Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs

CHOMSKY PERSPECTIVES

After the Cataclysm:

The Political Economy of Human Rights – Volume II

Culture of Terrorism

Fateful Triangle:

The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians

On Power and Ideology:

The Managua Lectures

On Western Terrorism:

From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare

Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:

International Terrorism in the Real World

Powers and Prospects:

Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order

Propaganda and the Public Mind:

Interviews by David Barsamian

Rethinking Camelot:

JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture

Turning the Tide:

U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism:

The Political Economy of Human Rights – Volume I

Year 501:

The Conquest Continues

PLUTO PRESS

First Edition published by South End Press

This edition published 2016 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © 2000 by Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust

The right of Noam Chomsky to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 3563 6 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7837 1265 6 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7837 1983 9 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7837 1982 2 EPUB eBook

Contents

Chomsky Perspectives

Title Page

Copyright

Preface to the New Edition

1. Rogues’ Gallery: Who Qualifies?

2. Rogue States

3. Crisis in the Balkans

4. East Timor Retrospective

5. Plan Colombia

6. Cuba and the US Government: David vs. Goliath

7. Putting on the Pressure: Latin America

8. Jubilee 2000

9. Recovering Rights: A Crooked Path

10. The United States and the Challenge of Relativity

11. The Legacy of War

12. Millennium Greetings

13. Power in the Domestic Arena

14. Socioeconomic Sovereignty

List of Abbreviations

Books by Noam Chomsky cited

Notes

Index

Preface to the New Edition

States that have some degree of power and agency in the international arena face two related tasks: to portray the targets of their punitive actions as irremediably evil and their own acts as glorious and just. The task falls to agencies of propaganda, the information (media) system, and loyal intellectuals—the last category the great majority in just about every known society. Since its origins, the US has not been free from this necessity—or, we might say, immune from this affliction. The portrayals might conceivably be accurate in some cases, but in historical reality, such cases are not easy to find.

There is a fundamental guiding principle: the more that crimes can be charged to some enemy, and hence the less we can do about them, the greater the outrage and clamor for a strong reaction. The more we are responsible, and hence the more we can do about them, the less the concern. Our own transgressions can be ignored, denied, or dismissed as errors that we shall now overcome. Departures from the principle are rare.

One aspect of the principle was captured succinctly in a famous observation of Orwell’s about nationalism: The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. The counterpart is the tremendous outrage about real or alleged atrocities committed by the other side, which we can do little or nothing to alleviate, though we can and sometimes do compound them by wielding the sledgehammer.

When this book was written, at the end of the millennium, the flavor of the month for enemies was rogue state. Hence the title, posing the question of just what the concept means, why it emerged, and how it can be correctly applied, particularly if we are willing to question the powerful doctrine of self-immunization and the Orwellian principle, expanded to include its natural counterpart.

For the US, the standard task gained far greater salience after World War II, when it reached heights of power and wealth without historical precedent, and appropriated—or wrested—the mantle of world leadership from the hands of a fading Britain. The losers, not surprisingly, were not amused. The British Foreign Office recognized ruefully that Britain would henceforth be a junior partner in world domination, though they could not have anticipated the enthusiasm with which Tony Blair assumed the role.

With the sophistication that comes from centuries of practice in the art, British diplomats had little difficulty in perceiving that Washington, guided by the economic imperialism of American business interests [is] attempting to elbow us out … under the cloak of a benevolent and avuncular internationalism. They also recognized a posture that had been second nature during Britain’s day in the sun: Americans believe that the United States stands for something in the world—something of which the world has need, something which the world is going to like, something, in the final analysis, which the world is going to take, whether it likes it or not.¹

What the world needs and what it is going to take were spelled out clearly even before the war ended. In February 1945, the US called the Latin American countries to a hemispheric conference in Mexico, where it imposed an Economic Charter for the Americas. The goal was to put an end to the heretical philosophy of the New Nationalism, as the State Department called it, which embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses. It was necessary to remind straying Latin Americans that they are mistaken to be convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country. The first beneficiaries are US investors, while Latin America fulfills its service function, refraining from excessive industrial development that infringes on US interests.

The Charter was intended to eliminate economic nationalism in all its forms—with one unmentioned exception. In the United States, economic nationalism continued to reign. Extending wartime achievements, the dynamic state sector largely created the modern high-tech economy by the familiar system of public subsidy, private profit.

Similar lessons were dictated to the rest of the global South in detailed and sophisticated planning, often presented with engaging frankness in internal documents, as when George Kennan, one of the leading planners, explained in PPS 23 that Africa’s role is to be exploited for the reconstruction of Europe. In Europe itself, even before the war ended harsh measures were undertaken to restore the traditional order, including fascist collaborators, but now incorporated into the US-dominated world system. A corollary was undermining the antifascist resistance and radical democratic tendencies generally. After a brief interlude, similar policies were undertaken in occupied Japan.

A major theme of the Cold War that followed was the need to crush or subvert governments that pursued radical and nationalist policies [that gain] the support or acquiescence of almost all of the population, who then provide mass support for the present regime, policies that even proceed to mobilize the hitherto politically inert peasantry. The quotes in this case are from the CIA warning about reformist capitalist democracy in Guatemala, a heresy that made it necessary to overthrow Guatemala’s ten-year democratic interlude in 1954 and restore it to brutal military dictatorship and hell on earth, which it has yet to escape 60 years later. The problem has arisen over and over, exacerbated by fear that the Russians were lurking in the shadows.

Among the many crimes of the Russian enemy, one of the most serious was that they might have flirted with the thought of associating themselves with a rising tide all over the world wherein the common man aspires to higher and wider horizons. For such reasons, it was understood at once that we must surround the USSR with military bases and offensive weapons while barring any such action on its part. Discussing this problem in 1945, the War Department (transmuted later, in Orwellian nomenclature, to the Defense Department) recognized that this might seem illogical. But that is a superficial error, the department explained: it is a logical illogicality, as we can see in the light of the persistent threat.²

Just as today with Obama’s global terrorist campaign, then too it was necessary to respond to threats that might arise someday, which is only reasonable, after all. For us.

The doctrinal and rhetorical standard for the post-war era of US hegemony was set by NSC 68, the most famous of the founding documents of the Cold War. This report, written by the prominent statesman Paul Nitze with the assistance of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, called for rapid militarization of American society to protect free people from the Kremlin onslaught that threatens our very survival. The document reads like a fairy tale, contrasting their ultimate evil with our utter perfection, flawed only by our excess of tolerance and permanently open mind. The fundamental design and implacable purpose of the Kremlin-run slave state, the report instructs us, is to gain absolute authority over the rest of the world, destroying the structure of society everywhere. In contrast, our fundamental purpose is to assure the dignity and worth of the individual everywhere under the guidance of leaders who are animated solely by generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations.

One may recall an observation of historian of imperialism V.G. Kiernan: Administrations at Washington have frequently paid themselves the fulsome tributes that in Europe are left to poet laureates or journalists to pay³—though willing journalists are hardly lacking on this side of the Atlantic. Though it is one of the most cited documents, the rhetorical framework of NSC 68 is commonly avoided, perhaps out of embarrassment.

Meanwhile the CIA had been supporting armed rebellions within Russia in an effort, soon formulated as an official policy objective in NSC 68, to destroy the slave state from within. The opposite can hardly be contemplated. Another example of logical illogicality.

Throughout the Cold War it was possible to portray terrible crimes as courageous defense of freedom against the slave state, JFK’s monolithic and ruthless conspiracy dedicated to our destruction along with freedom everywhere. As the reality of the Vietnam War began to be appreciated, far too late, that technique became harder to deploy. What happened next is of considerable interest. One of the best descriptions is by a highly respected historian of human rights, Samuel Moyn. Writing from the left-liberal and critical end of the spectrum, his review and analysis is of particular interest for understanding how the intellectual culture functions.

The contemporary human rights era, Moyn observes, began with America’s new politics of liberal internationalism, which rose after the horrors of the Vietnam War in tandem with the search for a new geopolitical role for the country. Invented just before the end of the Cold War, liberal internationalism surged in the decade after, with immense consequences for history. As one indication, "In 1977 the New York Times featured the phrase ‘human rights’ five times more frequently than in any prior year. The moral world had changed."

Human rights experienced their first global breakthrough when the cause began to be championed by the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It was only then, beginning in a moment of guilt and introspection and continuing in a post-Cold War mood of optimism and power—that liberal internationalism assumed its current form, stressing rules and rights.⁴

Moyn recognizes, of course, that Great Britain had its own version of liberal internationalism, which, he observes, served as high-minded excuses for violent rulership. But the US is different. These are dangers that the less self-interested and more authentically humane American hegemony will avoid. Although there is no absolute way to distinguish between [Britain’s] maleficent empire and our benevolent hegemony, still we should be cognizant of the differences. In general, There is little interest in unmasking liberal internationalism as an imperialism that dare not speak its name, surely not when considering the specifically American vision of liberal internationalism that the end of the Cold War seemed to anoint.

Moyn points out correctly that it was Eastern European dissidents who made it possible for ‘human rights’ to be reclaimed by liberals and the anti-Communist left in the 1970s, leading to the global radiance of human rights in our time. Particularly radiant was the idealism so powerful during Bill Clinton’s presidency, when for a moment in the 1990s, it looked as if the American school of thought known as ‘liberal internationalism’ was close to realizing its fondest dreams, though regrettably the dreams did not outlast the Bush II era.

Moyn selects the basic facts. We might, however, consider a slightly different way of interpreting them.

The horrors of the Vietnam War were the hideous crimes of American imperial aggression and occupation, which belatedly came to be appreciated, at least by many people worldwide. In 1967, the highly respected military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall warned that Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity … is threatened with extinction [as] the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size. By then a mass popular movement opposing the war was just beginning to take shape, after a bitter struggle, and by the time the US finally withdrew in 1975, domestic and international outrage had become a very powerful force.

To fulfill the joint tasks of a powerful state, discussed at the outset, something new was plainly needed. What could better serve the needs than human rights and liberal internationalism, which indeed became a mantra in the late 1970s, as Moyn describes? And he is also quite right to credit the Eastern European dissidents who provided intellectuals with the means to construct the global radiance of human rights in our time.

Why Eastern European dissidents rather than, say, their counterparts in Latin America—who are incidentally not called dissidents: that honorable term is reserved for dissidents in enemy domains? After all, it is beyond debate that violence and state terror in Washington’s Latin American domains were far more horrendous than what happened in Eastern Europe during that period, and the punishment of those who sought to resist and oppose state crimes was incomparably more severe than the ugly repression of East European dissidents. There is no need to tarry on the question: the guiding Orwellian principle provides the answer.

Let us turn to the end of the Cold War, when American liberal internationalism was close to realizing its fondest dreams. For those who wish to understand the nature of the Cold War, and a good deal of modern history, there could hardly be a more instructive moment than when the Cold War came to an end.

The first question is: What happened to NATO, which was established to protect Europe from the hordes of the slave state, according to doctrine? Answer: with no more Russian hordes, NATO rapidly expanded.

After the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to allow Germany to be unified and to join NATO, a hostile military alliance and the most powerful in history. An astonishing concession in the light of recent history, when Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia several times. Gorbachev believed that Washington had promised him that NATO would not expand one inch to the East, meaning to East Berlin, let alone East Germany. When NATO at once expanded to East Germany, he complained bitterly, but was informed by the Bush I administration that there was nothing on paper, just spoken words. Clinton then expanded NATO to the borders of Russia, a provocative move that is now raising severe tensions with initiatives to incorporate Ukraine within NATO.⁵

Along with the dangerous expansion, the mission of NATO was officially changed to protection of the global energy system, pipelines and sea lanes. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that NATO was quickly turned into a US-run military force to control the global system.

The Bush administration issued a new National Security Strategy and defense budget adapted to the end of the Cold War. They were much the same as before, but with new pretexts. A huge military establishment is needed because of the technological sophistication of third world powers. Also needed are intervention forces aimed at the Middle East, where in past years, the threats to our interests that required military intervention could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door, contrary to half a century of propaganda, now quietly shelved. Rather, the threats were radical nationalism, meaning intolerable independence. With the clouds lifted, the sun shone through briefly, but has been ignored.

With Russian support for Cuba ending, the US stepped up its economic warfare, hoping to move in for the kill.

Meanwhile within US domains, matters continued routinely. A week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War, six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, were murdered by an elite Salvadoran battalion, armed and trained by the US, and fresh from renewed US training, acting on direct orders of the High Command. There was little notice, in accord with the Orwellian principle. They were not honored dissidents, just more unpeople, in Orwellian parlance.

A few weeks later the US invaded Panama killing unknown numbers of people in the slums that were heavily bombarded, thousands according to Central American human rights organizations. The purpose of the invasion was to kidnap Manuel Noriega, who was brought to the US and sentenced for crimes, most of them committed when he was on the CIA payroll. His crimes in those years were well known, sometimes lavishly praised by high officials. US Ambassador Thomas Pickering informed the Security Council that the invasion was legal under Article 51 of the UN Charter, because Noriega had been sending drugs to the US—a claim that merits comparison with the one that impressed legal specialist Anthony Lewis when Reagan bombed Libya in self-defense against future attack, discussed below (chapter 2).

All routine, differing from the norm only in that new pretexts were invoked, the Russians having lost their utility in this regard. Hispanic narcotraffickers came to the rescue temporarily. But they plainly would not do as a general justification for future military intervention, with the Communist threat no longer available. More was needed, and, as Moyn relates, liberal internationalism was invoked with new passion. We then move on to the idealism so powerful during Bill Clinton’s presidency, which merits a closer look.

It was indeed common to praise Clinton for having brought foreign policy to a noble phase with a saintly glow.⁶ Those words were uttered in 1997, an important year in the annals of Clintonian idealism. Throughout the Clinton years, NATO ally Turkey had been carrying out shocking atrocities against its Kurdish population, killing tens of thousands of people, destroying thousands of towns and villages, generating hundreds of thousands of refugees. Clinton was generously providing 80 percent of the arms, the flow increasing as atrocities mounted. In the single year 1997, as we were basking in the noble phase, Clinton sent more arms to Turkey than in the entire Cold War period combined up to the onset of the counterinsurgency operations.

Meanwhile there were impassioned laments about how NATO could not tolerate crimes near its borders, in the Balkans. Only within its borders, without comment and virtually no reporting. Another triumph of Orwellian nationalism.

At the same time, Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq (in theory, UN sanctions) had become so murderous that the distinguished international diplomats who administered them, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, successively resigned in protest, charging that they were genocidal.

In the western hemisphere, the leading human rights violator in the Clinton years was Colombia, also the leading recipient of US arms. See chapters 3 and 5 on Clinton’s contributions.

In Haiti, a military coup in 1991 ended a few months of democracy and hope, initiating a reign of horrific terror and torture. The Organization of American States imposed an embargo, but the Bush administration evaded it by exempting US firms—fine tuning the embargo for the benefit of the Haitian people, as the New York Times interpreted the move. Clinton undermined the embargo further, increasing trade and even secretly authorizing Texaco oil company to supply the murderous military junta in violation of presidential directives. That fact could not be missed. It was the lead story on the AP wires on a day when all attention was focused on Haiti because of the impending marine intervention. It was scarcely reported outside the business press, and remains unknown.

Clinton is greatly praised for the intervention, which placed the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power after years of terror effectively backed by the US. Aristide’s return, however, was conditional on his accepting the economic program of the US-backed candidate whom he had handily defeated in Haiti’s one free election. The program ensured the collapse of Haiti’s weak economy by compelling it to accept US exports without restriction, a great benefit to agribusiness in Clinton’s Arkansas while it wiped out Haiti’s rice production and even small industries like production of chicken parts, dumped in Haiti though blocked in independent countries. Clinton later apologized, claiming that he was unable to foresee what was widely understood, indeed predicted by US government agencies. Haiti sought extradition of Benjamin Constant, the leader of the junta militias that had murdered thousands of Haitians. Clinton refused. He also refused to return to Haiti 160,000 pages of documents stolen by the marines—for fear that they would implicate US participation in junta crimes, Human Rights Watch and other informed analysts speculated.

One of the worst crimes of the post–World War II era was the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, discussed in chapter 4.⁷ It was carried out with strong and unwavering US support, continuing through the Clinton years while the chief perpetrator, Indonesian president Suharto, was welcomed by the Clinton administration as our kind of guy on a visit to Washington. Indonesian atrocities escalated through 1999, peaking in August. Clinton continued to support the Indonesian invasion, but finally, under substantial international and domestic pressure he called the war off, as could have been done for 25 years.

There is more, but perhaps this is sufficient evidence of the saintly glow of radiant Clintonian idealism.

Throughout this period, the expanded Orwellian principle continued to be upheld with vigor and dedication, and with some creative innovations: adherence to the principle along with passionate denunciation of the US for its failure to respond to terrible crimes—crimes of others.

The most impressive contribution to this literary genre was the Samantha Power’s lavishly praised study "A Problem from Hell" (2002), which helped propel her to the position of US ambassador to the United Nations among other awards.⁸ Power bitterly condemns our unreadiness to fulfill the commitment implied by ‘never again,’ to quote a typical accolade by Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute and former executive-director of Human Rights Watch.

The many similar accolades for this work are understandable, as far as they go. There is, however, the standard omission of the nationalist: our own crimes are denied or ignored. The book contains no reference to the crimes of the preceding years: no El Salvador, Guatemala, Turkey, Colombia, Iraqi sanctions, Haiti, or other massive US crimes. One indeed is mentioned: East Timor, where the US looked away, in this useful version of history. In fact, as in the other cases, the US looked right there, with eyes open, as it authorized the invasion and took pride in rendering the UN utterly ineffective in inhibiting the resulting crimes (Power’s predecessor at the UN, ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan) and supported the invasion fully as it approached genocidal levels, indeed qualified as genocide as the term is currently used with regard to enemies.

Power does bring up lessons of Vietnam, where, it will be recalled, already by 1967—eight years before the war’s end—Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity … is threatened with extinction [as] the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size. The Vietnam dilemma is how Americans of noble character could have allowed themselves to wage the Vietnam War, which had such immoral consequences. The answer, citing Anthony Lake, is that the noble Americans adopted a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions which encouraged easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end, many millions of them. The inattention remains easy.

Castigation of Washington in this manner elegantly serves the dual tasks of state power, demanding that we march on to pursue the noble ideals that define our national identity while condemning and punishing those who lack our dedication to humanity’s highest values.

Another feature of rogue states is defiance of international law. Many examples are discussed below, among them, the Clinton doctrine that the US will act multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary and will do so for ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources. One can, of course, bring such principles into conformity with international law by creative interpretations, as, for example, when the UN Security Council unambiguously barred Clinton’s threatened use of force against Iraq, to which he reacted by stating that the resolution provides authority to resort to force as he chooses (here).

Clinton’s casual dismissal of international law is, of course, nothing new in contemporary US history, as often frankly declared, for example, by the respected statement Dean Acheson, quoted on here.

Still another feature of rogue states is rejection of international conventions, a topic discussed in chapters 9 and 10. The topic is of great current concern because of President Obama’s much contested decision to restore relations with Cuba—partially, the crushing embargo and other punishments remain. The official tale is that the benign US effort to protect the civil and human rights of the Cuban people has failed, so that a new approach must be undertaken.⁹

President Obama’s decision to restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba will face an early test next year as the White House tries to make good on its contention that the policy shift will lead to a gradual improvement in the Cuban government’s dismal record on human rights, Michael Gordon reports in the New York Times.¹⁰ Obama administration officials are calculating that they can enlist support from European and Latin American countries to persuade Cuba to accede to a major treaty protecting political freedom—the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—and, ultimately, to improve its legal system.

A serious problem, no doubt. In obedience to the Orwellian principle, there is, however, a small omission: the United States does not accede to the ICCPR. To be sure, the US signed and ratified it, but in the usual cynical style: with reservations, declarations, and understandings that eviscerate it. In particular, the Senate determined that the provisions of Articles 1 through 27 of the Covenant are not self-executing, that is, are effectively inapplicable to the US. Articles 1 through 27 are the only ones with any content.¹¹

The ICCPR is described by the American Civil Liberties Union as a key international human rights treaty, providing a range of protections for civil and political rights. The ICCPR, together with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UD] and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights [ICESCR], are considered the International Bill of Human Rights.

The US rejects the ICESCR with disdain, as discussed below, along with the UD quite generally. The normal stance of a rogue state.

One of Washington’s grand hopes for Cuba is that it will accept US initiatives to improve the use of the Internet, permitting US telecom companies to provide Internet infrastructure and services to Cuba. Even in the current state of deprivation and tyranny depicted in US coverage, Cubans are likely to have heard of a gentleman named Edward Snowden, and might therefore be pardoned if they are skeptical about this munificent offer.¹²

The stream of denunciations of Cuban human rights violations consistently manages to ignore the fact that the worst of these are clearly in Guantánamo, which the US stole from Cuba at gunpoint a century ago, rejecting Cuban requests for its return since Cuba attained its independence in 1959; and the fact that Cuban human rights violations, while real and meriting censure, pale into insignificance in comparison with the crimes of US dependencies in the region, which elicit substantial aid and diplomatic support, not sanctions.

As Moyn describes, during the Clinton years the American school of thought known as ‘liberal internationalism’ was close to realizing its fondest dreams, at least in its own estimation. The exuberant self-admiration of American (and other western) intellectuals during those years is a phenomenon of much interest,¹³ unfortunately disappeared since, perhaps again out of embarrassment. The military component of liberal internationalism, humanitarian intervention, also achieved near exalted status. The jewel in the crown was to be intervention in Kosovo, discussed in chapter 3. Much more was learned later when a rich trove of western documents was released, including two State Department collections designed to justify the US-run NATO bombing of Serbia, the valuable reports of the UN monitors on the ground in Kosovo prior to the bombing, reports by NATO and the UN, and much else.¹⁴ The rich documentary evidence explains further why western self-praise was not echoed among the traditional victims.

It most definitely was not. The reaction to the NATO attack was delivered at the South Summit of the non-aligned movement—the governments of 80 percent of the world’s population—in April 2000. With the attack very clearly in mind, they rejected the so-called ‘right’ of humanitarian intervention. The stand was reiterated in the summit of non-aligned countries in Malaysia in February 2003.

The same stand was reiterated again by a December 2004 high-level UN panel that included such prominent figures as Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser for George Bush I. The panel reaffirmed the basic principle of the UN Charter, banning the use of force with two exceptions: when authorized by the UN Security Council, or under Article 51, in defense against armed attack until the Security Council acts. Plainly neither condition holds for the NATO war against Serbia, or the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, presumably what the panel had in mind specifically. Both therefore are acts of aggression, the supreme international crime under the Nuremberg judgment. The UN World Summit in September 2005 reaffirmed that the relevant provisions of the Charter are sufficient to address the full range of threats to international peace and security. The UN panel specifically warned those impatient with resort to Article 51 that "the risk to