Strategic Studies Center, Moscow, Russia
Summary: In the
author’s opinion, the Iraqi crisis has shown the fragility of the modern-day
international security architecture and the inability of existing international
organizations to react adequately to challenges that the world community is now
facing. Is it possible that the time has come to strengthen international
security by altering the existing world order?
The widely spread opinion that there existed, since Yalta and until
March 20, 2003, a certain international security architecture consecrated by
international law and effective international institutions is a profound
delusion.
The bi-polar world that had existed from Yalta up to the collapse of the
Berlin Wall in 1989 was based on the currently “vogue” word - “the law of the
fist” - of the two top-rank players - the USSR and the USA. The UN and the
Security Council became a stage on which the world’s top stars, together with a
crowd of extras, competed with each other through propaganda and ideological
arguments. The real issues of security, war and peace were resolved in a
different place - where the two superpowers’ dialogue took place.
Let us remember for example, the most dramatic conflict of a
half-century of confrontation - the Cuban missile crisis. The Security Council
session, where Adlai Stevenson displayed photographs of Soviet missiles in
Cuba, was quite spectacular and turbulent. However, the actual process of
resolving this conflict, now on record not only day by day, but also hour by
hour, had nothing to do with the Security Council.
The two nuclear superpowers learned a lot from the Cuban crisis. The
result of this event was the development of a series of bilateral nuclear
agreements - the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, SALT-1 and SALT-2 (never
ratified, yet observed by both parties), and the creation of permanent
institutions to support these agreements.
The goal of these agreements was the codification of the fundamentally
hostile relations between two entities and preventing them from escalating into
military, and potentially even nuclear, conflict. War became impossible because
both parties accepted the concept - nowhere openly spoken, yet implicit
throughout those agreements - of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Both
parties developed their strategic forces in order to allow both to maintain the
potential of delivering an unacceptable degree of damage to their adversary
through a retaliatory strike. Hence, the launching of a nuclear war (a first
strike on enemy territory) would have automatically meant mutual self-annihilation.
The MAD concept (and not the UN Charter) was the true cornerstone of the
international security system during the cold war period.
This system prevented a direct super-power clash that would have been
fatal for the world, yet it failed to avert dozens of local conflicts and wars
in various regions of the world that destroyed millions of lives. In many of
these, directly or through intermediaries, either the USSR or the US -or both -
were involved.
The nostalgic refrain regarding the inviolability of national
sovereignty, supposedly effective in those happy days of the post-Yalta
architecture of international security, certainly sounds strange to our ears.
National sovereignty was violated to the left and to the right, including by
the Soviet Union. Remember the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.
However, it is important to note that there were circumstances when the
breach of sovereignty was clearly a good thing in the eyes of the world. The
Vietnamese troops’ invasion of Cambodia was a clear breach of the latter’s
sovereignty, but it saved a further third of the Cambodian population from
annihilation by an insane regime.
Collapse of the bi-polar world generated certain illusions with regard
to security, the extreme manifestation of which was the Fukuyama concept “the
end of history.” Very soon it turned out that it was not the end of history,
but the beginning of many new and unpleasant histories - the painful
disintegration of Yugoslavia, conflicts on the former territory of the USSR, in
Somalia, Rwanda, East Timor, etc. Finally, the events of September 11th
demonstrated a new all-out challenge posed by international terrorism to
civilization.
The world community found itself unprepared for all these challenges -
both institutionally and conceptually. The illusions about security institutions
such as the UN and the SC have been discussed above. Another widespread fallacy
was the belief in certain norms of international law - standards that would
guide all nations. If that were so, all the world’s problems would have boiled
down to defining an action as being legitimate or illegitimate. If only it
could be that simple. Let us review a few commonly recognized principles of
international law, recorded in dozens of declarations, charters and treaties:
·Sovereignty and
territorial integrity of a nation;
·The right of nations to
self-determination;
·Human rights formulated in the
UN Declaration and reiterated in the laws of the majority of nations, including
Russia;
·The right of states to self-defence.
If we now look at any serious international problem, at any of a few
dozen smouldering or flaring local conflicts, we will
see how wildly contradictory those principles are. In fact, all conflicts and
problems are pre-eminently generated by these contradictions.
Anyone with an elementary knowledge of logic would know that if a system
of axiomatic statements contains mutually conflicting assertions, A and non-A, any arbitrary conclusion can be derived.
Contemporary international law represents exactly such a system, and because of
that, practically any action of a state in the international arena (as well as
its opposite) may find validation in one of the norms of international law.
Most advanced politicians understand this very well. Here is what
President Vladimir Putin said during his press
conference at the closure of the St. Petersburg summit of April 12, 2003:
“However, in recent times many imperfections in the structure of international
law have revealed themselves, as well as inherent inconsistencies in which, in
my view, a serious potential for conflict is concealed.”
He continued, “Politicians and state leaders rely on effective legal
mechanisms. The inadequacy of those mechanisms may be fraught with serious
implications. I am convinced that if clearly functioning legal mechanisms for
crisis resolution were set up in time, far more effective solutions to the most
complex world problems could be found.”
Let us now dwell in greater detail on this principle and the specifics
of its application in the world after September 11th. As mentioned above,
nuclear security during the cold war was based on a principle of containment,
where each party was aware that its potential adversary was not suicidal. How
can this principle operate now when we are dealing with suicide bombers? A new
potential menace has appeared in the world - terrorists with access to WMD -
for which the containment principle does not work, and which can be countered
only by preventive measures.
The principle of the inviolability of national sovereignty has never
been absolute, and all the more so cannot be in the contemporary world. Initially
the concept of a preventive strike was very clearly and straightforwardly
formulated in the “New US National Security Doctrine” published in September
2002. The declaration by the US, of the right to conduct preventive strikes as
an intrinsic extension of the right of a nation to self-defense, has been
repeatedly criticized in the Russian press.
Yet, here are two quotes:
"If anyone tries to use weapons commensurate with weapons of mass
destruction against our country, we will respond with measures adequate to the
threat. In all
locations where the terrorists, or organizers of the crime, or their
ideological or financial sponsors are.
I underline, no matter where they are."
"In such cases, and I officially confirm this, we will strike. This
includes preventive strikes."
Who are these hawks, preaching a concept of preventive strikes violating
the sacred principle of national state sovereignty? Donald Rumsfeld,
Paul Wolfovitz, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice?
The first quote comes from President Vladimir Putin’s
speech at the October 28, 2002 session of the government. The second is a
statement by Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, made even earlier, on September 22, 2002.
Vladimir Putin’s declaration was an official
order by the Supreme Commander-in-Chief to the appropriate government agencies
to develop a new Russian military doctrine that would include the concept of
preventive strikes in response to threats against which the traditional
deterrence concept proved ineffective.
It looks as if each nation, taken alone, would adopt for itself, with
ease and enthusiasm, the concept of preventive strike, derived from the
principle of the right to self-defence, yet would be
rather critical of the readiness of other nations to adopt a similar concept.
Who indeed, will, in this case, define whether the preventive strike is
legitimate, and the extent of its validity in regards to the actual threat? The Security Council? Has the Security Council ever defined
anything? During the cold war, when its uselessness was obvious, or in the
subsequent decade, when it demonstrated its helplessness, having not been able
to prevent or halt any of the conflicts that mowed down hundreds of thousands
of lives in the former Yugoslavia, the former USSR, Rwanda, Somalia or
Afghanistan?
The increasingly chaotic character of the modern world, challenges of
radicalism, terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
generates an objective demand for some form of non-fictitious (UN, SC) but real
world government. Demand gives rise to supply. After September 11, 2001, the US
has been attempting to play this role. This situation does not seem to satisfy
anyone, including the Americans themselves.
Confrontation with the US and the formation of various
anti-American axes will only lead the US government to become more intransigent
and, at the same time, less efficient (with negative implications for the world
at large) the more their isolation increases.
Pleas to return to a certain “system of international security,”
allegedly destroyed by the Iraqi crisis, are totally vain appeals, be they
sincere or false. There never was such a system; there were not even conceptual
approaches adequate to the challenges of the contemporary world.
All the more, the world community should focus on the development of
both the concept and the institutions for a new world order. First of all, it
is necessary to turn to the problem of conflict within the various principles
of international law and try to develop some reasonable rules of balance
between them.
Yet there should be clear awareness of the fact that, with every
potential improvement to the norms of international law, the solution to the problem
cannot be purely legalistic. It will always be political. It is impossible to
invent an abstract scheme suitable for the resolution of any emerging conflict,
in which both democratic nations and totalitarian regimes bent on obtaining
nuclear arms will be equal actors.
Only an alliance of responsible world powers, united by common vision of
the problems and challenges facing the modern world, sharing common values and
with the resources - political, economic and military - to implement their
joint policy, can perform the role of efficient world government.
The structure best able to meet these requirements is the Group of
Eight. Russia, having become a full member of this framework, has an objective
interest in the G8 expanding its area of responsibility into the sphere of
international security. Because of the traditionally informal and confidential
nature of discussions within the G8, it is the most useful forum for the
realization of joint decisions on key issues of world politics.
The US will remain a leader within this eight (and in the
future, maybe, nine or ten), yet constructive and open discussion of the
current key policy issues would allow the leading powers to develop a culture
of consensus. It is in the common interest of the world community not to
alienate the US but to convert it into a responsible leader accounting for the
interests and concerns of its partners.
The United Nations, with its enormous bureaucratic structure, certainly
will not disappear. It could play the role of organizer of joint decisions made
by the leading powers.
Such a transformation of the G8 into a leading international security
institution is impossible without Russia’s participation. Full participation in
the G8 is a very important political resource for Russia. In our opinion, it is
much more important than Russia’s permanent membership on the Security Council
- a position based on inertia, exaggeration of our diplomatic attributes, and
inherited after the disintegration of the USSR superpower. The G8, as an institution
for global security, would simply be ineffective without Russia, which is
geographically adjacent to the sphere of instability that poses the worst
potential threat to the world. For the same reason, Russia will not be able to
maintain its security outside an alliance with the leading industrial nations.