Defending the UN
by Andrew Bast
Like beauty, the value of the United Nations lies in the eye of the beholder. Case in point, David Rothkopf’s recent screed on Foreign Policy.com (“You Can’t Spell Unproductive Without the Letters U and N”) against the world’s largest multilateral organization, the latest in a long line of vitriolic — and largely misinformed — attacks on the institution.
David Rothkopf
Only a few years ago, John Bolton, at the time the US ambassador to the UN, declared that taking ten floors off of the secretariat would make little difference in its operation. Superfluous or not, those ten floors managed to survive Bolton’s UN tenure largely unscathed. Although Rothkopf’s rant, too, will likely dissolve away into the digital archives of misguided foreign policy analysis, his argument deserves a second, serious look.
That Rothkopf should be the source of this broadside is unfortunate, because he otherwise seems to be, on the whole, brilliant. His credentials are top-notch: head of a global consulting firm, appointment to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, author of the enjoyable read, Superclass (which drilled into the networked elite pulling the powerful levers behind the machinery of globalization) and another widely praised book on the National Security Council.
All of this makes his piece all the more confounding. Apparently Rothkopf, like many others (including many US policymakers), doesn’t know what the UN is.
Rothkopf makes three bold claims. First, that the “UN” has lacked a backbone since its inception and, what’s more, was actually designed to be “invertebrate.” Second, that the ideas underlying the Security Council are, literally, elementary: “Basically the organization was designed along the lines of the conflict resolution sessions my daughters’ elementary school used to use when students got into a fight.” And third, that the organization is not even worth the building it occupies.
Rothkopf’s condemnation is a clear echo of Bolton, reflecting more the criticisms thrown around at Turtle Bay than what the UN actually does. He suggests shutting the place down and renting the building out as condos because “even in a down New York real estate market it is almost certain to be a better return on investment for the dollars poured into that white elephant on the East River than ‘outcomes’ like the proposed sanctions on Pyongyang.”
This kind of argumentation is worse than scorching a straw man, ignoring the ways in which the UN is a positive tool for the exercise of US power, designed in the image of the US ideal.
To begin with, Rothkopf repeatedly refers to the “UN,” when it’s clear that he’s really talking about the Security Council, the body that handles matters of international peace and security. But to reduce the United Nations to a mechanism for conflict resolution, as Rothkopf does, misses the point. The theory underpinning the composition of the council, rather than elementary, is a rather nuanced and high-minded concept in international relations known as collective security. Put simply, an attack on one member state constitutes an attack on all. The logic behind the theory is to create significant disincentives for aggression, thereby increasing stability among the society of states. The best example of collective security at work was the council’s response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Rothkopf has a point, inasmuch as during the Cold War, the Security Council remained deadlocked, with the United States and the Soviet Union able to wield their vetoes to effectively block any action against their interests. But to suggest that the body was designed without a spine or that it was founded on facile ideas is ludicrous. If anything, it traces its origin directly back to one of the finer US presidents, Woodrow Wilson.
Worse still, to talk about the UN as if it were only the Security Council, though disturbingly common, neglects the reality of the last six decades. Bluntly stated, today the UN is essentially a service organization. One could argue, and I probably would, that the UN is doing more than any other state or international organization to satisfy “the obligations of the social contract in the global era,” as Rothkopf phrases it. After the United States, the UN today exercises command control over the world’s largest number of deployed military forces. UN peacekeeping missions currently number sixteen, with nearly 100,000 uniformed personnel deployed.
UN agencies also feed the hungry, house the displaced and save the lives of children on an unparalleled scale around the world. The World Food Program will feed 105 million people this year. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) cared for 25 million people last year, most of whom had fled war and chaos. UNICEF works in the poorest countries to provide children fresh drinking water, immunizations and equal access to education, among other things. Imagine that: an organization committed to serving those from whom the least benefit is to be gained — namely, the poor, the dispossessed, the desperate. And most of its programs fight to sustain funding every year.
This is to say nothing of agencies like the UN Development Program (which has been working to strengthen governments in the developing world for decades), or the international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, or the International Atomic Energy Agency, or the World Health Organization, which has served as the global coordinator in the rather impressive response to the swine flu.
Even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both of which provide American foreign policymakers with concrete mechanisms to extend influence around the globe, technically fall under the UN umbrella.
None of this should be interpreted as some blind faith in the UN as an organization. Without a doubt the UN secretariat and assorted agencies are poorly organized — even disastrously so — and almost institutionally geared for waste and inefficiency. A management chart of the entire place would elicit shudders, if not outright shouts of terror, from a Fortune 500 executive. There’s also no question that the Security Council looks like a plan drawn up by the victors of World War II, not by the major and emerging powers of today. And yes, there are disasters, such as the Human Rights Council, which has made a mockery of its name.
But throwing stones at “the UN” in order to criticize the latest resolution on North Korea as toothless is not only shallow, it’s simply wrong. Because a deliberative body exists does not mean that the United States will always get its way. And when you actually try to make sense of other states’ actions, in this case Russia and China, it becomes clear that they may actually be coming around toward a more muscular condemnation of North Korea’s nuclearization. That is, they are increasingly approaching the US position.
Arguing that the politicization of the Security Council justifies ridding
the world of the UN is not just intellectually dishonest. It’s at odds with US interests.
