ONE SMALL STEP FOR COMMON SENSE, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR TOM FRIEDMAN:

Vote France Off the Island (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, February 9, 2003, NY Times)

Sometimes I wish that the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council could be chosen like the starting five for the N.B.A. All-Star team - with a vote by the fans. If so, I would certainly vote France off the Council and replace it with India. Then the perm-five would be Russia, China, India, Britain and the United States. That's more like it.

Why replace France with India? Because India is the world's biggest democracy, the world's largest Hindu nation and the world's second-largest Muslim nation, and, quite frankly, India is just so much more serious than France these days. France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it's become silly. India has grown out of that game. India may be ambivalent about war in Iraq, but it comes to its ambivalence honestly. Also, France can't see how the world has changed since the end of the cold war. India can.

One has to praise any sign of progress on the part of a slow learner, so congratulations to Mr. Friedman for realizing that India matters more than France to our future. But he's got a ways to go. First, if the UN is to continue--which it hopefully won't--the minimal condition we should place upon it is that only democracies should have seats on the Security Council. It's ridiculous to allow a totalitarian country like China to have a veto over the actions of the "world". Second, though Russia can, and must, be an important part of the long term war against Islamicism, it's hard to think of any measure by which it is a peer of the other nations on the Security Council--with its chaotic economy, crumbling infrastructure, declining population and falling life expectancies. A more suitable candidate would be Turkey or a politically reformed Iran--some major Islamic democracy.

Third, the very fact that one bitter little hedgehog of a nation--like France now or the Soviet Union when it existed--can gum up the works of the UN is ample reason to set aside the UN itself and form a more ad hoc coalition of those nations that are seriously dedicated to what Mr. Friedman calls a "World of Order". At the moment such a coalition would have a particular group of countries that mattered most--America, Britain, Israel, Turkey, India, etc.--for the confrontation with Saddam, but there would be a different group of lead nations in dealing with N. Korea--America, Russia, Japan, S. Korea, and, for this purpose at least, China. Nations that share cultural traditions, trading partners, long term allies, etc. would tend to stay involved in such otherwise regional issues, at least in so far as offering moral and logistical support, but an Israel might understandably decide its energy was better used outside the Korean Peninsula or a S. Korea might decide it can't be focused on Saddam right now. This kind of flexibility would reduce the pressure on nations to take positions on matters that truly don't mean much to them but increase pressure on nations to get involved in matters that are of obvious interest, before the rest of the coalition heads off without them.

Finally, Mr. Friedman's offered India a nice bone, American policy should tilt more drastically toward India and other newer members of the World of Order. India, because it is flanked by nuclear armed communist and Islamicist states, is central to any vision of long term order. We should have free trade and mutual defense treaties and, so long as it begins to restrain its Hindu nationalism, should begin to treat India as what it is, one of our most important allies.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 9, 2003 6:11 AM