Last Thursday, Kerry told minority journalists at the Unity 2004 conference in Washington that "I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side.

The EU's faith in U.N.-brokered conflict resolutions rests in large part on the assumption that following the fall of communism, Russia, a veto-wielding Security Council member, shares the West's basic values and interests. As looting Russian soldiers are demonstrating in Georgia, this was a misconception...

Moscow's dealings with the ruling mullahs should have long convinced Europe that Russia doesn't share its goal of stopping the Iranian bomb. How else could one explain Moscow's construction of a nuclear reactor in Iran, its delivery of advanced antiaircraft missiles to Tehran and its refusal to pass anything but the weakest economic sanctions?

...Moscow can quite rightly assume that a nuclear Iran will hurt Western interests more than Russia's. And in Moscow's atavistic balance-of-power calculations, as long as the West loses more than Russia, Russia wins.

...Many Europeans still believe that only a U.N. stamp of approval lends collective action moral and legal legitimacy. But clearly, a regime that acts with such brutality and disregard for international norms, as Security-Council-member Russia has in Georgia, has no legitimacy to confer. The U.N. as an institution has also little legitimacy left, as it, partly again due to Russian (and Chinese) vetoes, has stood idly by in the face of genocide in Sudan and Mugabe's crimes in Zimbabwe...