Bye Bye!
Gwyn Prins in the Guardian says Farewell to the old world - Iraq is the catalyst for the draining of power from the UN, EU and Nato:

But Iraq is simply a subplot within the play, whose major theme is the definitive end of the post-cold war interregnum, and the opening of the American imperial moment. We are at the passing of the age of Middle Earth. All the agents and the institutions of that age will be profoundly affected.

The previous breakpoint of equivalent importance was in the late 1940s. Emerging from the ashes of the destruction of the Third Reich, and led by the US, the victors found collective will to act: and in that time, they engendered the universal declaration of human rights and initiated the three main multi-lateral political adventures of the next half century: the UN, Nato and the EU.

Today, simultaneously, we are seeing the draining of power from all three, and transformation of the residuum. The catalyst to this profound and rapid change has been Iraq. Stirring this volatile mixture in all three cases has been French foreign policy since 1991. Most immediately, the stirring stick has been President Chirac's opportunistic anti-Americanism.

If you dress up the court jester, he's still the jester.

Chirac has trapped France on the narrow summit of his own rhetoric. So unless quick footwork can sidestep that prospect, and also the unseemly scrabble for the nine votes, the second resolution becomes less about repetition of the "678-687-1441" mandates than precipitating the UN's "Abyssinia moment".
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Nato is now passing into the shadows. The spat over defending Turkey was a superficial graze compared with the far deeper wound it sustained after 9/11. The failure to use Nato in Afghanistan maimed its credibility as a military alliance; and ironically the accession of the next wave of militarily weak members, by that act, destroyed what they thought they were joining. It was dead on arrival at Prague. But since nations have permanent interests, and tailor their arrangements accordingly, a functioning successor military alliance has for some time been working quietly inside the dead structure: an "intelligence special relationship" coalition (Australia-Canada-New Zealand-UK-US) with occasional help from others. The French officer's betrayal to Serbia of air tasking orders and Chirac's capriciousness at Pristina during the Kosovo campaign have not been forgotten in Washington.

I was wondering if anyone was going to mention those betrayals.

But the biggest miscalculations of the past few weeks have been about the EU. The EU constitutional convention, as now drafted, is straightforwardly federal. Not a word of what the British and other sceptics said was entertained. When Giscard d'Estaing presented the clauses, he did so with a brutal frankness: this is the future and those who do not like it are free to leave. The assumption is that this is a deadly threat - to be cast out into the cold. But is it?
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Put now to Giscard's choice, for the first time in decades it becomes realistic to think that the British, the Dutch, Iberians, Scandinavians, current applicants - and who else? - may decline the federal invitation and prefer to become Europeans marching to a different drum. This other Europe contains the more dynamic European economies, would go with the grain of expressed public desires, and it is Blair's to lead.

France achieves continuing irrelevance. Film at 11.