U.N. Should Change -- or U.S. Should Quit

The United Nations is the tooth fairy of American politics: Few adults believe in it, but it's generally regarded as a harmless story to amuse the children. Since 9/11, however, the U.N. has ceased to be harmless, and the Democratic presidential candidates' enthusiasm for it has ceased to be amusing. The United Nations has emerged at best as irrelevant to the terrorist threat that most concerns us, and at worst as an obstacle to our winning the war on terrorism. It must be reformed. And if it cannot be reformed, the United States should give serious consideration to withdrawal.

The U.N. has become an obstacle to our national security because it purports to set legal limits on the United States' ability to defend itself. If these limits ever made sense at all, they do not make sense now.

Yet the U.N.'s assertion of them forces presidents and policymakers into a horrible dilemma. If we obey the U.N.'s rules, we compromise our national security. If we defy them, we expose ourselves to accusations of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

According to the U.N. Charter, nations are permitted to use military force only in two situations. Article 51 of the charter recognizes an "inherent" right to self-defense against attack. In all other cases where a nation feels threatened, it is supposed to go to the U.N. Security Council to seek authorization before it takes military action -- even action that might forestall an attack.

The trouble is that the U.N. defines aggression in outdated ways. For the U.N., "aggression" means invasion across national borders. Send Nazi shock troops into Poland -- that's aggression. Give sanctuary to thousands of anti-American murderers, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, that's not aggression.

In other words, if the United States had sent troops into Afghanistan to shut the camps down, we might well have been branded the aggressor. But if the U.S. had asked the Security Council for a mandate to destroy Al Qaeda's terrorist bases, could the French, Russians and Chinese have been expected to approve? Even after 9/11, there would still have been plenty of people ready to argue that however much they deplored what Al Qaeda had done, Afghanistan -- a sovereign state and United Nations member -- was not an Article 51 "aggressor."