A blog about a criminal enterprise
Have human institutions evolved sufficiently to cope with the modern world? When it comes to national security, the answer appears to be: No.
Ever since the emergence of individual nations, their governments have sought to secure what they consider their “interests” on an ungoverned planet of competing nations. Amid this international free-for-all, nations tended to pursue national security or national advantage through military might.
Of course, the downside of this arrangement was that
Are the nations of the world doomed to go on fighting the brutal, horrifying wars that have long characterized human history?
We might well wonder about that as we watch, aghast, while Israeli armed forces slaughter thousands of Palestinian civilians, Russian military might relentlessly pounds Ukrainian towns and cities into rubble, and new, bloody wars erupt in numerous other lands.
Why does such widespread destruction and human suffering persist in the modern, ostensibly “civilized,” world?
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Although the current U.S. presidential campaign has focused almost entirely on domestic issues, Americans live on a planet engulfed in horrific wars, an escalating arms race, and repeated threats of nuclear annihilation. Amid this dangerous reality, shouldn’t we give some thought to how to build a more peaceful future?
Back in 1945, toward the end of the most devastating war in history, the world’s badly battered nations, many of them in smoldering ruins, agreed to create
International law―the recognized rules of behavior among nations based on customary practices and treaties, among them the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights―has been agreed upon by large and small nations alike. To implement this law, the nations of the world have established a UN Security Council (to maintain international
For some time, it’s been apparent that the world’s nations are not meeting the growing challenges to human survival.
A key challenge comes from modern war.
Over the centuries, as military weapons have grown ever more destructive, war-related devastation has grown accordingly. World War II was the deadliest military conflict in human history, with an estimated 70-85 million people perishing from the war directly or through
Although, according to the UN Charter, the United Nations was established to “maintain international peace and security,” it has often fallen short of this goal. Russia’s ongoing military invasion of Ukraine and the more recent Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza provide the latest examples of the world organization’s frequent paralysis in the face of violent international conflict.
The hobbling of the Security Council, the UN agency tasked with enforcing international peace and security,
Although the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza has captured the world’s horrified attention, the war in Ukraine has had even more terrible consequences. Grinding on for nearly two years, Russia’s massive military invasion of that country has taken hundreds of thousands of lives, created millions of refugees, wrecked Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and economy, and consumed enormous financial resources from nations around the world.
And yet, despite the Ukraine War’s vast human
In December 1934, Arthur Henderson, a leader of the British Labour Party, declared in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that the immense human suffering caused by World War I “led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.”
Unfortunately, that realization did not go very far or very deep. Although, since that time, international law has been refined, nations remain far from adhering to its provisions or accepting its
Addressing the UN Security Council on September 20, 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a heartfelt plea “to update the existing security architecture in the world, in particular, to restore the real power of the UN Charter.”
This call for strengthening international security under the aegis of the United Nations makes sense not only for Ukraine―a country suffering from brutal military invasion, occupation, and annexation by its much larger, more powerful neighbor, the
In recent decades, a segment of the global Left has looked upon the U.S. government as the Great Satan in international affairs, responsible for the world’s major ills. Thus, on those occasions when countries at odds with the United States behaved like brutal imperialist powers, these “campists” (as they were called thanks to their division of the world into an evil U.S. imperialist