This happened at the beginning of a new century. The Western leaders came together to launch an attack on a strategically located nation in the East. As compared to the nations further to the East that sought to establish a global regime based on Islamic tenets, this nation was culturally closer to the West. But the Western leaders were not happy that the ruler of this nation had usurped power. They wanted to restore power to the legitimate leaders of the nation, living in asylum in the West, who promised them long term economic and security partnership.

The Western leaders were confident that once they marched into the capital city, the people of the invaded nation would rise in protest against the ruler, embrace the liberators (as the Western leaders saw themselves), and install the new leaders.

The Western forces marched into the capital city of this nation in the Third year of the new Century as per the Christian calendar. They discovered that they could capture the city with their superior military force but not win the hearts of the people. The so called legitimate leaders who had lived abroad failed to attract the loyalty of the locals. The incumbent ruler fled the city and was arrested several months later and several miles away from it. There was a bloody contest among different factions in the country to take over the state. In the meanwhile, those who had come to liberate this nation filled their hearts by sacking the beautiful city and violating dignity of the local people on a large scale. In particular, the condition of those imprisoned was extremely inhuman. The real beneficiary of the tragedy was a neighbouring power. The dynamics that were generated by this Western victory ensured that the city and the nation eventually fell to the Islamic forces from the East a few decades later and remained with them for almost 500 years.

The invasion was not organised to promote national interest of the Western nations. Rather it was conducted to promote values that the Western leaders believed in and to throw out an illegitimate leader in favour of a legitimate one. I am talking about the Western invasion and sack of Constantinople in 1203. You see, the habit of blending strategic interests with ideology has a long history.

We must thank Jonathan Phillips for recreating the story of The Fourth Crusade. Ironically I purchased it in a bookshop in Georgetown, home to Washington’s elite.

A big question of our time is whether powerful nations will give up their age-old habits of promoting national interest while promoting universal principles. There are times when external intervention is necessary. Anybody who has seen the gruesome pictures of ethnic war in Rwanda over a decade ago, killing a million people, will support Gareth Evans, former foreign minister of Australia, is his campaign for Responsibility to Protect. This was one of the few innovations adapted by the UN General Assembly in its Outcome Document of the Millennium Summit in 2005.

Of course, with Responsibility to Protect there is also responsibility on the Security Council to use this doctrine with commons standards and fairness. The problem we encounter in real life is that such principles are used selectively. Iran is declared guilty for acquiring nuclear weapons technology. A Q Khan who sold nuclear technology clandestinely around the world, including to Tehran, is not even subjected to an open international investigation, leave aside the punishment.

An interesting case study of duplicity of the international community is a comparison between Sudan and Northern Uganda, the two neighbouring countries in Africa. Both countries have been torn by brutal conflict and genocide. In Uganda, Lord’s Resistance Army, a terrorist group, forces its own child members to kill their siblings in order to make them into perfect killers. The Government of Uganda has failed to stop this mayhem. And yet there is international outrage about Sudan, quite justified, but not about Uganda. Why?

In the last decade and half more than five million people have been killed in Rwanda, Congo and Sudan. The international community does not have adequate will or competence or both to stop such disasters. It does not have capacity to tame slumlords of Baghdad or warlords of Afghanistan. It does not have ingenuity to prevent mass starvation in North Korea. It can not unseat military dictators in Pakistan and Belarus, though in the case of Belarus the EU had the gumption to deny visas to the dictator and his cronies.

Recently, Global Business Network had invited me to speak at their headquarters near Berkeley, California. The discussion soon turned to the role of the United States in shaping the future of the world. At Berkeley, where Nobel laureates are found in coffee shops and street corners, and where cocktails speculation is about the next scientific invention, one is reminded of the greatness of the American nation. There is no doubt that the United States is a world leader thanks to its strengths in military, economy and technology. But it is fast losing its leadership of the community of values, reducing it to the position of a super-force from that of a superpower. At Berkeley, one is reminded that there are still a large number of people in the United States who would like their nation to provide a leadership to make the world a happy place. After all, the Declaration of Independence was about the pursuit of happiness, and not about the pursuit of power. A big question of our time is whether the American leaders will choose to rely on the wisdom of their outstanding founding fathers rather than that of the conspirators of the Fourth Crusade.