Evidently, the Italians feel the same way I do about German ambitions for a permanent UN Security Council seat. Germans expressed surprise that Italian FM Franco Frattini objected yesterday to the German initiative:

Germany and Italy locked horns yesterday after the government of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, opposed Berlin's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Italy's foreign minister, Franco Frattini, accused Germany, supposedly one of the country's closest allies, of trying to divide Europe with its request for a seat by putting its national interests first.

"I will not accept competition based around national interests. That risks dividing Europe," he told the Italian newspapers Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica.

Of course, that is one good point -- why does Germany deserve a veto on the UNSC when Italy doesn't? Joschka Fischer told Italy that they should also campaign for a permanent seat on the Security Council in response to that question. Since when did the UN declare open bidding on veto powers anyway?

This effort to expand both the rotating and permanent memberships on the UNSC will do nothing except increase the level of paralysis in global diplomacy, which is exactly the intent of states such as Germany and France, who supports its eastern neighbor's campaign. The statists in the UN support the notion of the organization's mission as not so much a forum for global peace or to expand freedom, but as a battlefield for diplomatic war against the Anglo-American alliance, a counterweight to US power.

If that is their intent, they may be sorely disappointed in the result. The UNSC has already lost tremendous credibility with the American people thanks to its weak performance over 12 years with Saddam Hussein. If the UN stacks the deck with a raft of new vetoes that guarantee the Security Council can never act, the Americans and its true allies will simply bypass the travesty in the future.

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» Deport the United Nations from A Stitch in Haste
It is now 60 years since the end of World War II in Europe. We have, the one-worlders would argue, a single European nation. Fine, give it a single seat on the Security Council. [Read More]

Tracked on September 27, 2004 8:20 AM