Following up on the Scheunemann post from earlier, Matt Yglesias flags a different part of the interview (UN Security Council bashing) and makes an important point, namely, that the actual problem conservatives have with the UN is that it imposes even minimal restraint on American autonomy, and not, in fact, that the veto-system is unduly hard to navigate. America, after all, actually lays down more vetoes than any other country. And if conservatives are upset when a Russian veto obstructs American action, imagine how they'll feel if America couldn't veto, and the UN Security Council was endorsing all manner of resolutions and actions that America actively opposes. In many cases, the gridlock of the Security Council actually acts as a transparent and fairly low stakes venue for great power conflicts to play out. Matt uses the example of Burma, and it's a good one. "If the U.S. were to try to invade Burma in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition, in the context of new great power tensions, you’d just wind up with a bloody proxy conflict not with vast new humanitarian benefits. The problem, at the end of the day, is with the underlying pattern of facts — SLORC is terrible, Burma is close to China, China sees defending Burma’s sovereignty as important, and China is a big and important country these days." On the Security Council, China can simply veto action on Burma. If there was no Security Council, then China would still want to block American action, but they couldn't do it publicly through a frustrating procedural move. So in order to head off American troops, they'd have to threaten or imply response or retaliation. Which might work, or it might just anger the US, or it might get misinterpreted as diplomatic channels are rarely straightforward. In this murkier world, the possibility of a very bad outcome becomes much higher in that situation, and the likelihood of a very good one isn't really increased at all. As it is, if America was serious enough about an action that it didn't care how angry other major powers would be, they could simply ignore the Security Council now. That we don't do that on issues like Burma tends to suggest we don't want great power conflict and wouldn't court it in the absence of a UN, and if that's indeed the case, the Security Council is a better venue for that temperature taking than the much messier work of Kremlinology and the close parsing of public statements.
