Robert Kagan has an excellent (if long) analysis of what he terms the "crisis of legitimacy" regarding the use of military power in the world today.
Kagan is the author of various works on geopolitics, including the excellent (short!) book Of Paradise And Power, which is the most insightful analysis of the current disconnect between the U.S. and Europe regarding the use of military force. He wrote it in the run-up to the Iraq War, and it sheds a lot of light on what was behind French, German, and similar European thinking.
It is also useful to help understand what European ecclesiastics were (and are) thinking on the subject. At the risk of oversimplifying, his basis thesis there is that the Euros have had it good for the last sixty years. American power helped stabilize Western Europe and keep it stable after World War II and allowed Europeans to neglect their defense interests. As a result, the Western Europeans have been living in an artificial paradise (historically speaking) created and sustained by American power. Now they have developed the idea that everything can be achieved through dialogue and process rather than through the use of force. After all, they’re living in a paradise (judged in historical terms by the absence of wars between their nations). They haven’t needed to use force for anything. Why should anyone else? Dialogue will do everything that needs to be done.
They’re also scared of the use of military force because they have so little themselves. The only power they have to influence world affairs today is through dialogue, not through military power. Therefore, they’re going to accentuate the former at the expense of the latter.
In his new online piece "The Crisis of Legitimacy," Kagan carries this last thought further. He explores the sudden change of standards Europeans have proposed (or imposed) on the legitimate exercise of military force in the last couple of years. It has only been just now that Europeans have proposed all of a sudden that one needs the approval of a corrupt and dysfunctional body like the U.N. before a nation can take actions it perceives as necessary to its self defense.
The Europeans who opposed the Iraq War on these grounds themselves have not applied this test to their own uses of force, but they want to apply it to us. And, Kagan argues, the reason isn’t hard to see. They don’t really believe that legitimacy is conferred upon the use of force by getting a consensus of nations to sign off on it. The real motive is baser: France and Germany want their blessing to be required for wars to be legitimate. The U.N.-confers-legitimacy argument is just a temporarily expedient smokescreen being used to try to preserve what influence on world affairs France and Germany still have or think they ought to still have.
Once the mask is taken from this duplicity, the natural American instinct is to dismiss the whole claim. But Kagan argues that we can’t totally ignore the issue of legitimacy in world opinion. The reason isn’t that we don’t have the power needed to ignore it. The reason, instead, is that we don’t have the internal political will to ignore it forever. And so he argues that a balance of sorts needs to be sought.
READ THE PIECE.