To review, the global security system as it stands combines the international community, as legally (self-)constituted, with a U.S. willingness to enforce its writ effectively prior to and beyond law, just as U.S. military-economic preponderance at the end of World War II made the (pseudo-universal) UN international regime possible.
The stability of this system, not uniquely, requires a kind of studied unconsciousness and active forgetting of its effective precepts: The extra-legal and extra-rational origins of the regime of laws and reason generally must be suppressed so that it may operate as a regime of laws and reason, or operate at all. This dynamically paradoxical mechanism was fitted to mass societies by the 18th Century, first in political philosophy – in sum, from Machiavelli to Hobbes to Rousseau to Locke – and with the American system its first practically successful elaboration. The liberal-democratic regime form that emerged via American constitutionalism is a mixed regime that we, absolutely typically, discuss as though it is, or could be, or has ever been or might ever be simply democratic. The neo-imperial or global regime is likewise a mixed regime but on a larger scale producing different orders of complexity, with the twinned idealisms of the UN Charter system and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights partly masking the pragmatic requirements of world security, which include a pro-democratic, but at the same time decisively non- or pre-democratic and “exceptional” (legally extra- or pre-legal) reliance on the “world’s policeman” or, perhaps more accurately, the “world’s chieftain.”
The world’s chieftain cannot serve the general interest effectively and reliably unless convinced that serving the general interest also serves “his” self-interest – that the two interests are finally the same or non-severable. When the chieftain falls into a depressive state – of apathy, or aboulia, or neurasthenia; doubting all, negating itself to negate all – the system fails, and the will to stasis is realized, or hypostatized, as crisis.
