Rebuilding A Multilateral World After Trump
Repairing the damage to international cooperation will be a work of patience, diplomatic craftsmanship and the slow recovery of mutual trust. And it cannot be done by America alone.
In September of 2003, Kofi Annan famously gave a speech titled “A Fork in the Road.” He was deeply worried at the time about recent events that, in his view, had indeed put the world at a point where tough choices had to be made.
The United Nations secretary-general’s serious concern essentially stemmed from a reemergence of unilateralism and disregard of international law, whose chief expression had been the invasion of Iraq earlier that year. Annan thought that the unilateral use of force — that is, not properly sanctioned by the Security Council — in reaction to real (or even just perceived) threats, such as terrorism or weapons of mass destruction, posed a fundamental challenge to the principles on which, however imperfectly, world peace and stability had rested for almost six decades.
He was raising the alert about a precedent that could result in the unilateral and lawless use of force, with or without justification. That precedent, he warned, would run against the belief in collective answers to our common problems and challenges, and neglected the shared vision of global solidarity and collective security that had been pledged in the Millennium Declaration three years earlier, in September of 2000.
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