It’s test-time for Senators Kerry and Kennedy and their faith in socialist ‘world opinion’ and ‘the community of nations.’
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We are about to walk the same utopian path that led us nowhere during twelve years of negotiating with Iraq through the UN. Despite many months of diplomatic niceness by the mythical ‘community of nations,’ Iran is yet again thumbing its nose at ‘world opinion.’
Hope, however, springs eternal in the savage socialistic breast. Our liberal-Progressives cling to their religious faith that the ‘workers of the world’ will never countenance aggression and war. It’s only nasty, capitalistic Big Business (Halliburton again?) that wants war in order to make blood-money profit from the lives of innocent civilians. All we have to do is let the intellectuals discover what material goods Iran wants and fork them over, even if the material goods amount to the extermination of Israel. That’s, in liberal eyes, a small price to pay for restoration of French, German, and Russian approval for American foreign policy.
Meanwhile, however, liberals are leaving nothing to chance. Iran’s brazen reopening of its nuclear production facilities has stirred up a real hornets’ nest. Secretary General Mohammed El Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency that he told reporters in Vienna he was “losing his patience” with Tehran’s leaders.
This must have terrified the Mullahs; heaven help them should Mr. El Baradei’s impatience rise to the level of irritation.
The big artillery is being positioned for our next move. We and other nations are negotiating to get the UN Security Council to review this latest breach of international agreement and, saints forfend, impose sanctions on Iran. We all remember how successful UN sanctions were in making Saddam into a benign ruler who channelled immense oil wealth into humanitarian aid for his own subjects.
If the Iranian situation follows the Iraq script, in the months after Teheran launches its first nuclear missiles against Israel, Senators Kennedy, Kerry, Schumer, and Leahey will be speaking approvingly of street demonstrations by world socialists here and in Europe, demanding that we give UN sanctions still more months to work.
One has to wonder whether the truth ever will sink into the liberal-Progressive consciousness. Almost a full century of feckless pursuit of world peace via public meetings, first in the League of Nations, now in the UN, presents us with an unblemished record of failure. The League did nothing to stop Japan’s rape of China or Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and certainly nothing to arrest Hitler’s conquests. Only when the United States unilaterally took military action, sometimes marginally supported by UN members as in Korea, has the UN ‘worked.’
In the real world, some types of sanctions might be partly effective in deterring Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But imposing them through the UN and getting all UN members to honor the sanctions is not a reliable means, as we saw with French, German, and Russian under-the-table dealing in Iraq’s case in the massive oil-for-humanitarian-aid scandal.
As I noted in Misunderstanding Alliances, nations that survive do not follow utopian liberal-socialist theories when formulating their foreign policies. They seek to protect their vital national interests and to enhance their international advantages. Only when those vital national interests coincide with results of diplomatic negotiations will they follow the diplomatic path.
We are in a multi-faceted game. No matter what they may say publicly, many other nations see their national interests best served by diminishing the power of the United States.
Russia is smarting from our support of Ukraine’s break-away elections last year and anxious to reassert its military, economic, and diplomatic power. China likewise has much to gain by seeing us preoccupied in the Middle East and less able to concentrate upon North Korea and Taiwan. Other Middle Eastern Islamic autocracies see our success there as a potential threat to their own rule. And France has for centuries seen itself as a natural antagonist of England and the United States and is always searching for ways to reinvigorate la gloire francaise.
All of history repeatedly and bloodily informs us that aggression and war cannot simply be wished away, nor influenced by socialist mobs waving placards and smashing private property in the streets.
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