The Foreign Service Journal, November 2004

surrounded by a larger group of members whose interests in the Union are primarily economic. That will not allow Europe to make its full weight felt on the world stage, and differences within the Euroatlantic community will be harder to resolve. Farther to the east, in Russia and the states that once were part of the Soviet empire, the revolution of the last years of the 20th century has not finished its work. It was never likely that Russia would become another “normal” European power. Russia has its own deep-seated cultural tradi- tions which set it apart from Europe. Even before the tragic recent events in Beslan, there were ample grounds for fearing that Russia is turning back toward an authoritarianism that will deepen the divide within the Euroatlantic system of nations that many in Russia, and in the West, had hoped to erase. It would be an enor- mous defeat for the globe’s democrat- ic forces were that to occur. The Euroatlantic world — North America, Europe and Russia — is clearly not a geopolitical system that has arrived at a calm and stable plateau, with all problems solved. Nor is it likely to arrive there for decades to come, at least. Despite all the crises that call out for attention in other parts of the globe, the building of a true Euroatlantic community, which is so essential to global peace, remains unfinished business of the highest importance. But, as often happens, the urgent is driving out the important. The Security Council’s Agenda The medievalism that al-Qaida rep- resents haunts the world like a specter of the Dark Ages or a premonition of future chaos. Bin Ladenism will be a threat for a long time to come even if its leader is eliminated. The danger that members of a movement like this will acquire nuclear, biological or chemical weapons is very real. Neither NATO, nor the European Union, nor any other regional organi- zation can tackle this threat by itself. A global organization is needed to inte- grate their efforts, if only loosely, and that organization is still the United Nations, led by the Security Council. Those who focus on the recent dis- array and dissension within the Council forget that for most of the body’s history, consensus in even the smallest matter was nearly impossible. When the Cold War ended, the hope was that the Security Council, and the U.N. itself, would enjoy a long-over- due renaissance. Indeed, following the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, the U.N. seemed to have entered its Golden Age. Today, that optimism has vanished and the Security Council’s obituaries have already appeared. That is not because its members disagree over the desirability of peace, or even how peace should be maintained, but instead over the relative authority of certain powers — above all, the United States — in determining which international problems take priority and the preferred means to manage or solve them. The disagree- ments are political and case-specific; they have little to do with national-his- torical legacies, nor should they. The political pendulum in the United States has already swung back in the direction of a more traditional American regard for the opinions and interests of others, but the U.N. Security Council — and its servant, the Secretariat — have a long way to go in order to restore their ability to serve the cause of international peace and security. The striking fact about conflicts for the last quarter of a cen- tury, at least, is how many of them were internal affairs, rather than clas- sic state-on-state aggression. The founders of the U.N. did not have that model in mind because, customarily, N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 51