Even if the G-20 was not the success which everybody would like to believe,

when deficits and unemployment are increasing in all developed countries,

another meeting the day before, in New York, led to a remarkable decision:

the United Nations Security Council, gathered in the summit as a real

institutional world government, took unanimously the decision, in its

resolution 1887 ” to look for a more secured world for all and to create the

conditions for a world without nuclear weapons.” Tremendous ambition: to get

rid, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of the 23. 574 nuclear

weapons which are there (among which 12.987 in Russia, 9.552 in the United

States, 300 in France, 192 in Great Britain, 176 in China and a few other

hundreds in Israel, India and Pakistan).

This resolution 1887, without explicitly naming Iran and North Korea, even

reiterates that sanctions are possible against them if they continue to seek

to produce nuclear weapons: the United Nations has also sent Iran an

ultimatum requiring the cessation by the end of the year of any uranium

enrichment under threat of a boycott of its exports of refined oil, a vital

resource for the country. All the members of the security council agreed;

and even the Russian president, Dimitri Medvedev, up to here very hostile to

sanctions, stated that the sanction “would be from now on inevitable”. We

could therefore think that we entered a brave new world.

And yet, for now, all this is only a dream, a manifestation of the irenicism

that sometimes dominates Western ideology, resulting in tolerating threats

by exaggerated desire for conciliation, by disproportionate optimism;

ideology also, in a vision of the world where all sources of conflict would

have disappeared, on grounds that democracies would never have made war and

that the market economies have too many crossed interests  to be in

confrontation.

It is illusory because the First World War provides a contrary example. Then

because the more the nations will be alike, by becoming all market

democracies, the more they will be in a situation of mimetic rivalry, and thus

of potential violence. Then, because the reduction of weapons will concern

at first France, which will have to reduce its stock below its threshold of

credibility, so losing its sovereignty, while others will still have enough

to remain credible and protect themselves.

Then again, because it is useless to prohibit nuclear weapons if we do not

ban at the same time effectively the bacteriological, nanotechnological and

chemical weapons; and if we do not subdue terrorism, hooligan countries,

and other piracies and mafias, that are more and more prosperous.

Finally, because this weapon in the hands of democracies, remains the best

safety of world peace as long as there is no effective and credible

global police force, serving a real world government, to which all brings

back to.