The World Needs a Policeman, Mr. Rasmussen, but Not One with an American Badge

Former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said, “Look around, you will see a world on fire…Iraq on the brink of collapse. Libya a failed state in North Africa. Russia attacking Ukraine and destabilizing Eastern Europe. China flexing its muscles, the rogue state North Korea threatening nuclear attacks.” He has also pleaded that “we need America as the world’s policeman. We need determined American global leadership.”

Rasmussen’s statement is partly correct. The world needs a global policeman who will keep order in the world. The U.S. fulfilled that role for a time and there was a certain benefit from it having done so.

One can thank America for preventing a new war on the Korean peninsula, containing the nuclear ambitions of Japan and Saudi Arabia (these states want to possess nuclear weapons to contain, respectively, China and Iran), freezing the Indo-Pakistani conflict and a number of other perhaps inconspicuous but very important achievements in the world.

The only problem is that the U.S. can no longer play the role of guardian of stability. And it’s not just that America no longer has enough strength, determination, nor, to some extent, even the intellectual resources for global politics. America isn’t trusted.

The world doesn’t need just a policeman — it needs a sheriff. That is, it needs a guardian chosen by responsible members of the international community who have voluntarily delegated to that guardian the right to use force.

As a matter of fact, the U.S. was such a sheriff in the ‘90s, but then it simply started using its official position for personal advantage, abusing the rights given to it. And when a number of members of the international community expressed a vote of no confidence in the sheriff, America turned into a police officer who coerced those who dissented into carrying out his will.

And that right there is exactly how the problems about which Rasmussen has written came about.

Iraq ended up on the brink of collapse because the U.S. decided to bypass the United Nations Security Council and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Libya turned from a prosperous country (by North African standards) into nothing in the middle of nowhere largely due to the fact that Washington didn’t want to give Nicolas Sarkozy, who wanted to get his hands on Libyan oil, a rap on the knuckles, and also because Libya allowed itself to be run by Moammar Gadhafi’s Middle Eastern adversaries.

The Ukrainian crisis occurred because of the systematic unwillingness of the U.S. to respect Russian interests and international law, which found expression in the Washington-organized coup in Ukraine.

And finally, North Korea’s nuclear muscles grew after the George W. Bush administration wanted to play cowboys and Indians in its first months in power and rendered all the Clinton administration’s many years of achievements on the Korean peninsula null and void. Let me remind you that at the end of Clinton’s term, there was even a visit by the U.S. president to North Korea being planned.

Can the United States Resume the Role of Sheriff?

As a matter of fact, that’s what Trump wants. In an article about his foreign policy program, he talks about the need to defend American interests (and not its values), about not badgering those who disagree with the ideas of regime change, and about beginning to cooperate even with states that aren’t American allies.

But will Russia, under sanctions imposed by the U.S., believe in American objectivity that appears with the wave of a wand? Will China, against whom the Americans are organizing a system of collective containment? Will Iran, whose accounts Washington never unfroze even though it should have in accordance with the nuclear deal? Hardly.

Rasmussen is right, the world needs a global policeman. But in today’s world, a group of states should be this policeman and guardian of stability, not an individual country — much less the U.S., which has discredited itself. Ideally, it should be some kind of board of directors: the members of the U.N. Security Council and other leading countries of the world like Japan, India, and Germany.

Realizing that this project would be anything but simple today is another matter.