United Nations Collective Security and the United States Security Guarantee in an Age of Rising Multipolarity: The Security Council as the Talking Shop of the Nations

I. INTRODUCTION: POSTULATING THE RISE OF A MULTIPOLAR WORLD Two interrelated theses are these days much in vogue. One is the thesis of US decline and, by corollary, the rise of new Great Powers and multipolarity. Though this thesis is in vogue today, it has been a favorite of writers, politicians, and statesmen over generations - almost a parlor game for intellectuals. It is a parlor game that tends, however, to turn historians into futurists. Proceeding from the unimpeachable, but also uninformative, observation that no empire in the course of history has lasted forever, thence to the claim that the American empire is teetering - these analyses have a predictive track record as poor as they are undeniably popular. The eminent Yale historian Paul Kennedy, for example, skewered himself in 1987 with a sweeping, best-selling foray into American declinism, a mere matter of months, as it happened, before the fall of the Soviet Union.1 It curiously did not hurt his reputation or book sales; The Rise and Fall of Great Powers has been translated into twenty-three languages and counting. But Kennedy is hardly alone, and the phenomenon owes something (it is hard to resist concluding) to the schadenfreude of intellectuals for whom the persistence of American power, although not really so long by historical standards, is something of an embarrassment, a bit of vulgarity upon the propriety and decorum of history. Today's financial crises and recession are likely to spur more such talk. Historian Niall Ferguson has said as much, largely on the basis of American indebtedness to China, among America's (and Americans') long list of other creditors.2 Ruminations on historical parallels between present economic troubles - the crisis in American mortgage finance, credit default swaps, Fannie and Freddie - and those of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France - -John Law and Louis XTV and, eventually, hyperinflation, default, bust, ending finally in Revolution and rolling royal heads3 - raise the question of whether we are seeing financial portents of the fall, at long last, of American imperial military and political power. For all one knows, this might turn out finally to be the moment when the prophecies come true. Current events disincline to optimism, let alone Pollyanna. Indeed, the arguments from financial and economic weakness are broadly persuasive. The path from financial crisis to economic decline to military decline and Great Power overstretch, viewed within a frame of a few years rather than across centuries, risks unwarranted specificity for economic determinism in history. Still, the Duc de San Simon was surely not wrong to observe that the ability of the British crown to borrow to finance its wars at a fraction of the rate charged to Louis was not irrelevant to the outcome.4 From a purely academic standpoint, one counsels historians to hold their fire until the future has become the past. Waiting to pronounce decline in hindsight is the scholarly prudence otherwise known as the discipline of "history" rather than "futurism." Yet it is equally true that leaders of men and women and states and nations, their advisors and policymakers, cannot wait to act upon history: they, and we, must be futurists. By contrast, today's second popular thesis is the rise of new powers: not of a new superpower, but of new Great Powers, new regional powers, new local powers and, as a result, the emergence of a "multipolar world." The charter members of the club of rising new powers are, naturally, China and India. Later on this Article will describe them as "rising production powers." They are supplemented by a group of rising new powers often described as the new petroleum autocracies, but more precisely as "resource extraction democratic authoritarians" - with much packed into each descriptive term. The most important members are Russia and Venezuela. These rising new powers are, however, tightly bound to the existing Western powers, and to the superpower, through globalization and markets. …