Address by Tom Campbell to the Alumni of International House,
University of California at Berkeley, and the Alumni of the Haas School of Business

UNESCO Headquarters, Paris

June 14, 2003

On an occasion such as this, the greatest joy would come from recounting our common bonds – of allegiance to Berkeley and to I-House – to the delight that comes from having a perspective that takes in more than one continent, a perspective shared by all in this room that, for many, started at UC, and at I-House. We can celebrate all of these best, however, by attending to the moment presented to us. And that is why I asked Joe to announce my topic today as the state of world affairs.

This city afforded President Theodore Roosevelt the occasion to proclaim what were probably his most famous words, short of, “It takes more than one bullet to kill a bull moose.” He gave his famous speech here, at the Sorbonne, in 1909, to a room full of academics, professors at what was arguably then the world’s finest university. Teddy Roosevelt said, “It is not the critic who counts, but the man in the arena who . . . striving greatly, even if he fails, will never be numbered among those cold and timid souls who know neither triumph nor defeat.” So it is for America – embodying many of the same attributes of our country’s youngest president:

• A drive to do great things.
• Several centuries’ lack of seasoning in doing so.
• An adolescent’s tendency not to ask permission.
• But a deep caring nonetheless for what a more experienced judgment might say.

President Roosevelt was speaking just that way – announcing to academics that their criticism didn’t matter to him, the man of action – but making a visit to the Sorbonne all the same.

We are gathered as daughters and sons of California – but this is not the occasion to direct my remarks to Cal’s victory over my former employer at the big game.
Nevertheless . . . I’ve now had the chance to see the axe up-close at both institutions—and there is an amazing difference in the same physical object depending upon where it is displayed. The difference is in the silver plaque underneath the axe blade, listing the scores of each game. The score of one particular game, in 1982, now reads a Berkeley win, 25 to 20, but I could have sworn that, when I saw the axe in its case at Tressider Union on the Stanford campus, the score of that same game was represented as a Stanford win, 20 to 19. I suspect this has something to do with the malleability of space and time, quantum mechanics, and parallel universes, all caused by the magnetic field of heavy elements in the immediate environment, elements like berkelium and californium.

That, however is not our subject today. We are here to talk about the world, at a time when the institutions of international law and governance have broken down. In France, America is seen by many as unilateralist, ill-disciplined, and ill-prepared for the long-run consequences of the most serious actions that it undertakes. In America, France is seen by many as jealous, unprincipled, willing to do a deal with anybody, and convinced to its core that Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George Bush start each morning with a phone call to review how each will try to restrict the use of the French language in the world, just a little bit more, during that day.

Both views cannot be 100% right, not even close. But these views do exist, and, in California-speak, there is a lot of negative energy generated. Let's use the energy – but change its sign. Let’s focus the negative toward candor.

This is a rare moment for the world. It’s a rare moment where circumstances permit dispensing with decades of euphemism and encourage the use of candor to rebuild what has been broken. Here are some truths that, in my view, might not have been spoken out loud, but for the candor compelled by the times.

1. Tyrants exist in the world. They have names like Amin, Mobutu, Hussein, Mengistu, and Duvalier. They do horrible things to their own people. Traditionally, as long as their actions did not cross borders, international leaders looked away. That was wrong. That is now changing.
2. Countries have or soon will have nuclear weapons that cannot be trusted with them. A nuclear-weapon-free world would be delightful. We will not, however, be blessed to live in such a world. In the world in which we do live, there are countries that must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Note that there is nothing new in this. In the 1960s, when the nuclear non-proliferation treaty was adopted, it was recognized there were five nuclear powers in the world, and that there would be only five. The wrong-headed doctrine -- that to be sovereign entitles a nation to any weapons it wishes -- was rejected as long as forty years ago.
3. Big countries often get their way from other countries who want their trade or their aid. A candid example is China and Taiwan. China has kept nation after nation from having normal relations with Taiwan, a country the PRC as never ruled, and that no mainland Chinese government has ruled in 113 years. It’s even kept the World Health Organization from admitting Taiwan, a folly demonstrated in the current SARS epidemic. And it’s all because everyone wants to sell in China’s markets.
4. Palestine is central to US relations with all the Muslim world. As a member of the House International Relations Committee Subcommittee on Africa, I traveled often to Africa. On one occasion, I visited Somalia, and then went across the Red Sea to discuss the huge influx of Somali refugees into Yemen, and what it was doing to that country’s fragile social welfare system. I met with the speaker and other leaders of the Yemeni parliament, in a private setting, no press, no speeches. I said I was there to understand better what the Somali crisis meant to the region. He said he was there to discuss Jerusalem. I wasn’t, and am not, anyone special. I certainly wasn’t and am not, anyone powerful. But I was one of the only members of Congress ever to make the effort to go to Yemen, to ask to speak with leaders of their parliament, and the subject they chose for that limited opportunity was Jerusalem.
5. France, Europe, and America have many unsavory business and diplomatic partners in the world. It’s an embarrassment that can be cured by candor. Yes, we will trade with anybody, though not in every product. Yes, we do form alliances with hereditary monarchies that discriminate against women, and with military leaders that overthrow elected governments when we fear the fundamentalism of those elected. And yes, one of the finest humans ever to be our president, a gentle man who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, did call the Shah of Iran an enlightened leader, a human rights champion, and an island of stability.
6. It is immoral to collect a large part of the debt owed by the third world. You might never again hear a free market, Chicago-school trained economist say this. The heavily indebted poor countries owe the rest of the world about 18 billion dollars. Write it off. All of it -- tomorrow. When loans were extended to Mobutu Sese Seko, the tyrant of Zaire, the United States and France knew that they were not loans, but gifts, personal gifts, to keep Mobutu in our camp in the cold war. It is simply not moral to force a fisherman in the Congo River today to put aside twenty percent of his catch to pay interest on that loan, which went, with our knowledge and approval, to build several chateaus for Mobutu on the Cote D’Azur.

There’s my attempt at candor. What follows is a suggestion intended to be constructive. I will focus on just one area: the use of force, because the Iraq war has demonstrated most clearly a break-down in this area of the rules for international governance.

Whether we are speaking of what the member states of NATO will do, individually or as an alliance, or specifying the premises upon which the use of force will be undertaken by the world’s nations, not just the United States, with or without U.N. Security Council approval, I submit simply that the rules of international governance regarding the use of force have now become quite unpredictable.

That, in itself, is a cause for the most serious concern. Unpredictability about the use of force is often associated by tyrants with a lack of will. Two famous examples are 1950, when US Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced in a speech that the United States’ security perimeter in Asia extended only as far as Japan to the north -- which the North Koreans took to mean South Korea was out; and 1990, when the US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, was summoned to Saddam Hussein’s palace, and stated the official policy line that the United States had no concern about a dispute over Iraq’s border with Kuwait.

From neither of these do I infer that America was, somehow, to blame for the invasion of South Korea or of Kuwait. I only point out that the aggressor nation was in a state of some uncertainty regarding the likely consequences of its aggression; and that, had that uncertainty been removed, they might not have attacked.

How did we get here?

The structure of the U.N. Charter makes the Security Council the exclusive body capable of using force. Matters which might invite armed action are to be submitted, instead, to the Security Council. The only explicit exception is in Article 51, the right of a nation to defend itself “if an armed attack occurs . . . until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” Regional associations are recognized, but their scope of action is limited by the requirement to get approval of the Security Council before they may take military action.

The cold war descended almost at once, however, upon this structure for the use of force proposed by the U.N. Charter. And the cold war made that proposed structure impossible.

In Korea, President Truman made it clear the US would, and did, send help to its ally – whether or not the U.N. Security Council approved. It was clear then, as it was in every subsequent use of force until the fall of the Berlin wall, that the decision to use force would be made and implemented, if necessary, outside the Security Council.

In a revealing concession, however, to the outward form of compliance with the U.N. Charter, the large countries using force claimed to do so under Article 51, the only available route in the U.N. Charter for unilateral action. They were not content simply to announce that they were acting based on their own sense of interest.

And so a series of asserted justifications under Article 51 began. In listing them, I am careful to note that they are not equal, in my eyes, in legitimacy; indeed, some are patent fabrications.

Force was exercised without U.N. Security Council approval for the purpose of:

• Helping an ally that was attacked from outside, pursuant to a treaty of mutual defense: the US in Vietnam.
• Helping an ally that was attacked from within by forces alleged to be instigated by outside governments: the Soviet invasion of East Germany in 1949 and Hungary in 1956; the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 1979.
• Taking action against a country that has threatening weapons of mass destruction before it can make use of those weapons: the US blockade of Cuba in 1962.
• Taking action against a country that has begun to develop nuclear capability and has expressed hostile intent: Israel bombing the Osirik reactor in Iraq in 1981.
• Taking action against a country that has amassed threatening conventional weapons and expressed a hostile intent: Israel bombing Egyptian airfields at the start of the Six-Day War, 1967.
• Taking action with the approval of a regional security pact against a member of that pact that seeks to withdraw from it: Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, under the Brezhnev doctrine that a threat to socialism anywhere was a threat to socialism everywhere.
• Taking action against a country that has threatened your citizens, within the borders of that country: US invasion of Grenada in 1983.
• Taking action against a country that you allege was responsible for the killing of your citizens in a third country: the US bombing of Libya in 1986.
• Invading under treaty rights purportedly granted by the country being invaded: France, UK and Israel’s invasion of Egypt in the Suez crisis, US invasion of Panama in 1989, and
• Invading a country at the request of a group with attributes of a government in exile that the invading country chooses to recognize as the legitimate government: US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, 1961; US invasion of Haiti, 1993.

The underlying premise for all of these doctrines, one way, or the other, was Article 51. In each case, the euphemism was advanced that the nation using force was under attack, that its ally was under attack, or that the legitimate representative of its ally was under attack.

It would have been better, for the world we inherit now, simply to have admitted the truth then, rather than engage in these circumlocutions. There might have been legitimate reasons for using force outside of Article 51, but there was no international agency capable of hearing those legitimate reasons, so no effort was made to advance them.

Instead, the language of Article 51 was tortured to interpret the phrase that “individual or collective self-defense” could be used until the Security Council could act -- a stipulation directed to cover a physical or tactical constraint -- to apply to a constraint of will, namely, that the individual country could use force until the U.N. Security Council chose to supersede. With the guaranteed deadlock of the Security Council, that day would never come.

Nor was it in the attacking country’s interest even to ask the Security Council’s permission. Indeed, raising the issue could destroy the surprise value of an unannounced attack. In the foregoing list I have mentioned, actually, only some of hundreds of incidents of the use of force outside the approval of the Security Council, from 1950 to 1992. After 1992, as the cold war ended, but the old habit of using force unilaterally, under one of the stretched versions of Article 51 doctrine, did not.

And since Article 51 would not permit a defense based on any rationale other than response to attack, a doctrine permitting one country to use force against another for another purpose, for instance, to put an end to humanitarian atrocities in the invaded country, was not developed.

A good recent example is Kosovo. The US did not obtain the approval of the U.N. Security Council. Instead, it claimed conditions in that part of Yugoslavia constituted an attack on NATO – which it clearly did not.

So also in Iraq. The brutality of Saddam Hussein to his people far surpassed that of Slobodan Milosevic. Indeed, it surpassed that of Idi Amin. But fearing failure in the Security Council, the US shoe-horned its rationale into the boot of Article 51; and that meant making an argument about an attack on America.

In my view, that rationale was actually better phrased than in the case of Kosovo. The concept of attack through a terrorist intermediary had surfaced since September 11 in a way no one could deny was possible -- even in the absence of any specific link between that terrorist attack or its sponsors, and Iraq. Nevertheless, Article 51 speaks of a country taking action “if an armed attack occurs,” and Iraq had not attacked the US.

The argument that it might, and that even a low risk of attack could be outbalanced by the devastating consequences of the kind of attack September 11 now demonstrated was most possible. Or the entirely separate argument that Saddam was a brutal tyrant whose imminent replacement would be a service to the Iraqi people.

All these arguments were irrelevant to Article 51 -- which, 48 years of cold war history had taught, was the only way around the Security Council. But an alternative is available to us today. In the Security Council, the rationale for the proposed use of force can expand beyond just Article 51, responding to an actual attack, to incorporate factors like stopping human rights abuses, and possibly others.

I believe this moment in world history invites us to start along this new path. But since early failure can turn us back to the alternative followed for 48 years, essentially, unilateral action contorted into Article 51, I suggest we commence with modest, achievable goals.

The commitment to trying this process, however, has to be clear – and the best way to underline such a commitment is by structural change within the U.N. Security Council itself to invite these broader discussions.

First, we should explicitly include as an amendment to chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter that force can be permitted to end a tyrant’s abuse of his own people. We all wish now that some country, any country, had intervened when the government of Rwanda began to murder its own citizens in 1994—whether or not that massacre constituted a threat to any other country.

Second, regarding the evaluation of a threat to other nations, it should be explicitly legitimate to be concerned with not simply the imminence of a threat, but the severity of the threat if exercised. A low probability of unleashing small pox or eboli should count as much as a high probability of taking a disputed border area by guns.

Third, we need to expand the Security Council’s composition of first-tier, not second-class, members. Let there be five new permanent entities to represent Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and a seat for a representative of all the remaining nations, with a mechanism for rotating the country chosen for each group.

Fourth, let us put an end to unilateralism, at least on the negative side: the concurrence of two veto-holding nations, not just one, should be required for a veto to be exercised.

Note that this suggestion does not require any existing permanent veto-holding member of the Security Council to surrender its veto. I want to be practical here. But a security council with no room among its permanent members for any of the third world but China; a security council with three out of five vetoes held by European nations, such a security council has long engendered doubts about its legitimacy in the modern world.

In two years, we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the U.N. Charter. It has never been amended. By contrast, the American constitution has, on average, been amended once every twenty years—and that’s counting all ten of the Bill of Rights as a single amendment.

For America’s part, these proposed changes would see it give up the negative power, the power to stop the will of the Security Council on its say-so alone. I recognize that this approach could also lead to more of what America wants being vetoed by the Security Council. This is because there would be more countries capable of exercising a veto, even if two, rather than one, were required to do so.

But regarding the positive power, also for practical purposes, my proposal is careful not to require a country to obtain approval to use force. The duty, rather, is to consult. This is not a meaningless obligation; parliamentary governments give their prime minister the authority to wage war, but oblige consultation with the cabinet. The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that Quebec has the right to separate sovereignty upon winning an appropriately phrased referendum, but a duty to consult with the rest of Canada first.

A duty to consult insures that alternatives are considered, that intermediaries become activated and energized, and that possible third-way approaches are fully developed.

Out of this new arrangement, specific procedures will develop. The duty to consult will, I predict, be implemented in a series of mounting pressure points with measures of performance along the way—quite similar, for instance, to what the Canadian government proposed in the build-up to the war in Iraq.

I do not today call for the abolition of unilateral use of force, because it would be a fruitless call, and, because, occasionally, force must be used, even if only one nation either sees it, or has the means to act upon it, or is in a diplomatic position to speak the truth. For instance, Tanzania was right to invade Uganda, and put an end to Idi Amin’s horror; though it acted without U.N. Security Council approval. And Vietnam was right to invade Cambodia and stop the Khmer Rouge, though the U.N. was not consulted. And as noted before, we can only now regret that no nation, disgusted by the U.N.'s failure to act , intervened in Rwanda.

I note France’s actions in Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Rwanda, and Cote D’Ivoire were all undertaken without Security Council approval. Those actions can be assessed, as can America’s in Iraq. My own view, is that they were good, bad, bad, really bad, and good, respectively. But my point is that the use of force by one nation against another, without U.N. Security Council approval, is not solely, or even dominantly, an American matter. In addition to France, the following countries have invaded and held territory of another country without U.N. approval, just since the end of the cold war, and just in the part of the world where I have a little bit of special knowledge: Africa: Uganda, Rwanda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Senegal. (I should note that some of these instances involved the approval of regional security alliances, such as ECOMOG in West Africa. But under the U.N. Charter, Article 53, that is not enough. The Security Council’s approval is required.)

So, if the amendments to the U.N. Charter I put forward today do not outlaw, absolutely, the use of force by one nation against another, I submit that neither has the first 60 years of the United Nations, and, second, that that is not all together a bad thing.

In conclusion, I put forward:

• a candid admission that force will have to be used in the world, against tyrants who abuse their own people, and to minimize the chance of world devastation.
• that a duty to consult, carefully, and formally, with the Security Council must be followed before the use of force by any nation.
• that an expanded Security Council should incorporate more of the world that has to live with the consequences of one nation’s war with another, and
• that the rules of the veto be changed to end unilateralism.

Most important of all, this new scheme will start to mend and to blend the relations between our world’s major powers, and those of the countries where so many of the world who are in need live.

We must seize this moment of crisis, this moment of disappointment in the functioning of our present institutions, to discard the broken tools, and fashion new ones.

Thank you, and … allez les ours! Go bears!

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