Senior Fellow James Traub writes for Foreign Policy Magazine on how the institutions designed to secure global order clearly aren’t up to the task. What will take their place?
Such a U.N. might be able to devise and execute policy on the global issues as the current version cannot. But would the United States trust it on matters of national security in the aftermath of a close brush with World War III? That seems hard to believe. Michel Duclos, a former French diplomat and now a resident sage at the Institut Montaigne, France’s leading liberal think tank, wrote that he finds the kind of scenario I suggested all too plausible. In such a case, he predicts, the Security Council would be deposited in history’s dustbin, while an “informal directoire,” consisting perhaps of the United States, China, India, and the E.U., would emerge.