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10 Chi. J. Int'l L. 55 (2009-2010)
United Nations Collective Security and the United States Security Guarantee in an Age of Rising Multipolarity: The Security Council as the Talking Shop of the Nations

handle is hein.journals/cjil10 and id is 57 raw text is: United Nations Collective Security and the United States Security Guarantee in an Age of Rising Multipolarity: The Security Council as the Talking Shop of the Nations Kenneth Anderson* I. INTRODUCTION: POSTULATING THE RISE OF A MULTIPOLAR WORLD Two interrelated theses are these days much in vogue. One is the thesis of US decline and, by corollary, the rise of new Great Powers and multipolarity. Though this thesis is in vogue today, it has been a favorite of writers, politicians, and statesmen over generations-almost a parlor game for intellectuals. It is a parlor game that tends, however, to turn historians into futurists. Proceeding from the unimpeachable, but also uninformative, observation that no empire in the course of history has lasted forever, thence to the claim that the American empire is teetering-these analyses have a predictive track record as poor as they are undeniably popular. The eminent Yale historian Paul Kennedy, for example, skewered himself in 1987 with a sweeping, best-selling foray into American decinism, a mere matter of months, as it happened, before the fall of the Soviet Union.' It curiously did not hurt his reputation or book sales; The Rise and Fall of Great Powers has been translated into twenty-three languages and counting. But Kennedy is hardly alone, and the phenomenon owes something (it is hard to resist concluding) to the schadenfreude of intellectuals for whom the persistence of American power, although not really so long by historical Professor of Law, Washington College of Law, American University; Research Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and member of the Hoover Task Force on National Security and Law. Thanks to my research assistants Can Celik, Neil Pandey-Jorrin, David Wiseman, and Scott Yoo for their able work, and to my WCL dean, Claudio Grossman, and the executive director of the Hoover Institution, John Raisian, for support in completing this Article. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Mifitay Confictfrom 1500 to 2000 514-35 (Vintage 1989). See also Kenneth Anderson, El Pasado Como Prologo: El Futuro Gloriosoy el Turbio Presente De Las Naciones Unidas, 143 Revista de Libros de la Fundacion Caja Madrid (November 2008), available online at <http://ssrn.com/abstract=1300693> (visited Apr 22, 2009).

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