HOLMES: Time for 'Global Freedom Coalition'

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By Kim Holmes

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Most of America's foreign and national security challenges today are global in nature.

Whether countering terrorism or nuclear proliferation, offering an alternative to radical Islamists, expanding free trade, or supporting free and democratic nations in danger such as Georgia and Taiwan, America must protect far-ranging interests that span the globe.

Yet our alliances and international institutions are ill-suited to these tasks.

Born some 60 years ago at the dawn of the Cold War, NATO, the United Nations and the international trade and financial institutions are out of date - invented for a world that no longer exists.

When I was assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the first Bush term, I saw firsthand how limited the United Nations was in tackling hard problems like Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

The U.N. could do some easy things where there was consensus, but it would break down in the hard cases. The U.N. has been more an impediment than a facilitator to ending the tragedy of Darfur, and its Human Rights Council is an outright embarrassment.

NATO is still an important alliance to America, but it's a pale comparison to its former greatness. It played no role as an institution in Iraq. It is stumbling badly in Afghanistan. More and more it is the European Union - not NATO - that takes the diplomatic lead on behalf of the United States in crises, as is now being done with respect to Georgia.

The need for a new global security arrangement for truly free nations couldn't be more obvious or timely. Free nations have far more in common than what divides them.

There can be power and unity in numbers, and yet many of America's friends are institutionally strewn unconnected across the globe in disparate regional alliances or bilateral arrangements.