A Tribunal Born of Fear and Hope

At the dawn of the Cold War’s end, old dreams of an effective multilateral system based upon the rule of law and democratic public opinion returned. Senior United Nations officials and Scandinavian foreign ministers, as well as George Bush Sr’s speechwriters, pored over dusty volumes of Woodrow Wilson’s speeches. The first Gulf War, unlike the second, was firmly grounded in multilateralist rhetoric, justification and hopes.

For a while, the early 1990s seemed less an American triumph than an opportunity for international organizations whose development the Cold War had stunted. Canadian political scientist Janice Stein and Yale historian Paul Kennedy expressed the view that both sides had lost and, in Kennedy’s case, that the American empire was on a downward trajectory. The Americans had won the major battle, but the huge deficits of the Reagan years and the emergence of Europe and Asia meant that the United States was limping into the 1990s. The U.S. was, as it...