UN needs America’s clout and conscience to make a difference
If the United Nations were a stock or an index fund, you might want to short it. Founded in 1945 to “maintain international peace and security,” the UN in recent years has been mostly powerless to stop slaughter in Syria, Yemen and Myanmar. Civil conflicts are nearing post-Cold War highs. The number of displaced people has hit a new record. After decades of improvement, more of the world’s poor are going hungry. The gap between what the UN seeks and receives for humanitarian relief is greater than ever. Gridlock at the Security Council is worsening. The organisation’s biggest shareholder, the US, is withdrawing its support, creating an opening for a takeover by powers with decidedly illiberal interests.
Yet the UN is still necessary — far too necessary to be written off. From the spread of weapons of mass destruction to the threat of climate change, the range of perils that no one nation can counter has greatly expanded since the UN was established. The test facing those gathered for this year’s General Assembly is as pressing as it is daunting: to make the UN fit for purpose in an era of surging nationalism and mounting geopolitical tensions.
Seen from today, US president Harry Truman’s pronouncement that it might take 80 years for the UN Charter to remake world affairs seems a trifle optimistic. Today’s recrudescence of geopolitical competition threatens to turn back the clock. Last year saw the greatest number of vetoes in the Security Council since 1989, mostly over Syria. Before that, differences over the intervention in Libya that toppled Muammar Al Gaddafi and Russia’s annexation of Crimea had poisoned the council’s well.
China has become more willing to deploy its veto. As the second and third biggest contributor to peacekeeping and the UN general budget, respectively, it’s pushing for influence more broadly. China’s efforts to defend its interests in the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, Russia’s recalcitrance on Syria, and Saudi Arabia’s aggressive defence in Yemen are efforts to “rewrite the ground rules of UN diplomacy,” Gowan wrote in World
Politics Review. And that’s to say nothing of the growing assertiveness of regional powers old and new such as India and Ethiopia.
This competition is taking place on a new strategic landscape. Cyberspace has opened up a virtual arena for everything from sabotage and espionage to political interference. Criminal syndicates that traffic in weapons, minerals, drugs and migrants have stoked violence and corruption in fragile states. Implacable extremist groups have made conflicts more violent and harder to resolve through negotiation. The number of major civil wars has almost tripled in the past decade. In 2015, intrastate conflicts were also 10 times more likely than in 1991 to involve an outside power. Even as the UN has successfully ended some peacekeeping missions, such complicating factors will make others harder to wind down. The average age of the 14 missions now in place, involving some 103,000 personnel, is 26 years.
And then there’s Donald Trump. His administration poses the greatest challenge of all. Before taking office, he told reporters in December 2016: “There is such tremendous potential, but it is not living up. When do you see the United Nations solving problems? They don’t. They cause problems.”
Trump has ended US support for the UN Population Fund and backed away from the Paris accord
If Guterres hopes to keep such forces at bay, he needs to do what he can to keep the US engaged. That gives him little choice but to appease his US tormentors
on climate change, the UN-led Global Compact on Migration, Unesco, and the UN Human Rights Council. And he dumped the Iran nuclear agreement that Security Council members jointly fashioned and UN agencies had monitored. Congress restored many of his cuts to US support for UN agencies. But this past month, Trump terminated US aid to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
The US has legitimate complaints. As the UN’s biggest funder, it’s right to demand accountability. In 2017, its so-called assessed (meaning obligatory) contribution of 22 per cent of the regular UN budget amounted to $611 million. (In all, the US provides about $10 billion in assessed and voluntary support for UN agencies.) Under the current formula, some 30-odd of the world’s poorest countries pony up a mere $25,000 or so a year — a fraction of what some might pay for their presidential limousines.
There’s no denying that the UN has been plagued by corruption and mismanagement. And biting the US hand that feeds them comes far too naturally to many of the General Assembly’s members.
Productive engagement is the answer. US Ambassador Nikki Haley was right, for instance, to shine a bright light on UN peacekeeping operations: Many were overdue for serious scrutiny. But the administration is increasingly inclined toward unproductive disengagement.
Consider the US decision to withdraw from the Human Rights Council. As Bathsheba Crocker, a
former assistant secretary of state for international organisation affairs in the Obama administration, argued in an interview, “We were able to push back in ways you just can’t when you’re not in the room.” The US supported investigations into human-rights abuses in numerous countries and broke up antiWestern voting blocs.
The argument that by withdrawing from the council the US denies it legitimacy is beside the point. By the same logic, you might as well walk away from the General Assembly. After all, Freedom House rates more than half the world’s nations “not free” or only “partly free,” and says that trends are heading in the wrong direction.
A US retreat from the UN would be UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s worst nightmare. A former prime minister of Portugal and UN High Commissioner for Refugees, he’s liked by UN critics and defenders alike. His proposals for UN reform are bolder than those of his two predecessors.
But this congruence of interest seems unlikely to keep Trump’s pugilistic instincts in check. Guterres appears to recognise this. His latest idea for taming those impulses is to warn that the US withdrawal from the UN is creating a vacuum that China is moving to fill.
Would that be so bad? China is stepping up in UN peacekeeping, providing relatively well-trained and — resourced troops. Last year, it moved with new speed in the Security Council to support sanctions on North Korea for its nuclear and missile programmes. It has championed the fight against climate change, a cause that has amplified its influence. Its financial role in the UN is growing, and with that is coming greater interest in how the money is spent. That could bolster institutional reform.
But while it’s one thing for China to put more peacekeepers in the field, it’s another for China to push in UN budget deliberations for fewer humanrights observers in peacekeeping missions. The last thing the UN needs is a stronger illiberal axis, led by China and an increasingly disruptive Russia. Illiberalism is on the rise in many parts of the world — including, for instance, in the European Union, where until recently one would not have expected it to pose a threat.
If Guterres hopes to keep such forces at bay, he needs to do what he can to keep the US engaged. That gives him little choice but to appease his US tormentors, preferably in ways that serve larger institutional goals. Make a more concerted and visible effort to trim the bureaucracy, especially at UN headquarters, and cut red tape. Push for a new assessment formula that increases the piddling contributions of its least well-off members and gets them more invested in the UN’s effectiveness. Increase the scrutiny of UN peacekeeping missions, winding down the failures and holding national detachments more accountable.
The still-unfolding backlash against globalisation and inevitable return of geopolitical competition will make meeting such challenges harder. All the more reason for governments to direct and empower the UN to step up. One of history’s most painful lessons is that failure to agree on how to solve a problem doesn’t make it go away.