A World Shaken Up: Consequences of the first important event of the 21st century -- good and bad.

The Anglo-American action in Iraq, to which the Arab terrorist attack on September 11 was the prolegomenon, is likely to rank as the first important event of the 21st century. The reasons are twofold, the first negative, the second positive.

The action, and responses to it, brought to the surface the need for fundamental change in various international organizations. The first is the United Nations, an omnium-gatherum of states whose permanent membership on the General Assembly and whose periodic membership on the Security Council is automatic without any regard to their qualifications. Thus military dictatorships, gangster-run states, and failed states overrun by terrorists have voting rights as valid as those exercised by law-abiding states that have succeeded in making democracy work and abided by the rule of law.

Moreover, the Security Council system, invented in 1945, is more than half a century out of date and no longer corresponds to global realities. These weaknesses explain why the U.N. failed even to address the problem of international terrorism, let alone deal with it. When, following 9/11, America, as the injured power, finally determined to do so, it found the U.N. an obstacle, not a help. The U.S. government suspected this all along, and involved the U.N. machinery only at the urgent request of its principal ally, Britain. In the event, the Allies refused the requests of France and Russia for bribes in return for allowing the U.N. machine to function. This rejection of the U.N.'s characteristically corrupt way of doing things amounted to rejecting the U.N. altogether. The U.N.'s failure to involve itself in the first major crisis of the 21st century effectively ends any attempt to make it an instrument of world government.

Second, the use made by the French government (and its temporary ally Germany) of the NATO structure to impede America's plans to act in Iraq again exposed the antiquity of an organization that had fulfilled its original purpose -- to protect Western Europe from Soviet expansion -- and showed conclusively that it is now obsolete. There is, indeed, no further point in keeping large forces from the U.S., U.K., and Canada in central Europe, and their withdrawal at this point becomes inevitable and urgent.

The question of what should replace these two organizations, both damaged beyond repair, is linked to a third negative event -- the crisis inside the European Union. This was inevitable sooner or later, for the EU, in its fundamental structure, is also half a century out of date. It has proceeded systemically toward some forms of economic union, including a common currency, and is now contemplating a constitutional union. But it has made no progress at all toward a common foreign policy, and has actually gone backward from a common armed force to give it muscle, since the "European Army" proposal was voted down by the French in 1954. Britain excepted, the armed forces of the EU member states have declined in size and effectiveness in relation to the rest of the world, and there are no present proposals to modernize them. This helps to ...