Even if the G-20 was not the success which everybody would like to believe,
when deficits and unemployment are increasing in all developed countries,
another meeting the day before, in New York, led to a remarkable decision:
the United Nations Security Council, gathered in the summit as a real
institutional world government, took unanimously the decision, in its
resolution 1887 ” to look for a more secured world for all and to create the
conditions for a world without nuclear weapons.” Tremendous ambition: to get
rid, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of the 23. 574 nuclear
weapons which are there (among which 12.987 in Russia, 9.552 in the United
States, 300 in France, 192 in Great Britain, 176 in China and a few other
hundreds in Israel, India and Pakistan).
This resolution 1887, without explicitly naming Iran and North Korea, even
reiterates that sanctions are possible against them if they continue to seek
to produce nuclear weapons: the United Nations has also sent Iran an
ultimatum requiring the cessation by the end of the year of any uranium
enrichment under threat of a boycott of its exports of refined oil, a vital
resource for the country. All the members of the security council agreed;
and even the Russian president, Dimitri Medvedev, up to here very hostile to
sanctions, stated that the sanction “would be from now on inevitable”. We
could therefore think that we entered a brave new world.
And yet, for now, all this is only a dream, a manifestation of the irenicism
that sometimes dominates Western ideology, resulting in tolerating threats
by exaggerated desire for conciliation, by disproportionate optimism;
ideology also, in a vision of the world where all sources of conflict would
have disappeared, on grounds that democracies would never have made war and
that the market economies have too many crossed interests to be in
confrontation.
It is illusory because the First World War provides a contrary example. Then
because the more the nations will be alike, by becoming all market
democracies, the more they will be in a situation of mimetic rivalry, and thus
of potential violence. Then, because the reduction of weapons will concern
at first France, which will have to reduce its stock below its threshold of
credibility, so losing its sovereignty, while others will still have enough
to remain credible and protect themselves.
Then again, because it is useless to prohibit nuclear weapons if we do not
ban at the same time effectively the bacteriological, nanotechnological and
chemical weapons; and if we do not subdue terrorism, hooligan countries,
and other piracies and mafias, that are more and more prosperous.
Finally, because this weapon in the hands of democracies, remains the best
safety of world peace as long as there is no effective and credible
global police force, serving a real world government, to which all brings
back to.