IT’S IMPORTANT to note that not all conservatives are down on the UN. Wirth notes that at least one former US secretary of state had solemn regard for the UN — and an appreciation of how hard it would be to reinvent the alphabet of international relations. " [Former US secretary of state] George Shultz once told me that we have to work to strengthen, not weaken, institutions such as the UN, " recalls Wirth. " Otherwise, we’d have to reinvent it — and we wouldn’t do half as good a job. "

Wirth also pointed me to an op-ed penned by former senator and 1996 vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp in the March 27 issue of the Washington Times. The column gently rebukes those who would reject the UN and makes what has to be one of the tidiest and most pertinent arguments in favor of the institution:

The promise of the United Nations was not to legitimize war but rather to provide a collective forum to help avoid war and a mechanism of collective security if members were attacked or in imminent danger of being attacked. The terrible irony of this war is that the United Nations is being criticized, not for failing to keep the peace, but for failing to wage war to enforce one of its resolutions.

But if voices such as Shultz’s and Kemp’s are in short supply on the conservative side of the debate, there is a striking deficit of such arguments on the progressive side as well.

The worst part of the neocon attack on the UN and other international institutions is that its ferocity has trickled down into more rational discussions of international relations. The mantra that the UN is unreformable and irrelevant has been repeated so often and with such volume and malice that it has affected rival points of view.

Most thinking about how to bolster or even replace the UN has come from the liberal side of the camp — which is faced with squaring the obvious need for global governance with the toxicity of conservatives’ political attacks on the UN and other international institutions that provide such governance. Two recent presentations on the future of global governance offer clear examples of how this disturbing trend is taking shape. At the end of March, the New America Foundation presented a lunchtime talk by Whitehead Senior Fellow Michael Lind on the topic " Does the United Nations Have a Future? " Lind is about as fierce an opponent of neoconservatism as you can find in the US today. In a recent article published in the British magazine the New Statesman, Lind dubbed the neocons " the weird men behind George W Bush’s war " and argued that " these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers. " Yet Lind’s talk carried eerie echoes of the line taken by neocons about the UN’s inability to solve contemporary problems. Unlike the neocons, Lind placed much of the blame for the UN’s recent dysfunction on what he termed the " deceptive and manipulative politics of the Bush administration. " The UN failure over Iraq, Lind argued, " was not a test of the UN, but a hoax " perpetrated by the White House.

Despite their different analyses of the UN's viability, however, Lind and the neocons end up in roughly the same place. One road — dismissed by Lind as " impractical " — is to enact the " Military Staff Committee " provision in Chapter VII, Article 47 of the UN Charter as a means of approving and implementing future military action. Another road, cited with more approval by Lind, is that described by Chapter VIII, Article 53 of the UN Charter:

Nothing in the present Charter precludes the existence of regional arrangements or agencies for dealing with such matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security as are appropriate for regional action provided that such arrangements or agencies and their activities are consistent with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations.

In other words, Lind arrives at nearly the same " ad hoc " principles of international governance sought by the neocons. There are important differences, to be sure, which Lind took pains to emphasize. For instance, the Charter insists that these " regional arrangements or agencies " be consistent with the " Purposes and Principles of the United Nations. " Clearly, the US-led attack on Iraq flouts the UN Charter’s prohibition of pre-emptive strikes. Yet at bottom, Lind’s " solution " is more in line with the neocons’ despair about the UN than with those who hope to reform and strengthen that institution.

Another event, a roundtable on global governance held on April 8 at the Brookings Institution, which was tied to the release of Brookings senior fellow Ann Florini’s book, The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World (Island Press), also stressed the difficulty of constructing new models for global governance. During the discussion, Florini argued that US empire, as called for by Boot and other neocons, is an inadequate form of global governance. " US thinking right now on its role in the world, " she observed, " doesn’t seem to reflect that kind of far-sighted vision of how you construct a global order that other people would be willing to go along with. " Yet Florini also argued that world government as we have known it is equally unsustainable. Instead, she laid her chips on a new system of global governance that would harness information technology, transparency, and civil society to establish new norms of supranational law. It’s an interesting notion that is as warm as it is fuzzy — and it is certainly not a panacea for the immediate breakdowns in global consensus that have occurred over Iraq.

The most interesting point in the Brookings session, however, came during a give-and-take between Florini and the other panel members — Carnegie Foundation for International Peace president Jessica Matthews, Brookings president Strobe Talbott, and Brookings vice-president James Steinberg. One exchange near the end of the session made clear why even progressives in favor of strengthening global governance offer such half-hearted or fuzzy defenses of the concept. A questioner, noting that the even the term " global governance " had proven to be a " hot-button issue, " asked if some other term might be substituted. Matthews took the bull by the horns and insisted dryly that " governance is what we’re talking about, and if we can’t talk about it, we’re unlikely to be able to do it. " When it comes to defending the powers of government on any scale, liberals are themselves clearly on the defensive.

ED MORTIMER writes speeches for Kofi Annan — and regularly advises the UN secretary-general. Talking to Mortimer, you’d never know that the UN is under attack, however. His tone is anything but defensive, and his candor about the battle over global governance is disarming. " There isn’t a clear answer on what replaces the United Nations, " he observes, when asked about the neocon drive to run the UN out of the governance business — and into a role as a sort of global humanitarian NGO. Mortimer is unabashedly critical of neoconservatives’ desire to permanently replace the UN with what he dubs " the law of the sheriff’s posse. " " In a way, " he notes, " it’s a curious approach for the United States to have, since they were major architects of [the UN].... One would hope that the US would aspire to construct something better than that. "

One of the sharpest rhetorical weapons used by the Bush administration to rail away at the UN is the charge that it is nothing more than a " debating society. " (President Bush himself has used the term on a number of occasions.) Yet for Mortimer and others, that the UN is a place to air international disagreements and test the strength of policy initiatives is precisely its strength. " The reality of the world is that people disagree, " says Mortimer. " One of the justifications for having a UN is that it has proven useful to the countries of the world to have a place where they can work to reach agreement. "

Mortimer is no Pollyanna. Quiz him about reforms in areas such as the Security Council, and he sharply dissects the history of the UN’s failure to reform that branch of its structure. The proposed reforms don’t go far enough, he argues, and exclude entire regions (Africa, Latin America) from a permanent presence at the table among countries with veto power. " It’s been extensively debated since 1992 and the end of the Cold War, " Mortimer admits. The failure to reform, he adds, has " reinforced the notion of a big disconnect between insiders and outsiders in the UN. "

Yet even in its unreformed state, argues Mortimer, the UN Security Council has proven its relevance. " The First Gulf War proved that the Security Council can function in the spirit of the UN Charter and make a major effort to enforce order in the world, " he notes. The current Bush administration’s push to get approval for an Iraq invasion also demonstrates, Mortimer adds, " that there is still a widespread feeling that [the Security Council] is a body that has legitimate authority and should have legitimate authority. "

Mortimer notes that the UN’s staying power has resisted numerous attempts to downplay it and dismiss its influence. " The countries of the world do need [the UN], " he says. " If it was needed in 1945, it is no less needed now. " Attempts by some in the US government to undercut and attack the UN, he observes, " make a lot of people, including many Americans, uncomfortable. "

Discomfort among American supporters of the UN is likely to grow as the push to discredit multilateralism gathers steam. What should scare them most is not the ferocity of the rhetoric used by the neocons. That’s nothing new. In the 20th century alone, America forged ahead despite the crazy talk indulged in by McCarthyites, racists, and anti-immigrant groups and the scares they unleashed on the body politic.

What’s truly scary now is that unilateralist neocons are asking Americans to toss away an interlocking global security system that has led the US away from the catastrophic wars of the past. In exchange, they’ll usher in a new world disorder that eschews trust and confidence building in favor of brute military strength. It’s a map where threats are vague and opportunities are uncharted. In short, it’s a permanent no-man’s land of perpetual conflict that admits no alternatives and no discussion.