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More recently Bridge Expert Ely Culbertson has come forward with a "quota force principle," which bids fair to match in popularity his forcing two-bid in contract bridge, if somewhat similar publicity methods can persuade a somewhat similar audience. The most seductive and sales-stimulating feature of the Culbertson scheme is its painstaking, pinpoint detail. With a thoroughness to delight and challenge any addict of mental games, he lists the precise size and make-up of each of the "national contingents" that are to be part of his world police force.
The international "special corps" of the French plan has become a "mobile corps," recruited from all the smaller nations; and Culbertson has picked the strategic bases they are to occupy. Inasmuch as the mobile corps is to comprise 22% of the world police force, it could presumably, in case of trouble, beat even the kingpin of the "national contingents," the U.S. with 20%. And it could join with other national contingents to take on a combination of aggressors.
Culbertson has had Bertrand Russell check and approve his mathematics, but apparently no one has checked his logistics. Factors of transportation and supply, not to mention the geography of achieved defensive positions, might weigh heavily against the mobile corps and its allies after Russia, say, had blitzed Poland or the U.S. had blitzed Mexico.
Who Runs the Force? Culbertson does not—as do many of his admirers—fall into the too easy trap of supposing that a world police force, no matter how carefully constituted, could keep the peace of itself. He knows that a cop acts only under orders. Hence his World Federation—complete with legislature (two branches), executive and judiciary—to govern the whole globe.
His World Federation Plan, for all its fine phrasing, boils down to domination of the globe by the four victorious major powers. In making the U.S. and Britain top dogs, even over Russia and China (the first world president, term six years, is to be American, the second British), the Plan verges slightly towards Clarence Streit's Union Now. Still, Culbertson is to be credited, as most of his critics have not credited him, with thinking his world police idea right through to a world government. For without some sort of world government to tell the cop what to do and when to do it, any kind of world cop would be a fist without a brain.
Law Is Behind Order. The simplest kind of world government from which a world police force might conceivably take its orders is a world court, acting on its own, without benefit of legislature or executive (other than the police force). Presumably such a court, in the absence of legislation, would have to base its decisions on that disputed mass of principles known as "international law." Could an effective war-preventing police system, then, be founded merely on enforcement of those principles?