Even before Israel launched attacks on Gaza last week, Barack Obama’s incoming national security team understood that the consuming demands of crises could all too easily eclipse the transformational agenda on foreign affairs that Mr. Obama advanced during the campaign.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, instability in Pakistan and the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran would have been more than enough to crowd out any thought of long-range planning. Now the Middle East is in flames again. And yet a wide range of foreign policy experts are urging the new president to look beyond the smoke and the bloodshed — indeed, to leverage the pervasive sense of crisis — to reshape the world’s governing structures.
Those structures — the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, among others — date from World War II’s end, when the victors enjoyed a monopoly on economic and political power, and the state system seemed impregnable. We no longer live in such a world. Vivid proof that we don’t came in November, when President Bush, no dreamer of multilateral dreams, convened the “G-20” to deal with the financial crisis.
See full Article.
Posts
