My comments are not so much to critique directly many statements of the paper written by Charles Kupchan and Adam Mount but rather submit for consideration some alternative solution in the sphere of international relations between sovereign states.

I would like to start reminding what the Great Italian astronomer, physicist, artist, intellectual Galileo Galilei said properly once –“€“ –“€œ–“€œThe Laws of the Nature categorically speak –“€˜NO–“€™ and mysteriously whisper –“€˜YES–“€™–“€. That Galileo Galilei–“€™s observation and imperatives is truth worthy, justifiable everywhere and forever - not only in natural sciences but also in social, political creative arts, in our day-to-day personal and communal real life.

So, first we have to define in the history of the previous XX century to what it is necessary to say categorically NO in the sphere of international relations.

It is the fact that, unfortunately and tragically, even from his grave Stalin still in our time continue to be the main obstacle to reach peaceful solutions in the international relations sphere by imposing his dictate-cheat how the UN has been organized and structured. It was and still is the main and decisive roadblock in the international relations sphere after Second World War till now.

Only after saying categorically NO to Stalin–“€™s influence in the sphere of international relations it would be possible to listen and extract so needed YES for innovative solution in the sphere of international relations.

It is what I wrote as my mysterious whisper in my essay –“€œBACK TO BASICS IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE TRAGIC EVENTS SEPTEMBER 11, 2001–“€ written and sent to President Bush in particular September 25, 2001 on the issues of the aspects of the policy of international relations of the United States with other sovereign countries and international organizations which are directly associated with the obligation to provide and support public security and safety especially threatening by international stateless conspired terrorists and their organizations:

–“€œFirst and foremost –“€“ the public security and safety to the maximal degree provided and supported in peace time when the United States is not provoked to fight the war with foreign country threatening the security and safety of the United States and its citizens. It means that the main task of the policy in international relations is to keep peace and to motivate urgently all other countries to solve the differences and conflicts in the international relations with other countries by peaceful negotiations. The necessary condition to do it and to achieve such peace is to do it not unilaterally but together with our allies and to spread the circle of our allies. But it is not enough. The supplemental sufficient condition from another side is to defeat decisively with all military might of the United States and its allies where and when their territory or airspace are invaded in spite of all undertaken attempts for peaceful solution of differences and conflicts between sovereign countries as it was done in the Gulf War. The military defeat without any negotiations and compromise, distraction of international stateless terrorists organizations and the regimes of the countries that nurtured and harbor them, the organizations that do not recognized and obeyed either international law or any other than the law of hate, is the only sufficient component to eradicate organized stateless international terrorism as international pirates were eradicated earlier on in history.

There are two kind of organizations in which the United States is collaborated fully with other countries to achieve and protect the peace, to protect security and safety of the United States and its citizens. The first one is the geographically defined compact organizations of friendly and united countries like NATO that was and is very successful in its peace efforts to provide and support piece and prosperity locally in the West and Central Europe. The United States under previous Administration led its NATO allies in using their military might finally and were able to liquidate military conflicts and atrocities on the Balkan.

Another international organization in which the United States is participated in the mutual efforts for international peace and stability is the United Nations. Unfortunately, from the very beginning the United Nations was not the union of friendly and united Nations-countries rather the unrestricted number of all sovereign countries on the globe with some of them very often not friendly at least at all to each other. The organization of the United Nations became as some sort of international club for dispute and hot political propaganda between not United but rather Divided Nations.

The initial charter of the United Nations was compromised between the United States and the former Soviet Union in Dumbarton and never was able to constitute fully good necessary and sufficient initial provisions to become the powerful and reliable instrument to support peace and prosperity for its members. The history of United Nations shows that this organization was not able not only to prevent any war conflict between its members but even to facilitate peaceful solution of any of these war conflicts. The best illustration of helplessness of the United Nation is what current U.N. Secretary General said after tragic events September 11, 2001 –“€œIt is little what United Nations can do–“€.

Such helplessness of U.N. is directly defined in particular by imposed dictate from soviet dictator Stalin to establish the 5 permanent members of U.N. Security Council with their veto capacity, to eliminate the permanent U.N. military contingent, to prescribe the rule of the selection and nomination by consensus among the permanent countries-members of the U.N. Security Council of the candidacy for election U.N. Secretary General only from the representatives of the countries of the so called Third World. Such organizational restrictions of U.N. decision-making structure paralyzed before and still paralyzes the possibility to make U.N. as an effective instrument to provide and support security and safety its members, international security, safety and stability.

The dissolution of the former Soviet Union in 1991 and arriving on international arena and in U.N. as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council the Russian Federation instead, potentially irreversible democratic transformation of the Russian Federation under the leadership of its first democratically elected President Boris Yeltsin and then democratically elected President Vladimir Putin can potentially transform U.N. as an effective instrument for the United Nations if to concentrate the mission of U.N. on humanitarian mission to help promote and spread for all nations constituted U.N. the advanced education technologies, health care technologies, agriculture technologies, to supply and distribute humanitarian aid for the countries-members if natural disasters hit these countries leaving the mission of providing geographically local security and stability to political-military geographically compacted alliances like NATO in Europe.

Such transformed U.N. has to change dramatically according to changed main mission, modernize its structure in particular by abolishing U.N. Security Council, establishing new democratic rule of election Secretary General, changing the weight of vote on U.N. General Assembly proportionally to the financial support that each country-member U.N. provide to the U.N. budget. Secretary General of such modernized U.N. has to be personally involved as the main facilitator and participant of the peaceful negotiations in the cases when there are territorial conflicts between U.N. members. It requests to select and elect as U.N. Secretary General the politician, former head of country highly respected internationally, who has demonstrated his/her capacity of effective leadership in his/her native country and has shown his/her devotion to nurture peaceful negotiations. It seems to me that right now hardly it is possible to find for such role the better candidate than the former President of United States Bill Clinton.–“€

Beforehand thanks for reading, listening and thinking through.



Sincerely and respectfully, I–“€™m

Dmitry Novik March 12, 2009.



P.S. Either you disagree or agree please call or write at your convenience to share with me your thoughts. Beforehand thanks.







Digital Imaging General

DIMAGE, Inc.

–“€¦dimage vs. damage–“€¦

Dr. Dmitry A. Novik

4000 Tunlaw Rd., NW, #1130

Washington, D.C. 20007

Tel. (202)-333-8956; dnovik@verizon.net

Another interesting take on society and the direction it should be taking. According to the authors, do they mean that countries that commit aggression or engage in coercive policies that are dangerously destabilizing should not be considered in good standing and should be denied the rights that accrue to be part of a group of responsible states? If the United States takes action against states that do not conform to said standards, are they not in violation of these standards? It appears that being anything more than a police officer and upholding certain standards gets the state a check in the block of being coercive towards the state that is not meeting those same standards. Does it mean that the United States is the only state that has to act as the police in upholding these standards?



If an action that occurs at regularity becomes part of the natural law and is accepted by a group of people in a certain state, what is the determining factor that makes that action illegal with regard to the law of man? If the author states that the United States needs to change their ways of thinking in order to meet the needs of some of the new leaders in the 21st Century globalization of states, why then does the author put them in the position of being the police force to enforce the global rules? If these states are going to be the leaders in the world, shouldn–“€™t they also be putting forth more effort to stop the violations against man? Would it be better to take the words of John Rawls and re-establish society in a truly equal state? By insisting upon only one sovereign state to be the protector of the rest of the autonomous states, there will be people who resent being told what to do.



It goes back to our societal norms. What we learn in the family is what has been taught for years in our own villages, our neighborhoods. All over the world people are teaching the tenets of what is tolerable in their own villages. They only want order and what is best for their children. Things in one society change when they have to deal with their neighbor. They guys in society A don–“€™t have the same needs as society B. This leads the two to find that they can work together better if they share. Just like today, we find our state at odds with another. While we know very well that we can work together and achieve what is best for our people, we still have difficulties truly understanding the person next to us. That is, while we know what is going on in our head, how well do we know that the person next to us has the same beliefs.

Are Professors Kupchan and Adam Mount inaugurating a new era of foreign policy in a post-Cold War world? That appears to be their sanguine intention with the publication of their essay "The Autonomy Rule." To be sure, Kupchan and Mount, in contrast to George Kennan who worked as an advisor in the policy planning staff of the State Department when he singlehandedly launched his "policy of containment" against Communism, are working both as foreign policy specialists: the first as a professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University, and the second as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.



In the case of Kennan 's theory of containment, its provenance has since been proved with the mellowing and dissolution of the Soviet Union, a process that I believe should also apply with equal force to China inasmuch as, by culture and tradition, the Chinese since ancient times continue to be the prime exponents of trade and commerce in the Orient. The Phoenicians in Homer's time were their seafaring counterparts. In fact, capitalism and free enterprise have become permanent fixtures of ancient Chinese civilization for millenniums, as, say, shark loaning was to Christ's Jews and Hindus today, that it would be close to impossible to imagine a China a decade hence whose ideology will be at strict variance with her mercantilist commerce and capitalist culture.



This is a phenomenon in the "future as history", to use Robert Heilbroner's memorable phrase, which was not envisioned in advance by Kupchan and Mount. For they take it as given that, in the case of the world's geopolitical balance under the unipolar might of the United States, even if democracy rules the waves, democracy should not be used as the new conquistador's ideology of bible and sword

to force upon other cultures and races a government not indigenous to their civilization and upbringing.



The two post-containment autonomy-rule advocates do not therefore question democracy's global primacy as an ideology to follow and embrace. Not, however, as a form of government to force and impose upon unwilling friends and allies. This approach to diplomacy, Kupchan and Mount believe, will usher in a more orderly, peaceful and harmonious world more accommodating and receptive to the United States and the libertarian and humanitarian ideals it stands for.



Because the two authors do not qualify their advocacy of democracy in the manner of Francis Fukuyama's democracy as an end to history, a thesis which, contrary to the misconception of some academicians, was earlier given cognizance by Hobbes as pointed out in Ralf Dahrendor'fs "The New Liberty: Survival and Justice in a Changing World", they take it therefore as axiomatic that, in a world governed by multitudinous cultures and ideologies, the United States shall lead the world, not by the use of armed intervention and conquest, but by allowing other peoples freely to rule themselves based on their own conception of justice, liberty, and freedom.



As a proposed doctrine to supplement Kennan's version of containment, applied this time primarily to Muslim fundamentalist states and terror groups, its validity must be actually demonstrated by case examples. In the case of rogue states like Iran or North Korea, for example, or jihadist millenarian movements like Al-Qaeda, are Kupchan and Mount perchance proposing that the United States, in the name of freedom and liberty as espoused by Washington, Paine and Jefferson, just leave their peoples to the mercy of their own leaders whose limited conception of freedom only is based on nuclear parity with the United States? Or, in the case of Osama bin Laden, being allowed without the least hindrance to detonate a prototype of the first dirty atomic bomb in a connurbal city like Los Angeles, Chicago or New York?



If other nations' conception of freedom is not blood-thirsty and violent and, as in a constitutional monarchy, holds their leaders accountable for their illegal actions while in office, actions which at one time were punished successively with criminal conviction by the government of South Korea, perhaps a case for non-interference in her sovereignty and independence could exemplarily be made of. But when a nation's armed forces, as in the case of Saddam's Iraq, invades a tiny neighboring state like Kuwait without the least provocation, but in the name of freedom and liberty Professors Kupchan and Mount counsel the United Nations instead to lay off, don't interfere, it's none of your business to intervene, then the ideals of liberty, freedom and independence which inspired the Founding Fathers would have remained just empty, meaningless slogans, without enduring meaning, had the United States refrained from spearheading a multinational force to liberate Kuwait.



I fully agree though with the two professors' advocacy, that what the United States practice as her ideals of justice, freedom and liberty within her borders, the United States must practice too without exception or discrimination beyond her borders. For the United States must lead not by fortuitous luck, accident, or chance, but deliberately through sacrifice, courage, and the probity of her exemplary ideals handed down to us by the Founding Fathers. Without a case by case application, therefore, of the Founding Fathers' libertarian examples on actual states needing succor and assistance without non-intervention and non-interference, or requiring intervention but not armed conquest, I am afraid Professors Kupchan and Mount's post-containment "autonomy rule" proposal can't have much utility as a guide to diplomatic action by President Obama, the State Department, or the Pentagon.



Accordingly, a detailed, not just a mere across-the-board generalization of its libertarian application to regional theaters, actual and potential trouble spots and flash points of the globe, should have accompanied their eloquent exegesis. This requisite is most crucial in order that, like other behavioral sciences such as psychology, sociology and economics, diplomacy as envisioned by Harold Nicholson is elevated to the rank of not just an art, skill or craft, but a science. Diplomatic solutions requiring non-intervention or armed intervention -- as the use of 'just' force is an extension, to paraphrase Clausewitz, of diplomacy by other means -- would then have a catena of case examples from which to draw lessons for application to particular states, groupings, forces, and movements across regions of the world.



In relation to Kennan's containment policy, I prefer to view the authors' "autonomy rule" principle as a form of containment by inversion. By strictly adhering to the ideals of the Founding Fathers, such a rule as one can readily extract from their theory of international relations, when realistically applied, contains and confines instead the United States within the four corners of her Constitution's defensive, libertarian perimeters. The Baedeker of diplomatic case examples I am urging on them to produce should provide the exception -- or exemption -- from this rule of Professors Kupchan and Mount's containment by inversion.



The glue, the cohesive force, by which the United States can unite the world is not through political ideology but commerce. Properly regulated, as in the case of China, commerce brings in its wake prosperity, security, health, peace, and public welfare. For sure, because commerce -- or the capitalist enterprise -- provides for mankind's daily sustenance, it is an imperative that can't be contained by any inversion, a la Kupchan and Mount or otherwise.





Meanwhile, let's wait for Professors Kupchan and Mount to provide our foreign policy experts the much needed diplomatic cases for application to their "autonomy rule", so they can now start helping solve the world's problems, in concert with other nations, without delay.