Strategic Assessment

The long, drawn-out, slow-motion crisis leading up to the war in Iraq produced, widened, or at least exposed serious breaches in the most prominent international organizations and institutions. In the United Nations, the difficulty of reaching an agreed text of a Security Council resolution and the subsequent impossibility of reaching an agreed interpretation of the text of the resolution that was eventually adopted raised questions about the UN’s future viability as a repository of international legality, arbiter of international morality, and guarantor of international peace and security. In NATO, differences over responsibility for Iraq-related contingencies such as the defense of Turkey brought to the fore doubts about the very raison d’etre of the alliance that had begun to surface immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. And in the European Union, bitter recriminations among members about the extent to which they identified with or objected to American policy vis-à-vis Iraq made a mockery of EU pretensions to forge a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and raised the distinct possibility that even the Europe of 15, and especially the post-enlargement Europe of 25, will not move toward ג€œEver Closer Unionג€ but is doomed, at best, to remain nothing more than a forum for mutually advantageous economic ties.