Killing the UN

This is very, very, very alarming:

This story begins with a Republican presidential candidate who, despite the hype, doesn't seem to know much about foreign affairs. McCain recently talked at length about problems on the "Iraq/Pakistan border" - the countries are a thousand miles apart. Asked how to deal with Darfur, he mused about "bringing pressure on the government of Somalia". Uh - it's Sudan, Senator McCain. And he keeps expressing his desire to build up US relations with Czechoslovakia, a country that hasn't existed for 15 years.

But McCain does know one thing: he doesn't like the United Nations. He championed George Bush's appointment of John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN - precisely because Bolton scorns the UN as "irrelevant" and "a twilight zone". He even announced "there is no such thing as the United Nations". It was like appointing Marilyn Manson as ambassador to the Vatican. This is part of a long seam of thinking on the American right: they opposed Franklin D Roosevelt's spearheading of the United Nations as a fetter on American power, and have never been properly reconciled to it. Republican congresses have refused to authorise US dues to the UN - so there is now a backlog of $2.8bn (£1.5bn) outstanding.

Yet McCain cannot oppose the UN outright - because the American people support it so passionately. Contrary to the yokel-myth, a typical opinion poll - by Global Public Opinion - just found that 64 per cent of Americans think the UN is doing a good job, compared to just 28 per cent who support George Bush. Some 72 per cent of Americans want the UN to play a bigger role.

So McCain has decided to build up an innocuous-sounding alternative called a "League of Democracies". It would be an alliance of countries the US labels democratic that can be used to legitimise US military actions. Charles Krauthammer, the conservative journalist who invented the plan, says: "What I like about it is, it's got a hidden agenda. It looks as if it's about listening and joining with allies... except the idea here, which McCain can't say but I can, is to essentially kill the UN. Nobody's going to walk out of the UN. There's a lot of emotional attachment to it in the US. How do you kill it? You create a parallel institution." Gradually - over decades - McCain hopes it would make the UN wither away.

Okay. Here's the big question: Will climate change or a nuclear war do us in first? Because one way or the other, we're screwed.