Word: consensus
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...Underneath all the political noise, there’s actually a consensus of reasonable people,” Butler said...
...will rejoin the Paris-based U.N. cultural agency unesco, officials say, was a plum aimed at rewarding the French. Russian support for action is also close, U.S. negotiators claim, and China, the last of the veto-wielding permanent members, is probably going to go along with the group consensus. "I think all the members of the council are now seized with the issue," Secretary of State Colin Powell said Friday at the U.N. Whether that means they will go along with the U.S. exactly on its timetable is a tougher question...
Surely the same is true in international affairs. One of the great follies of multilateralism is its supposition that a consensus of the international community is binding simply because it is a consensus. This could well be the thought behind Kilfoyle’s claim that “it is the UN that should decide on military action, not President Bush”—but, again, he neglects to offer reasons for his beliefs. I do not mean to demean the importance of consensus within a democratic community committed to a common set of values...
...ultimate test of American foreign policy is a question of its rightness, not of the process by which it was formed. Communities can make mistakes and individuals act rightly. The decision to appease Hitler by abandoning Czechoslovakia in 1938 was arrived at by international consensus; it was as multilateral—and as wrongheaded—as one could hope. On the other hand it is hardly likely that, if the United States had decided to halt genocide in Rwanda through police-keeping action, that policy would have been spat upon as “unilateral...
...seemed until last week. So successful was Bush's Sept. 12 speech to the U.N. in rallying an international consensus against Iraq that it left Saddam Hussein with little choice but to do what he rarely does: concede something. In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Iraq announced that after four years of blowing off inspections, it was now ready to submit to them "without conditions." That left the war camp in an awkward dilemma. Can you convince the world it needs to get rid of a bully if the bully suddenly appears to be playing nice...