Barack Obama missed a trick when he was first inaugurated; after decades of US jack-booting around the planet, Obama could have declared all war between nations illegal. Not that one simple idealistic statement, no matter who issued it, would have prevented future wars, far from it. We are still far too tribal for that happy day to dawn. But it would have established an historic marker, a line in the sand that implied that all ‘policing’ of disputes between and within nations must be done with the full consent of the United Nations and then carried out only with disciplined troops under UN command.

Of course, with the United States being the biggest rogue nation on the planet, the US Congress and the military-industrial complex were hardly going to buy into that multilateral game. Nevertheless, a daring statement of intent might have profitably been made by Obama as a way of distancing himself from all that had gone before. Not a bit of it.

Rather than surrender the arrogant pretentions of an imperialist power, the US, led by its first Afro-American president, has continued all the same old unilateral diktat that his presidential predecessors have sought to impose. Launching a wholly absurd and criminal war against Iraq, and, for over twelve years, blasting Afghanistan even further back into the Stone Age, the US has shown total contempt for international law and international diplomacy. Unmanned drones continue a policy of extrajudicial murder, and the US sponsored torture in Guantanamo and other secret prison camps dotted around the globe are further evidence of this contempt for even the most basic of civilised norms. Serbia, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan have all recently felt the imperial cuff behind the ear in recent years.

But if we examine the seven decades since the end of the Second World War, the list is truly staggering. It took a dissenting British Tory to remind Parliament the other day that it was, in fact, the United States themselves that used chemical weapons against civilians on a massive industrial scale just a few short decades ago in Vietnam. And who provided Saddam with the chemical weapons to attack Iran even more recently? Once again our dissenting Tory from Norfolk set Parliament straight on this inconvenient truth. And then along comes Syria. It’s a bloody mess, there’s no doubting that. But that should not herald the green light for US Tomahawk Cruise missiles to reign down on Syrian cities without any international authorisation.

Obama just doesn’t get it. A collectively arrived at UN decision, even a poor one, is infinitely more valuable than a unilateral NATO police action, no matter how well intentioned Obama may plead such an action to be. If the twenty first century is going to be even remotely more civilised than the twentieth, global diplomacy must trump big power diktat. We all know that the UN isn’t all that, but by contemptuously side-stepping it, whenever it suits US interests, is to consign the organisation to utter irrelevancy. That’s what happened to the original League of Nations and we all know where that led us to.

The UN, for all its bureaucratic failings, is the only global forum we have. It desperately needs restructuring to reflect a post-colonial world. It urgently needs to become transparent, accountable and democratic. But even now, its authority is the closest we have to an embryonic world government, and self- professed democrats in the western world would do well to remember that. Every time the US acts unilaterally, it drives another nail into the UN coffin. That may well be the deliberate intention of the US imperialists but it is a road that leads nowhere other than never-ending war. Russia and China are not, of course, faultless in all of this. Their bureaucrats are still operating with a redundant cold war mentality, when in reality they have a whole lot in common with the Western nations.

Russia and China, it seems, have long since abandoned all notions of a future egalitarian and rational world. Their prime ideology, like that of the US, is now simply one of markets, cheap resources and secure spheres of influence. Syria is just another pawn in that game. Welcome back to 1914..