Motus Mentis

David Brooks, with whom I agree sporadically, published a pretty good item about multilateralism in today’s Times.

Throughout history strong nations, ruled by confident men, reckoned their interests, and having weighed them, acted. No longer. As a modern Western democracy, America — despite having achieved in recent decades a supremacy of power without historical precedent — now operates under an enervating double whammy: first the belief, now axiomatic amongst Western nations, that unilateral action is morally culpable, and second the intrinsic incoherence of democracies themselves, in our case combined with and amplified by the deliquescent effects of internal cultural disunity and low social cohesion.

In his article, Mr. Brooks looks at the first of these factors: aversion to unilateral action. He begins by acknowledging that nowadays “we are all co-religionists in the church of multilateralism”, then goes on to nail a few theses on the door:

First, multilateral efforts are marked by opaque decision-making and strategic vagueness. It is hard to get leaders from different nations with different values to agree on a common course of action. When diplomats do achieve this, it is usually because they have arrived at artful fudges that allow leaders from different countries to read the same words in a U.N. resolution and understand them in different ways. The negotiation process to arrive at these fudges involves a long chain of secret discussions and it necessarily involves eliding issues that might blow everything up.

Quite so; this is surely why we have no clearly stated objective in Libya.

Brooks continues:

Second, leaders in multilateral efforts often obsess about the diplomatic process and ignore the realities on the ground. The reports describing how the Libyan intervention came about are filled with palace intrigue. They describe the different factions within the Obama administration, the jostling by France and Britain, the efforts to win over the Arab League. It’s not clear who was thinking about the realities in Libya.

Who are the rebels we are supporting? How weak is the Qaddafi government? How will Libyans react to a Western bombing campaign? Why should we think a no-fly zone will protect civilians when they never have in the past?

In this, as in so many previous multilateral efforts, the process blots out the substance. Diplomats become more interested in serving the global architecture than in engaging the actual facts on the ground.

Third, multilateral efforts are retarded and often immobilized by dispersed authority and a complicated decision-making process. They are slow to get off the ground because they have to get their most reluctant members on board. Once under way, they are slow to adapt to changing circumstances.

Sure enough, the world fiddled for weeks while Qaddafi mounted his successful counterinsurgency campaign. The coalition attacks are only days old, but already fissures are appearing. The Arab League is criticizing the early results. The French are not coordinating well with their allies. NATO leaders are even now embroiled in a debate about the operational command structure.

Good points all; these are also many of the same problems that naturally affect the internal affairs of democracies.

Now we come to Brooks’s most important insight:

Fourth, multilateral forces often lose the war of morale and motivation. Most wars are fought by nations ”” by people aroused not only by common interests but by common passions, moralities and group loyalties. Multilateral campaigns rarely, on the other hand, arouse people. They are organized by elites, and propelled by calculation, not patriotism. No one wants to die for the Arab League, the United Nations or some temporary coalition of the willing.

This simple idea — that nations are more than mere propositional abstractions, that their bones and sinews are built on the shared passions and loyalties of a common people — has been more or less taboo in recent years, though of course it was transparently obvious to all, not so long ago. Now it seems to be in the air again.

Should America “go it alone” in the world, without regard to the wishes of its friends and allies or any sense of noblesse oblige? Of course not. But it is good to be clear about things.

There’s more. Read the rest here.