former No.3 Pentagon official Douglas Feith and Libby and the more staid calculators of national interest such as Powell, his deputy Richard Armitage and--at that time--Rice. Neo-con ideologues such as Richard Perle and William Kristol lurked inside as well as outside the administration for their moment to wrest the helm of foreign policy away from realists.

(Neo-conservatism has been described as "muscular Wilsonianism", or the export of democracy via a variety of aggressive means, including force. As former White House speechwriter David Frum has put it: "Neo-conservatives believe that America can no longer ignore what happens inside countries, like realists do: we must have a role in keeping bad stuff inside other countries from harming us.")

September 11 ended any pretence of realist control of foreign policy. Strident, pugnacious nationalist impulses joined up with the robustly moralistic strategists and knocked away those such as Scowcroft who oppose any action that does not defend US interests. The Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz cabal became an anti-realist movement that reacted emotionally and without clear-headed, sober assessments of the costs and consequences of an invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The Bush doctrine of preventive war and regime change became the bumper sticker on a neo-conservative-inspired US unilateralism bent on twisting the world to its will. The problem with that strategy, as realists such as Scowcroft tried to counsel, is that US resources are constrained and other nations do not easily subordinate themselves to US edicts and preferences. Costs and consequences are the most important benchmarks to realist thinking. Neo-cons ignore costs and think instead of idealistic visions without regard to what it takes to achieve them.

The US over-extension in Iraq, the handicap that the Bush administration now faces if its highest ranking apparatchiks are indicted this week, the hemorrhaging government budget deficit and the new benchmark of 2000 US soldiers killed in Iraq all have done much to demystify the neo-conservative foreign policy agenda. By exposing the naivete of the Bush foreign policy team and demanding accountability from those in the White House, Scowcroft and Wilkerson have nailed a dagger deep into neo-con ambitions. Wilkerson, in particular, as a key insider during the build-up to the Iraq war, sees this administration's foreign policy as "a complete disaster." Neo-conservatives have lost their legitimacy and standing.

Now, regrettably, the reality of a world in which America's mystique of power has been punctured and its military and financial limits exposed, allies won't count on the US as much and its enemies will be emboldened. Such is the legacy of the neo-conservatism that was buried this week in Washington.

Beware Visionaries Wielding Power

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 14 Mar 2003 00:00:00 -0500

In the debate about a second UN resolution authorising a US-dominated invasion and occupation of Iraq, both sides share a common premise. France, Russia and Germany argue that the UN will lose its moral authority if it rubber-stamps a war that the US has decided to wage. The Bush administration argues that the UN will lose its geopolitical credibility if it does not. Both sides are mistaken -- the UN has neither authority nor credibility to lose.

The UN has never functioned as its founders intended it to do. US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who coined the name and oversaw planning for the UN during World War II, was a realist who sought to avoid the mistakes that had rendered the League of Nations ineffectual.

In Roosevelt's conception, the UN Security Council was to have formalised a great-power concert of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union. The addition to the Security Council's permanent membership of two minor powers, Nationalist China (at US insistence) and France (at Britain's insistence) undermined the Security Council's nature as a superpower steering committee.

Then Soviet-US competition paralysed the council for almost half a century. After the Cold War ended, the UN authorised the first Persian Gulf War. But an expected Russian veto in the Security Council led the US and its allies to wage war on Serbia under the authority of NATO rather than the UN. The present rift over Iraq between the US and other permanent council members may inspire future US administrations to follow the model of the war against Slobodan Milosevic rather than that of the two wars against Iraq.

The UN Security Council suffers from two defects, one that can be repaired and a second that cannot. The first defect is anachronism. The Security Council's permanent members are the victors of World War II, not today's great powers (France and China were not first-rank powers even in 1945). Germany, Japan and India in many ways are more important in today's world than Britain and France. As US foreign policy scholar Philip Bobbitt has observed, membership in the G-8 group of leading economies reflects the distribution of world power more accurately than the permanent membership of the UN Security Council.

The anachronistic nature of the Security Council might be remedied by the addition of new permanent members -- at the price of multiplying potential vetoes. But the deeper defect that cripples the UN cannot be cured. That flaw is the theory of collective security.

In a system of multiple, sovereign states, world governance may be undertaken in one of three ways: by all, one or some of the states. Collective security holds that a threat to world order is a threat to all states, which therefore should act in unison. In reality, of course, few threats affect all countries severely enough to make the risk or reality of war worthwhile. Most countries, therefore, will opt out of most military campaigns against states or non-state actors that do not threaten their interests -- not because their leaders are cowardly or immoral but because the first duty of statesmen is to avoid needlessly squandering the lives of their soldiers and the money in their treasuries.

Compared with world governance by all, world governance by one is a more workable proposition. The theory of US unilateral world domination, adopted by George W. Bush and theorised chiefly by Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, holds that the US can best protect itself by providing the world with certain public goods, including nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the suppression of terrorism by means of preventive wars waged solely by the US if necessary. No problems of collective action arise in this system, since all important decisions are made in Washington. The only thing required of the rest of the world is collective acquiescence.

This is not easily obtained, as the Bush administration is discovering. The British Empire, which used its naval superiority to suppress piracy and end the slave trade, is held up by today's US unilateralists as a precedent for benevolent US hegemony. But 19th-century Britain was not perceived as a benevolent global hegemon by the US or other countries at the time.

Until the early 1900s, the British fleet was considered the main military threat by US war planners. Rejecting the British claim that global free trade served the good of humanity rather than the narrow interests of British manufacturers, the US engaged in industrial protectionism to promote its manufacturing capability at the expense of Britain.

By the early 20th century, Britain's brief military and commercial hegemony had provoked its own nemesis, in the form of the arms build-ups and nationalist industrial policies of the US, Germany, Japan and Russia.

Paradoxically, Americans have been the principal sponsors of collective security and the new doctrine of US unilateralism. While the means differ, the end is the same -- a world in which a single authority, be it the UN or the US acting on its own, is the functional equivalent of a world government, in which the line between war and law enforcement vanishes.

The goal shared by US proponents of collective security and unilateralism explains why so many neoconservative unilateralists can describe themselves as Wilsonians even as they spurn alliances and reject international organisations. Both schools of Wilsonianism hope to transcend old-fashioned diplomacy.

The rival conceptions of the UN as world government and the US as world governor are two versions of the same utopian illusion. The only realistic method of maintaining a minimal degree of order in international affairs is world governance neither by all nor by one but by some. When the great powers of a given era compete, the results are expensive and lethal proxy wars or direct conflicts. However, when the great powers form a concert and collaborate in managing regional crises, the chances for a nonviolent, if not necessarily just, world are maximised.

This was the perception of 20th-century realists such as Theodore Roosevelt, who envisioned a US-British-French alliance as an alternative to US president Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations after World War I, and it inspired Roosevelt's hopes for a US-British-Soviet concert after World War II.

The relative success of NATO in the Balkans suggests an approach to world order that requires neither collective security under the UN nor collective acquiescence to the US. Most so-called global problems, including Iraq and North Korea, are actually regional problems and should be dealt with chiefly by those great powers that have the greatest interest in doing so, in addition to the greatest capability to act.

The hype about the US as the sole global superpower obscures the fact the US is best described as a multi-regional great power. Both the US and Russia, among the great powers, have a stake, for reasons of geography alone, in what goes on in Europe and North-East Asia. Russia, bordering on many Muslim nations, arguably has a greater interest in the Middle East and Central Asia than does the US, which has been the hegemon in the Persian Gulf only since the first Gulf War. BECAUSE neither the US nor Russia colonised the Middle East, Russo-American co-operation in the region might have more legitimacy than interventions by the former colonial powers of Britain and France (although US acquiescence in Israeli extremism hurts US legitimacy).

By the same realist logic, the North Korean crisis ought to be addressed not by all (the UN) nor by one (the US) but by some -- the US, Japan, Russia, China and South Korea, the states with the greatest stake in the outcome. Unlike the Bush administration's collection of bribed and opportunistic client states, these regional coalitions, to be perceived as legitimate, would have to include more great powers than one.

The alternative to the false utopias of UN world governance and US world governance, then, is not global chaos, as the rival proponents of the two schools of collective security and unilateralism claim. Rather, the alternative is a sustainable system in which different groups of great powers collaborate to resolve regional problems on an ad hoc basis.

Such an approach is not likely to inspire the visionaries who dream of world federation or world empire. But the 20th century should have taught us that there is nothing more dangerous than visionaries wielding power.