What went wrong? The United Nations was founded in 1945, and now has about 200 member countries. Its purpose was and is to foment world peace and humanitarian aid. Yet almost continuously in the nearly sixty years since its founding, the world has been repeatedly wracked by wars, civil wars, quasi wars, tribal wars, and ethnic cleansings on a scale that in total rivals World War II. World hunger is as bad as ever, and world health is nothing to brag about.

So people are asking two questions:

1. How can the U.N. make itself function better?

2. How can America improve our relations with the U.N.?

My premise here is that these are the wrong questions. (One seeming proof of this is that some of the best minds on the planet have struggled with these twin questions -- for decades really -- and they have failed to reach an effective, lasting solution.)

My thesis is that the basic paradigm or way of thinking behind the creation and the continuance of the United Nations has become deeply flawed, as international relations evolved rather tensely and chaotically in the broad stretch of years since 1945. The world no longer can, or will, or wants to ever act “as one.” A global peacekeeping body that works by committee, rife with factionalism and clique-rivalries, compromised by mutual suspicion, jealousy, fear, and greed, is about as relevant as a U.S. Army organized to refight World War II.

Specifically, to borrow an analogy from William Lind’s epoch-making concept of Fourth Generation Warfare, documented by him and his co-authors in the late 1980s, allow me to suggest that we now all live in an age of Fourth Generation Diplomacy.

Think about it.

One key aspect of Fourth Generation Warfare is that the enemy is often a “sub-national” group, who uses hit and run tactics in a theater of conflict with no specific front lines -- and thus no safe rear areas. Each success is tallied as a shocking fait accompli. America’s enemy in a Fourth Generation War typically hides except for fragmentary moments of brutal violence, relying on indirection, intimidation, and even time itself as weapons. This type of enemy uses patience and psychological warfare the same way the U.S. Armed Forces of today use assault rifles and smart bombs. And Fourth Generation opponents have a table of organization and equipment, if you could call it that, which is very fluid, always changing, and constantly adapting. Individual membership in the opponent’s militia or terrorist gang is frequently a part-time or nebulous thing. Alliances of convenience between different Fourth Generation groups who share a similar goal -- such as harming American interests -- come and go on what appear to be terms and conditions well suited to confuse and stymie Third Generation warriors in uniform.

My specific purpose here, in mentioning Fourth Generation Warfare, is to draw some telling analogies to current real-world diplomacy. Consider such experiences of armed strife as:

1. The “Tanker War” to protect oil shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf in the 1980s, that paralleled the long war between Iran and Iraq.

2. The war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi conquest in 1990/1991.

3. The repeated wars and ethnic cleansings in the Balkans.

4. The intervention in Somalia, and the military “generation gap” between the U.S. and our opponent which was painfully revealed in Mogadishu the day those Black Hawks went down.

5. Armed intervention against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

6. Regime change and ongoing attempts at nation re-building in Iraq.

In every one of these instances, to varying degrees, the group of nations that America worked with to try to restore peace and prosperity was very much “sub-global.” What is also rather conspicuous is how the coalitions involved on our side in each conflict were different, and often grew or shrank during different stages of the crises. In some cases, the United Nations either could not or would not take a stand on what action to take, or limited the sanctioned action to something tragically short of decisive. The U.S. and our friends were forced by this to exercise diplomacy that was often fluid, behind the scenes, and at odds with various other sets of non-combatant sovereign states.

The U.N. Security Council, with unchallengeable veto power held by several permanent members, became more and more not a place in which to reach consensus on swift solutions to glaring problems of aggressive bloodshed; rather it emerged as an ivory tower for bureaucracy and filibusters between well-dressed and privileged envoys. Though perhaps no one was completely blameless, and sometimes apathy reigned all around, firm steps to counter tyranny or genocide and save lives flowed less and less from near-unanimous agreement and support by the Security Council.

In short, the engineering of practical approaches to squelching local wars is now being accomplished, as far as the U.N. is concerned, in the shadows, by “guerrilla cells” of willing countries. These cells learn as they go to sidestep the no-win confrontations involved in any attempt to obtain the questionable blessings of their primary Third Generation diplomatic opponent: the U.N. itself. At the levels of ambassadorial negotiating, intelligence sharing, and operational planning, these cells are -- knowingly or not -- engaged in Fourth Generation Diplomacy.

The feisty accusation from many quarters that the U.S. is seeking to act as an imperial power can now be seen for what it really is: a understandable (and forgivable?) disconnect of the accusers’ perceptions between events and the cause that drives those events. The events creating such bitter debate are America and our partners acting sub-globally, outside the umbrella of the U.N. -- a potentially invaluable humanitarian entity whose rigid worldwide peacekeeping role is manifestly obsolescent. The driving cause behind these bitterly debated events is a new paradigm of foreign affairs being put into practice because of the dire necessity for it.

The Global War on Terror, plus the escalating battle (of words, so far) to halt the proliferation of nuclear arms and other WMDs in Iran and North Korea and elsewhere, mean that hesitation or half-measures could prove lethal to human survival. Since a WMD attack takes place in an hour or an instant, Fourth Generation Diplomats must know when to act with determination and speed. If it’s actually the case that America and our friends have grown into Fourth Generation Diplomacy, then we need to embrace this new era of statecraft wholeheartedly, and be proud of it, and educate others with urgency so they too can keep up with the times. That might even include the U.N., if the organization proves flexible enough to reinvent itself -- but the onus for this must lie on the U.N.’s shoulders, not America’s.

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com