Discordant Like Never Before

That the United Nations meeting in New York last weekend passed without result astonishes nobody. Never has the institution been in such a poor condition. It seems to have regressed to the times of the Cold War.

Nobody is disappointed by the U.N. this week because nobody expected anything. Not taking into account New York’s hotel industry, the simultaneous presence of several heads of government and state did not benefit anybody, least of all the Syrian people. Syrians could hear that all the

nations of this world wish them only the best while their country is disintegrating. After all, a rapprochement has been observed during this week: The presidential aircrafts of both the Iranian Ahmadinejad and the American Obama were located at the same airport for a few hours; however, that was it.

During the Cold War, everybody turned up at the annual meeting in New York without anticipating any kind of agreement. By now, the comparisons with the Cold War are as old as the U.N. itself; indeed, they both developed in step. In 1945 in San Francisco, Americans and Russians spied on each other while they wrote the U.N. Charter there. The mistrust was so strong that they secured the right to veto in all important issues. Without this privilege, which is paralyzing the Security Council to this day, the U.N. would not have come into existence at all.

Today, 67 years later, the U.N. is backsliding into that time. It is indeed a throwback to a different time. At least the big challenges in Washington, Moscow and Beijing were viewed similarly from time to time: climate protection (the facts won out), military operations against Libya’s despot Gadhafi (here, only German foreign minister and world-strategist Guido Westerwelle marginalized himself) or criminal prosecution of the Sudanese tyrant al-Bashir. The controversy over the war in Iraq is not an exception: The crack did not spread between East and West over that issue, but between the Bush/Blair duo and the rest of the world.

However, Libya was a critical turning point: In retrospect, Moscow and Beijing had the feeling that they made things too easy for the West. Their unease grew when Western politicians boasted not that they had protected the Libyan people, but rather that they had taken care of Gadhafi. In the case of Syria, it is again about the same principle: The West, with its regime-changing agenda, is not granted a new success, not even sanctions against Assad. Thus, the Libyan’s luck turns to the Syrian’s escape.

If the West intervenes, then it is not because of humanity.

Is that cynical and brutal? Yes, but it is comprehensible. Aung San Suu Kyi, the peaceful fighter from Myanmar, has once said that it is not the power that corrupts, but the fear of the powerful to lose their power. The rulers of the Russian half-democracy and the Chinese non-democracy are infested by that anxiety. The “stability” that they swear to in the Security Council is the condition that dictatorially tranquilized the Middle East and the Soviet Union for decades.

A tardy lesson from the massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia during the 1990s is indeed the doctrine of “responsibility to protect”: The U.N. should interfere if a government maltreats its people or a portion of the population. But from the point of view of autocratic regimes and others, the West never engages because it is so humane, but because it is self-interested. In many places, Western speeches about democracy and welfare sound – even today – similar to the speech by which erstwhile President of the United States William Howard Taft justified an invasion of the Philippines in 1908: America’s missionary commitment will liberate ignorant masses and promote Christian civilization.

It must have seemed similar to the Egyptian President Morsi when U.S. President Obama brought forward a plea for freedom of opinion in front of the General Assembly on Tuesday. Obama demanded that free speech must also remain free when the speaker is an agitator. Morsi, not a dictator, but an elected head of state, disagreed: Freedom of opinion ceases where religious sensitivity begins. Morsi rejected all requests to impose other “concepts or cultures” upon his people.

In consequence, the overthrows and revolutions of the past centuries, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Arab uprisings, do not bestow a new beginning on the United Nations. Democracy may be spread, but values, interests and cultures are too different. Too great is the distrust toward the West, who too frequently meddles with affairs that do not concern it and who in the process establishes rules that it applies selectively.

In this frigid peace, a new danger arises: Iran presses ahead its dubious nuclear project, while Israel threatens with a pre-emptive attack. It would display everything about the state of the U.N. if the whole region stood in flames soon.