What is the connection between the United Nations, public opinion, and state sovereignty? First, the United Nations is not the world's government. Second, its delegates are not international civil servants, but employees of the states that send them to U.N. headquarters with the task of bending the organization in ways that enhance the interests of their nations. Third, the U.N. Security Council can act only when the United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom—the permanent members—want it to act.
The U.N.'s political architecture has been altered since 1945. There are ten, not six, nonpermanent Security Council members. The pivotal General Assembly position—held formerly by Latin America—is held by Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And conflicts pitting Westerners against the Third World always evoke great emotion in the African-Asian-Arab-Muslim camp.
Thus, the United States has only four options in the General Assembly: agree; abstain; support a resolution it does not want because it cannot introduce a resolution it wants; or water down a resolution beyond all effectiveness to achieve the required two-thirds majority. In the Security Council, U.S. (and British) representatives must reckon with the French, who joust with the Anglo-Saxons as they strive to re-create France's earlier centuries of real and imagined glory.
It is interesting that many of those angered by U.S. unilateralism in Iraq also are angered by U.S. insistence on a multinational approach (by China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea) to North Korea's nuclear hard line. During the Arab-Israeli Six Day War in 1967, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., by then a critic of our Vietnam policy, was asked to sign a statement favoring U.S. armed support of Israel. He refused, remarking: "I think it inconsistent to favor unilateral intervention in one part of the world when I'm already opposed to unilateral intervention in another part of the world." Schlesinger implied that unilateral interventions are wrong just because they are unilateral, and multilateral interventions are right just because they are multilateral. He believed that consistency is the handmaiden of virtue-when it can be the companion of disaster just as easily.
French intervention on behalf of the colonists during the American Revolution was not wrong because it was unilateral, any more than intervention by several Western powers (including the United States) during the Soviet Revolution was right because it was multilateral. The U.S. resupply of weapons to Israel in the early days of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War was not immoral because only one country did it. Nor would the intervention of a multitude of Arab, Asian, and African countries to destroy Israel have been moral because many countries were involved.
A survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in May 2003 found that 80% of Palestinians agreed with this statement: "The rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the State of Israel exists." Does that mean that Israel is obliged to commit national suicide to placate Palestinian public opinion? An anti-Israel posture based on the numbers involved is no more valid or moral than a decision by the 87% of Americans who are not black to eliminate the 13% who are notwithstanding the principle of majority rule.
When a democracy embarks on war, it is obliged to debate, explain, and, if possible, justify its actions. But when Thomas Jefferson admonished Americans to afford "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," he did not mean the United States must be blindly obedient.
The recent U.S.-led intervention in Iraq lacked U.N. approval. So did several of the Arab states' attacks on Israel, the United States in Vietnam, NATO in Kosovo, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and Israel, Britain, and France in the Sinai Peninsula and Suez Canal.
In defiance of the United Nations and world opinion, President Jacques Chirac conducted France's fifth nuclear test in 1995 because he was convinced that an enhanced presence in the "nuclear club" would serve national interests. When President George W. Bush decided to oust Saddam Hussein without the blessing of the United Nations and international opinion, he, too, acted in pursuit of a vital interest: ending Iraq's links to international terrorism and preventing it from developing, acquiring, and using weapons of mass destruction.
At the end of the political day, safeguarding essential national interests—including resort to war—always trumps international organizations and world opinion. This is the way sovereign nations always have behaved. It is the way they always will behave.
Dr. Glick, the author of Soldiers, Scholars, and Society (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear Publishing, 1971), is a professor emeritus of political science at Temple University in Philadelphia.