Toward a Leninist world order. (Insider Report).

Vladimir Lenin, founder of the totalitarian Soviet Union, defined his ruling philosophy as follows: "Power without limit, resting directly upon force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestrained by rules." In 1970, then-UN Secretary-General U Thant, a Burmese Marxist, praised Lenin's vision as "in line with the aims of the UN Charter." Recent UN-related U.S. military ventures are setting the stage for the UN's abandonment of any restraints on its power, including those imposed by its own charter.

The Bush administration's war on Iraq and the Clinton administration's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia were carried out to advance UN-approved objectives: Forcibly disarming Iraq and enforcing global "human rights" standards in Kosovo. Both of those wars took place without the constitutionally required congressional declaration, and both proceeded without the UN Security Council's explicit authorization. Yet in both instances the UN ratifled these military actions after the fact: A UN "peacekeeping" force runs Kosovo; and the world body will play a central role in administering occupied Iraq.

Writing in the May-June issue of the CFR journal Foreign Affairs, Michael J. Glennon, a scholar of international law, observes that the war on Iraq raises the possibility of a "new institutional framework" for a UN-dominated world order. That framework would be based on pragmatism, rather than legalism; it would dispense with the formalities contained in the UN Charter and allow global rulers to operate according to a "global consensus" they define for themselves.

Most importantly, it would require a total break with the concept of the "law of nations," in which nations agree to govern their conduct according to customary understandings of Christian morality (a standard largely honored in the breach, of course). That concept was embedded in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and later referenced in the U.S. Constitution. It recognizes that while there is one law governing all nations, there is no central global authority. In international affairs, all nations are recognized as equal sovereigns. The Christian "Just War" concept was a key tenet of "law of nations"-based diplomacy.

Glennon urges that this system be destroyed root and branch, and replaced by a Lenin-inspired vision of a world ruled by unalloyed force:

Architects of an authentic new world order must ... move beyond castles in the air -- beyond imaginary truths that transcend politics -- such as, for example, just war theory and the notion of the sovereign equality of states. These and other stale dogmas rest on archaic notions of universal truth, justice, and morality. The planet today is fractured as seldom before by competing ideas of transcendent truth, by true believers on all continents.... Medieval ideas about natural law and natural rights ... do little more than provide convenient labels for enculturated preferences -- yet serve as rallying cries for belligerents everywhere.... Humanity need not achieve an ultimate consensus on good and evil.... Getting to a consensus will be accelerated by dropping abstractions, [and] moving beyond the polemical rhetoric of "right" and "wrong."...

What the world really needs, in other words, is a central ruling elite who can exercise power as Lenin defined it.