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

In other words, under U.N. rules, the U.S. is obliged to let terrorists strike first before retaliating -- and might even be prohibited from striking second. In an age when shadowy radical movements around the globe are seeking weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands of people, these rules are clearly out of date. We need new rules recognizing that harboring terrorists is just as much an act of aggression as an invasion and that those who are targeted by terrorists have an inherent right to defend themselves, preemptively if necessary.

Of course, it won't be easy to persuade the U.N. to adopt these changes. Many members -- including some of our traditional allies -- seem much more interested in constraining the United States than they are in defeating terrorism -- at least terrorism that is aimed at us.

The U.N. member states know that the U.S. will in the end do whatever it has to do, regardless of what the U.N. says. But they also know that the United States pays a price for disregarding the U.N. The French in particular benefit from pushing the United States to break the U.N.'s rules: Under French President Jacques Chirac, they are trying to fashion the European Union as a counterweight to the United States, and the image of the U.S. as an outlaw power helps their cause.

In a little more than a decade, our world has been transformed, first by the fall of the Soviet Union and then the events of 9/11. Everything has changed -- except for the U.N. It remains an invention of a vanished era, designed to solve vanished problems. It must evolve or it will slide from irrelevance to oblivion. If the U.N. is not part of the anti-terror fight, the United States should not be part of the U.N.