How exactly does the UN Security Council confer moral authority o­n America's actions? The UN Security Council is a committee of great powers, heirs to the victors of the Second World War. They manage the world in their own interests and not that of the international community.

The UN Security Council is, o­n the very rare occasions when it actually works, realpolitik by committee. But by what logic is it a repository of international morality?

How does the approval of France and Russia, acting very clearly and rationally in pursuit of their own interests in Iraq (Iraq owes France US$4.5 billion from pre-Gulf War sales and Russia US$8 billion from pre-Gulf War sales, mostly for military equipment) or for that matter China, under the heirs of Deng Xiaopeng and the butchers of Tiananmen Square confer legitimacy o­n an invasion?

Many critics of the US talk about a new multilateral world and the promise of the UN as a guarantor of a new post-Cold War order. But this is to mistake cause and effect, the US and the UN. The UN is guarantor of nothing. Except in a formal sense, it can hardly be said to exist.

Collective security? During the first Gulf War (1991), without the US leading and prodding, bribing and blackmailing, no o­ne would have stirred. The world would have written off Kuwait the way the last body pledged to collective security, the League of Nations, wrote off Abyssinia.

Liberal internationalism envisions a world order that, like domestic security, is governed by laws and not men. Realists see this vision as hopelessly utopian.

The history of paper treaties, from the pre-war Kellogg-Briand Pact and Munich to the post-Cold War Oslo accords and the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea, is a history of naivete and cynicism, a combination both toxic and volatile that invariably ends badly. Trade agreements are o­ne thing. Pieces of parchment to which existential enemies affix a signature is another.

They are worse than useless because they give a false sense of security and breed complacency. For the realist, the ultimate determinant of the most basic elements of international life, security, stability, and peace, is power.