National Committee on American Foreign Policy

Joseph Biden	John R. Bolton
Lawrence S. Finkelstein	Shepard Forman
Fereydoun Hoveyda	William vanden Heuvel
Edward C. Luck	William H. Luers
Benjamin Rivlin	Stephen Schlesinger
Nancy Soderberg	Thomas G. Weiss

Foreword by Donald Blinken and George Schwab
New York, August 2006

Acknowledgment

The generous support of Ambassador Donald Blinken and Mutual of America has made possible this publication of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy's (NCAFP's) project on U.S.-UN Relations. It includes NCAFP's initial policy recommendations on this vital issue that impinges on both the national interests of the United States and global security interests as well.

Foreword

By general consensus UN reform is critical if the only truly global institution is to survive. Numerous articles have appeared during the past two years prescribing remedies for fixing the UN. At the UN itself both the Secretariat and member states' task forces are heavily engaged in describing shortcomings and proposing remedies.

For Americans a few fundamental questions should take precedence: Is the UN of critical importance to the United States? If the answer is yes, why is this so? If U.S. interests are served by the United Nations, how would a more efficient and transparent UN benefit us?

Using this special issue of American Foreign Policy Interests as a forum, we invited American authorities on the United Nations to discuss these questions as a contribution to the broader debate.

Of particular interest are the titles of the contributions, which indicate the variety of opinions held by American authorities on the vital issue of U.S.-UN relations: "No More Business as Usual" (John R. Bolton); "Who Needs the United Nations? We All Do." (Joseph R. Biden, Jr.); "The Survivors: The United States and the United Nations in Troubled Times" (Edward C. Luck); "The Rule of Law, the United States, and the United Nations: An Ambiguous Record" (Lawrence S. Finkelstein); "U.S.-UN Relations and the Use of Force After the World Summit" (Thomas G. Weiss); "The U.S.-UN Relationship -A Difficult but Necessary Partnership" (Nancy Soderberg); "America and the United Nations: A Delicate Relationship" (Stephen Schlesinger); "Looking to a Refashioned U.S. Partnership with the United Nations" (William H. Luers); "The United States and the United Nations: One Strand in a Multilateral Strategy" (Shepard L. Forman); "The United States and the United Nations: From Close Relationship to Estrangement" (Fereydoun Hoveyda); and S"The United Nations: The Failure of American Leadership" (William J. vanden Heuvel).

We thank Professor Benjamin Rivlin for orchestrating this special issue of American Foreign Policy Interests.

Introduction: How Does the UN System Fit into American Foreign Policy Interests?
Benjamin Rivlin

The UN has existed for more than 60 years as a fixture in the terrestrial firmament, so much so that it is taken for granted both as an ideal of human solidarity and as an overarching resource for the people of the world to invoke in coping with the plethora of problems of interdependence that do not recognize boundaries and call for concerted or institutionalized intergovernmental approaches. Being taken for granted does not mean that the nature and role of the UN is clearly understood. In fact, its activities and its very existence are among the most controversial issues in world affairs.

The UN has both legal and political inherent qualities; the first being a body of rules of conduct embodied in international law and the second being the give and take among the members of the UN community as international public policies and contentious issues are dealt with.

The underpinning of the modern international system is state sovereignty. States participate in multilateral undertakings primarily for selfish reasons- self-preservation through the promotion of policies that enhance the national interest and preserve its sovereignty. This is true for all states in the world, including the United States. Institutionalized cooperation among sovereign states, begun in earnest in the 19th century with the creation of a number of functional international public unions such as the Universal Postal Union (UPU) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), has expanded significantly since the development of the United Nations system over the past 60 years.

The cluster of intergovernmental organizations that constitutes the UN system extends beyond the major organs at UN headquarters in New York (notably the General Assembly [GA], the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, and the Secretariat). It includes a varied assortment of specialized agencies, regional commissions, functional commissions, and special programs plus other subsidiary bodies. Together they cover the gamut of all political, social, and economic issues that beset the globalizing world ranging from the maintenance of peace, economic development, human rights, population growth and displacement, humanitarian relief, health, trade, intellectual property, terrorism, nuclear energy, arms control, and many more. Each of these issues has global dimensions that nation-states cannot deal with unilaterally; hence the growth of intergovernmental agencies and multilateralism. The United States was instrumental in the creation of the UN. Without it there would have been no UN. As the most powerful military and economic power, the United States affects and is affected by developments within each UN entity. It follows that U.S.-UN relations are important in the overall scheme of U.S. foreign policy.

Over the course of the last six decades, a "love-hate" relationship developed between the United States and the UN. From the outset of the UN, the United States has been the dominant if not the dominating force in the system. At times it seemed that the United States exhibited a proprietary claim on the organization. This is not surprising since, as noted, the United States was instrumental in creating the UN. The American vision of the world is reflected in the major ideas and principles in the UN Charter symbolically evidenced by the similarities between the Preamble to the UN Charter and the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. In connection with the issuance of The National Security Interests of the United States of America in September 2002, President George W. Bush's declared: "Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. . . . The United States is committed to lasting institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Organization of American States, and NATO as well as other long-standing alliances."

As the most important member of the UN, the United States had been the dominant force in the system. This has led to resentment of the United States in many quarters of the UN system and to resentment of the UN among many interests in the United States that are reflected in Congress. The atmosphere at the United Nations is charged with anti-American rhetoric and with anti-UN rhetoric in the halls of Congress. This charged atmosphere is not only uncomfortable; it is also detrimental to the nation's interests, particularly to its world leadership position. The U.S. preemptive war in Iraq and more recently the controversy over UN reform issues such as the Human Rights Council and management of the Secretariat are cases in point. In both these instances, the United States has been unable to carry the majority of UN member-states in support of its position, which ironically was in support of reform proposals made, in the first instance, by Secretary General Kofi Annan. Resistance to these reforms came from strong elements within the developing world, which saw in them an erosion of their "entitlements," that is, seats on UN bodies, positions in the Secretariat, and the collective strength of their numerical superiority in the General Assembly. Relations between the United States and the United Nations have never been as strained as they are today. It has become a vexing issue in American foreign policy and a critical challenge to American world leadership.

A set of provocative questions emerge in thinking about U.S.-UN relations. They include the following:

How do U.S.-UN relations fit into the basic mission of the U.S. government to provide for the security of its people? Is there a UN factor in the U.S.'s security equation? What benefits accrue to the United States from its participation in the array of multilateral operations subsumed within the UN system? How should the United States deal with the resentment toward it that exists within the UN system? Can the United States enhance its foreign policy interests without the UN? Can the UN system provide support for U.S. foreign policy? How? These questions and many others provide the context within which the following essays have been prepared by leading practitioners and scholars to constitute a written symposium on U.S.-UN relations.

No More Business as Usual
John R. Bolton

It is not often that one hears a secretary of state call for a "revolution." That is exactly what happened, though, at the 60th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2005. Secretary Rice called for "launching a lasting revolution of reform" for good reason: Without significant and meaningful reforms, the United Nations will be unable to fulfill the multitude of important goals outlined in its charter, whether in promoting international peace and security or helping to alleviate humanitarian crises around the globe.

The term "reform" at the UN can mean many things to different member states. The United States has made clear, though, that our top priority is management reform. Streamlining the structures that govern the myriad of important agencies and programs within the UN system will have ripple effects through the whole system. One need look no further than the Oil-for-Food scandal to see what happens when issues such as the transparency, accountability, and independent oversight of UN operations are ignored.

The magnitude of the Oil-for-Food scandal reflects how daunting a task we face. According to the Independent Inquiry Commission, chaired by Paul Volcker and set up to investigate the scandal, Saddam Hussein's regime diverted some $1.8 billion in illicit kickbacks and surcharges. More than 2,000 companies were involved in these illicit payments. The report recently released by the General Accounting Office notes that Saddam Hussein's regime might have obtained up to $12.8 billion in illicit revenue in the process. This money went directly into the coffers of one of the most oppressive dictatorships this world has ever known.

Chairman Volcker best described the fundamental reason why a scandal like Oil for Food was allowed to grow into the multiheaded hydra it became during a congressional hearing in October 2005. When asked if there was a "culture of corruption" at the United Nations, Chairman Volcker replied that it was less a "culture of corruption" than a "culture of inaction" that enabled the scandal. It is an apt expression and salient to this day for the following reason: It is not clear that the necessary steps have been taken by the UN to put in place procedures that would prevent another scandal like Oil for Food from taking place again.

The United States is trying to break through this logjam at the UN through a variety of means. It is critical that we do so. Reformation of the management structures within the UN is no guarantee that effective policies will be adopted, but lack of reform will almost certainly doom prudent policies to failure. It is also important to do so because policy failure has very tangible, even tragic consequences in the real world and on the lives of real men, women, and children. In addition to creating an environment that fosters waste and corruption, the lack of effective management structures means that critical services or supplies are not delivered. This means that vulnerable populations might not receive the humanitarian assistance they need. It can also mean that there are delays in providing the necessary equipment, materials, or support services to peacekeeping missions, with the result that such missions cannot fulfill their mandates effectively. When we are discussing management reform, we are ultimately talking about people's lives.

The United States has joined with others to launch an ambitious agenda of reform--reforms we think are vital to putting the United Nations back on track and fulfilling the goals outlined by President Bush during his address before the General Assembly last September where he noted, "meaningful institutional reforms must include measures to improve internal oversight, identify cost savings, and ensure that precious resources are used for their intended purpose."

Already, though, we can see sharp divisions emerging and clear battle lines being drawn. Some member states have made it clear they have no interest in reforming the UN. It is not the case that the initiatives for reform have stalled. It would be one thing if we had encountered indifference or a blasé attitude on the part of some member states. This is not the case. What we have encountered is outright intransigence and a large bloc of member states that are making it clear that they are prepared to fight tooth and nail to block the reform agenda we and many others believe is so important.

On one side, there is a group of 50 or so nations whose combined contributions total more than 85 percent of the UN budget. They are pushing an ambitious reform agenda. These nations, of which the United States is part, strongly support many of the elements the secretary general is pushing to reform the managerial structures and processes within the UN. Unfortunately, the G-77 is resisting efforts by the Secretariat to reform and streamline these managerial structures and practices. In March 2006 the secretary general produced a remarkable report that offered a remarkably frank assessment of the situation we face today. His assessment was as follows:

To be sure, we do not agree with every single reform proposed by the secretary general, but we certainly agree with his diagnosis of the problem. We are prepared to engage seriously with both the Secretariat and other member states to pass a number of ambitious reforms that we think would help revitalize the United Nations. Unfortunately, we have encountered not indifference or a lackadaisical attitude toward these reforms by the G-77. We have encountered outright resistance and hostility to any reform effort at all. Recently the Fifth Committee voted against measures that would have increased the ability of the Secretariat to implement a number of significant reforms. Many member states have pet projects that they will defend--projects that are wasteful and serve little to no purpose.

We are also working to establish a thorough process to review all UN mandates originally adopted more than five years ago. Unfortunately, on this issue as well, we are encountering opposition from the G-77 that is arguing that its review excludes mandates that have been renewed by the General Assembly within the last five years. The G-77 position if adopted would exclude from the review some 75 percent of active mandates and hamper our ability to eliminate significant waste and overlap within the UN system. To date these countries have made clear not only that they are uninterested in reform but that they will actively oppose it and do everything they can to block it.

The United States has identified a number of mandates that are appropriate for early action and is working with other member states to achieve some early results in the review. Implementing an established and routine process to review program mandates is critical because--and what I say is not an exaggeration--there is no systemized process in place to review mandates that might be obsolete or ineffective, nor has there been one at all in the 60-year existence of the UN. We hope to establish an ongoing process that will enable us to review program mandates not just now but in the future as well. Reform of the UN should be done on a continuing basis, not just in an ad hoc fashion.

Although we applaud the recent implementation of whistle-blower protection within the UN system, as well as the creation of an ethics office, we remain deeply concerned that other broader reforms are also being blocked. One chief concern is the independence and autonomy of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, or OIOS. OIOS is the inspector general of the UN, the body charged within the UN system to provide internal auditing, investigation, and evaluation of all activities under the authority of the secretary general. Any investigative body must not be beholden to those that it is responsible for investigating.

A number of studies, including one conducted by our own Government Accountability Office and released in a report issued recently, as well as our own experience, give us pause for concern about the ability of OIOS to operate independently and autonomously. There are concerns that the OIOS is funded by those it may be required to investigate, which can obviously create a conflict of interest. Moreover, there have been reports that the Secretariat was pressuring OIOS investigators to take into account political considerations when conducting investigations. This is categorically unacceptable. OIOS should never be pressured by those who fund it to change its conduct or alter its findings. We also encourage OIOS to continue making public any and all findings and conclusions it reaches whenever requested, a requirement the United States succeeded in getting approved in the UN General Assembly. This can serve as a valuable tool for member states to take action or push through reforms that are sorely needed. We will push hard for the creation this year of an Independent Audit Advisory Committee to validate the quality of OIOS's work and recommend levels of funding and personnel independent of the UN bureaucracy's audits of OIOS.

Although the picture painted above may be bleak, the United States is pushing ahead on these reforms with an unprecedented seriousness of purpose, one might even say revolutionary zeal. Not to do so would be to invite failure of the world's most important international institution and to do a grave disservice to the people the United Nations was established to protect in the first place.

Who Needs the United Nations? We All Do.
Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

Sixty years ago 50 countries came together to found the United Nations and charge it to work toward momentous goals: a world free from war and a world in which the basic rights of citizens in all countries would be respected. In its first six decades, the UN has helped to advance freedom and human rights around the world. It also has made a dramatic difference in millions of lives, providing shelter, basic education, and critical health care to people who would otherwise have gone without.

At the same time, some question what role, if any, the UN should play in addressing the major challenges of the 21st century. In recent years, both internal and independent investigations have brought to light mismanagement and corruption in the UN, fueling the widely held belief that the UN's organizational structure needs to be more transparent, accountable, and efficient. In view of these concerns, it is both timely and appropriate to reflect on our relationship with the United Nations. What does the United States gain from being a member? How does the UN further U.S. foreign policy interests? In short, are we better off with the UN or without it?

Although the broad goals of the UN remain the same as they were in 1945, global threats are dramatically different: terrorism, ethnic and sectarian tensions, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the spread of infectious diseases like HIV-AIDS, and environmental degradation. Not one of these threats has any respect for borders. Not one can be fully met without international cooperation and coordination. By harnessing the resources and collective expertise of its 191 member states, the United Nations is equipped to address global challenges that concern us all and that no single nation, even the United States, can or should handle on its own.

I believe America faces two overriding and connected national security challenges: We must win the struggle between freedom and radical fundamentalism, and we must keep the world's most dangerous weapons away from its most dangerous people. To be sure, other profoundly important developments like the emergence of China, India, and Russia; the shortage of reliable sources of energy; and the growing impact of climate change will shape this century. And Iraq, where I've visited six times, remains a top American priority.

But the most urgent and lethal threat we face is the potential combination of radical fundamentalism and weapons of mass destruction. To prevail we must be strong. But we also must be smart, wielding the power of our ideas and ideals together with the force of our arms and leveraging the power and influence of others.

To succeed we cannot work in isolation. We need effective alliances and international organizations. Far from limiting America's power, they can help us maximize it. Our main enemy is a metastasizing network of terror that could tap into a spreading supply of dangerous weapons. The most powerful military in the world cannot invade, kill, or capture a network or destroy every loose weapon on the planet. The best response to this network of terror is to build a network of our own--a network of like-minded countries and organizations that pools resources, information, ideas, and power. Taking on the radical fundamentalists alone isn't necessary, isn't smart, and won't succeed.

The United Nations is a critical part of this strategy. It can help set the rules of the road for the 21st century. It can establish norms for the conduct of nations, as it has through multilateral treaties and in several Security Council resolutions requiring states to take specific actions to combat terrorism. In a very practical way, through its Counter-terrorism Committee, it can help monitor states' cooperation on antiterrorism measures, provide technical assistance, and coordinate international responses.

Building up organizations like the UN is not enough. They have to be effective. As we live by the rules, we must also enforce them. Enforcing the rules that Saddam Hussein systematically violated could have been the basis for taking a common approach to Iraq with the UN and our allies. It was not, and both the United States and the UN are worse off for that failure. It can still be the basis for a common approach to Iran.

As we work to make the UN-and especially the Security Council-more effective in dealing with hard security issues, we should not lose sight of the dramatic difference it is making on humanitarian challenges day in and day out around the world. It's easy to take this work for granted-unless one is one of the millions of beneficiaries. For example, the UN continues to lead relief efforts in the wake of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, constructing 100,000 new homes, with tens of thousands more to come, and 550 new, permanent schools. Through UNAIDS, the organization coordinates a comprehensive global response to the fight against HIV/AIDS, providing antiretroviral treatment to 1.3 million people globally and working to halt and reverse the epidemic by 2015. The UN Development Program leads democratic governance projects in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Haiti and more than 150 countries worldwide. It was instrumental in organizing two elections and a constitutional referendum in Iraq.

These numbers are impressive, but they don't adequately convey the power of real lives touched and destinies changed. In May 2005 I visited a refugee camp along the Chad-Sudan border, where the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is providing food, shelter, and education services for nearly 25,000 refugees. The agency's small aid staff works tirelessly to serve this large population, and I witnessed extraordinary dedication and professionalism. I heard first hand from dozens of mothers and children how the UN effort was, literally, saving their lives.

For 60 years UN peacekeeping operations have been essential to stabilizing war-stricken regions. Currently 19 peacekeeping missions implement mandates from the UN Security Council involving more than 70,000 troops and civilian police from 108 nations--all coordinated by a small staff of 650 in New York. The UN "blue helmets" are literally on the front lines, protecting civilians, monitoring cease-fires, clearing mine fields, and disarming combatants. In most cases, the United States has an important foreign policy interest of its own. UN forces thereby represent a bargain-saving us from deploying our own forces and allowing us to share the cost of their presence with others.

Haiti is a case in point. We have frequently sent troops there to promote stability. A recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that if the United States were conducting a peacekeeping mission in Haiti, the cost would be $876 million-- twice as much as MINUSTAH, the current UN operation. The U.S. share of the UN mission is $115 million, and we contribute about 50 civilian police to the 9,000-person multinational force in Haiti.

Finally, the United Nations works close to home. We owe the UN our profound gratitude for the assistance it provided to victims of Hurricane Katrina on our Gulf Coast in 2005. Within days of the disaster, the United Nations launched a campaign to coordinate relief assistance with federal efforts, distributing life-saving supplies, supporting the Centers for Disease Control's surveillance work, registering evacuees, and tracking missing children. Also, the World Health Organization, part of the UN family, is a critical part of the administration's plan to prevent an avian flu pandemic. It is described as the "linchpin of international preparedness and response activities" and has been designated to lead global coordinating efforts.

For all its work, the United Nations is far from perfect. It needs reform. The good news is there is now real consensus-and momentum-in the UN for organizational and structural change. But the devil is in the details, which continue to be negotiated in New York.

Earlier this year the UN created an improved Human Rights Council to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission. The new Council will still include some members with little credibility on human rights, but many of the world's worst rights abusers were kept off the Council or pressured not to seek a seat. A Peacebuilding Commission has been established to strengthen the UN's ability to prevent postconflict countries from relapsing into violence. Structurally the UN Secretariat has created sound financial disclosure policies, a top-notch whistle-blower policy, and an independent Ethics Office. It is undertaking a review of thousands of outdated and duplicative programs to make the UN more efficient.

As the United Nations moves into the next chapter of its history, the momentum for substantial reform must continue. The future effectiveness of the United Nations lies in the balance, and I have every expectation that member states can and will deliver-but it won't happen without strong, diplomatic leadership by the United States.

In their 2005 task force report on UN reform, former House Speaker Gingrich and former Senate Majority Leader Mitchell summed up their recommendations by arguing that an effective United Nations is in the best interest of the United States. Maybe the best way to understand its profound value and ongoing relevance is to pose the "It's a Wonderful Life" test: If the UN didn't exist, what would have become of the people and countries whose lives it has touched?

Article One of the United Nations Charter states that the purposes of the organization are to maintain international peace and security; address international social, economic, and cultural problems; and promote fundamental human rights and freedoms. Today although tremendous progress has been made, we still need the UN, perhaps more than ever, to realize the vision of its founders.

The Survivors: The United States and the United Nations in Troubled Times
Edward C. Luck

For more than 60 years relations between the United States and the United Nations have ebbed and flowed. More often than not, periods of high expectations-on both sides-have been followed by longer periods of decline. Doubt, mistrust, and even mutual recrimination have had a way of displacing harmony and mutual confidence over time. Certainly there have been good times such as after the first Gulf War in 1991 and the appointment of Kofi Annan as secretary general in late 1996. But these have proved to be relatively brief and unsustainable.

Today relations between Washington and Turtle Bay are once again at a low ebb. In the latest Gallup Poll, two-thirds of the American respondents-64 to 30-rated UN performance as poor. For more than half a century, Gallup has been posing this question, and this is the most negative response yet. The voting coincidence between the United States and the majority in the General Assembly rose in the early postcold-war years but has fallen steadily since 1995. Once seen as a Teflon secretary general whose charisma kept him out of the line of political fire, Kofi Annan's favorable marks have slipped dramatically in polls since the war in Iraq and the Oil-for-Food scandal. The persistence of violence in Darfur, of the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons capability, and of terrorist threats has reminded Americans of the limitations of the UN's capacities for addressing urgent challenges to international peace and security. Finally, for all of the grand talk of radical UN reform, the results of the latest round have been decidedly modest.

Meanwhile the recent conduct of U.S. foreign policy would undoubtedly receive even lower marks if a candid survey could be undertaken among diplomats from other UN member states and from the UN Secretariat. In contrast, in the months immediately following the terrorist attacks on the United States of 9/11/01, both sympathy in other countries for the United States and U.S. public support for the UN soared, according to a number of surveys. Subsequently, however, the Manichean and unilateralist rhetoric of the Bush administration's version of the war on terrorism, the human rights abuses associated with it, and the unpopular and thus far unsuccessful war in Iraq have all contributed to a dramatic reversal of fortune. According to multinational polls by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, among others, the bottom has fallen out of public sympathy in other parts of the world for the current conduct of U.S. foreign policy. As so often happened in the past, a number of spoilers among the disparate ranks of UN member states have been all too ready to fan both anti-American sentiment and fears of U.S. dominance of the world body.

Although these patterns of mutual ambivalence have always tempered the prospects for any dramatic improvement in U.S.-UN relations, the current crisis atmosphere is particularly worrisome because it is so amorphous and unfocused. There are no longer any great ideological struggles to divide the member states. That war was won with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet empire. The United States got its handpicked secretary general in Kofi Annan to succeed Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who had been demonized in Washington as a particularly unpleasant thorn in its side. Although Kofi Annan's current reform effort can be singled out for being ill timed and ill conceived and suffering from a terminal case of grandiosity, over the years the United States has achieved many of the UN management and budgetary reforms it had demanded.

On the other side of this equation, although the Bush administration would never be accused of being a refuge for the poster children of multilateralism, it has worked quietly to defer congressional initiatives to mandate further debilitating financial withholdings from the UN. The administration, moreover, has refuted the president's occasional comments about the UN's fading relevance by returning, again and again, to the world body to get a substantial portion of its foreign policy work done. Many of Washington's current crop of policymakers had little use for the UN when they were on the outside, caricaturing the "assertive multilateralism" proclaimed-for a while-by the Clinton administration. Now that they are responsible for the conception and the implementation of American foreign policy, on the other hand, their appreciation of the utility of the UN system to help get things done appears to have grown appreciably. It is one thing to preach foreign policy, and quite another to carry it out.

Where does this leave us at this juncture, and where do we go from here? Paradoxically, while UN secretaries general have a way of running into trouble in their second terms, U.S. relations with the UN tend to mature and stabilize in an administration's second term. This arguably was the case for the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, who otherwise had rather little in common. Americans whether from the left or the right of the political spectrum tend to have a lot of fantasies and ideologically charged misconceptions about the world body, either badly overestimating or underestimating its capacities. Evidently it takes time and a reality check or two through practical experience to shed such notions.

In that regard it may be that the stars are coming into alignment with a new secretary general to be chosen later this year during the second term of a Republican president. There is a real possibility that a modest honeymoon period will follow. It is worth recalling in this context, however, that Boutros-Ghali, though hardly Washington's first choice, was appointed when President Bush's father was in office. In that case the honeymoon period was remarkably brief, though it extended through the president's last year in office. This time if someone more to Washington's liking is chosen, then the Bush administration may be inclined to facilitate a stronger relationship between Republican legislators on Capitol Hill and the new secretary general. It might give the secretary general the benefit of the doubt at least for a year or two as well.

Any serious candidate for the secretary generalship, on the other hand, ought to be giving close study to why Washington soured on the last two secretaries general. John Bolton's recent comment at Columbia University that the UN now needs more of a "proletarian" secretary general is suggestive. By this intriguing choice of words he meant to convey a strong preference for someone who would focus more energy on carrying out the Charter-given function of chief administrative officer than on the self-appointed roles of global spokesperson for dozens of causes and norm entrepreneur extraordinaire. Fair enough, after the most energetic and ambitious period of international norm and institution building in history, an era of consolidation and implementation should logically follow. Among the Millennium Declaration, the Millennium Development Goals, and the Outcome Document from last September's summit, there is no shortage of unfulfilled pledges and commitments. On the normative side, there is unfinished business on a comprehensive convention on terrorism and on the deteriorating nonproliferation regime, both key to U.S. security interests, and on global warming, something the Bush administration has unwisely resisted. On the whole, however, a new secretary general would do well not to follow the path of his or her two most recent predecessors, who were known in some Washington circles for never having met a norm they did not like.

There is some good news in all of the bad news about U.S.-UN relations. Things are so bad that they are bound to get better. Neither side can afford to let the downward spiral get out of control, for in the final analysis, each needs the other. As much as other member states are wary of U.S. dominance of the UN, they fear U.S. abandonment of the collective enterprise even more. They know that a UN without the United States would lack legitimacy, as well as credibility and capacity. For most American policymakers, an appreciation of the UN comes through lessons learned on the job by trial and error, not through prior inclination or training. It is, at best, a product of experience. For UN officials, not to mention diplomats from smaller, weaker, or less affluent countries, it is uncomfortable to have to deal with one hegemonic superpower in the midst of a political structure designed for multilateral decision making. The asymmetries can be baffling for all concerned. For U.S. policymakers, trying to do business in the exotic chaos of a 191-member UN is frustrating at best, debilitating at worst. This marriage was not made in heaven.

Why, then, do U.S. policymakers keep coming back to the UN? In 2006, as in 1945, the answer lies both in strategic realities and in domestic politics. Even superpowers need partners. For all the talk of primacy these days, it is worth recalling that the U.S. share of the global economy was far larger in 1945 than today. The United States dominated the seas and the air and had at least a temporary monopoly of atomic weapons. But World War II and the fateful events that led up to it had demonstrated the strategic value of alliances and of collective action to deter, prevent, and, if necessary, defeat aggression. The United States could not do it alone then, anymore than it could today win the struggle against terrorism, curb the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, resolve regional disputes, or secure respect for human rights and democratic values through unilateral action alone. There never was a choice between a strong national defense and a robust commitment to building international law and organization. America needs both if its values, economy, and security are to prosper in an otherwise unpredictable, competitive, and sometimes hostile international environment.

Over time U.S. foreign and security policy cannot succeed without solid and sustained public support. It would be wrong to mistake public criticism of UN performance for a willingness to give up on the collective enterprise and to leave its stewardship to others. Though the Gallup Poll mentioned at the outset showed unprecedented levels of disappointment in how the UN is carrying out its responsibilities, it also found that the public strongly preferred the UN to play a major role in world affairs. Few would have the United States give up its seat in the world body, many polls have confirmed. Historically the American people have been relatively skeptical of governmental bodies, particularly of those at the federal and intergovernmental levels that appear inaccessible and unaccountable. At the same time, they are prone to fixing institutions rather than abandoning them. Year after year, poll after poll, the public shows a strong preference for multilateral over unilateral action, particularly when it comes to the use of military force. It is reassuring to have others at your side, and unsettling to have to act alone.

President Bush was right when he said that no U.S. President requires a permission slip from the UN to defend American security. But his tortured efforts to try to obtain a Security Council authorization for the intervention in Iraq testified eloquently to his understanding that the action would have gained wider support at home and internationally if it had had a Council mandate. He has recognized as well that efforts to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran and North Korea would be bolstered by united Security Council action, whether political, economic, or military. UN peacekeeping and nation-building operations around the world have grown to unprecedented levels since George W. Bush became president.

It is clear that the United States is not about to end this relationship. Though too often a marriage of inconvenience, one that tries to bind the ultimate odd couple, in the end it seems to work. Both partners get enough out of it to keep it going, despite the frustrations. The U.S.-UN relationship, like the UN itself, has, if nothing else, has proved to be a survivor.

The Rule of Law, the United States, and the United Nations: An Ambiguous Record
Lawrence S. Finkelstein

For a country that takes pride in its belief in the rule of law, the United States surprisingly did not emphasize law as a pillar of the UN system that it had so great a role in designing.1 Shortly after the San Francisco conference, President Harry Truman reflected the axiomatic American belief in the rule of law. In urging speedy ratification of the Charter, he said, "If there is to be peace, countries must live under law just as our states and individuals do." 2 A few days later, he wrote " . . . the UN Charter is a statement of the laws all governments must obey and enforce, including the United States."

The Charter does contain important rules that members obligate themselves to carry out. It does not, however, sanctify the rule of law, or worldwide obedience to international law, as an overriding UN purpose. President Truman had it backward. By design, the United States unmistakably gave priority to "international peace and security." It did not postulate adherence to international law as necessary for peace and security. The United States took the lead in guiding the Charter in the opposite direction. Peace and security were prerequisite to the rule of law.

Moreover, the United States was far from comfortable with the thought that the United Nations should be a source of new laws for the United States to obey. At San Francisco it sought to limit UN jurisdiction over or influence on the domestic affairs of the United States. The United States favored what became the "domestic jurisdiction" clause.3 At San Francisco it succeeded in deleting as too narrow the words international law as the criterion for deciding when matters fell within the domestic jurisdiction of a member. There was an active concern that the Senate's advice and consent to ratification of the Charter could be jeopardized should it empower intrusion into sensitive domestic issues. One such issue was "the race problem."

Another example was the intense U.S. effort to block reference to "full employment" among the goals to be promoted in what became Article 55 because a proposed full employment bill was being heatedly contested in Congress and the country at that time. The United States lost on that issue.

It also rejected the compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court and successfully insisted on the "optional" alternative. When it actually exercised that option to accept compulsory jurisdiction in 1946, it virtually nullified the positive initiative by attaching conditions, one of which, the famous "Connally Amendment,"4 reserved the right to determine itself whether matters essentially fell within its domestic jurisdiction. 5

The United States, without doubt, had a very positive influence on the UN's inclination toward the rule of law. President Truman's remarks above identified the Charter not only as an important legal instrument but also as a source of law. It is the former because it is a treaty of vast reach, vital substance, and virtually universal membership. When ratified, it became binding on all members. It is a source of law because, among other reasons, it establishes the International Court of Justice as the principal judicial organ of the United Nations and incorporates its statute as part of the Charter. Also, in Article 55, it opens up a vast new arena for international rule making about economic, social, and other humanitarian issues.

The San Francisco Conference did not achieve President Truman's vision of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Parliament of man, the Federation of the world" or the "kindly earth . . . lapped in universal law."7 What emerged instead from a mix of Wilsonian idealism, realist understanding, and a strong dash of pragmatism was a system dependent on international cooperation of the member states to manage power in the interest of peace and security.

In 1945 the U.S. view of the role of law was ambiguous. In subsequent years this ambiguity has persisted as officials avoided, sometimes flouted, limitations on their freedom of action to pursue what they believed to be the country's national interest. In numerous instances this has set the stage for confrontation between the United States and the United Nations.

The Charter requires members to share the costs of the organization as they are apportioned by the General Assembly.8 The United States advocated that rule. The Charter is a constitutionally ratified treaty. Legal scholars and legal officers of the government have said that the obligation to pay is binding. Yet for decades the United States has been withholding portions of what it owed, at first amounts targeted at expenditures of which it disapproved. Increasingly the threat to withhold and actual withholding have been employed as bargaining levers of Congress to force reforms the United States sought or to preempt actions it opposed.9 The arrearages became quite substantial and imposed severe cash-flow difficulties on the organization.

Most recently there has been the flare-up over UN reform. Reform is certainly necessary.

The U.S. agenda is a good one, and the achievements thus far are welcome but insufficient. The United States is right, that is, analytically sound and prophetically shrewd, in making it known that how the United States relates to the UN henceforth depends on progress made in achieving reform. The problem is not the goals. It is the strategy as well as the tactics of the United States in pursuing them.

The need for reform and the difficulty of achieving it flow from the same source. The UN consists of 191 member states, all acknowledged as sovereign. They are a large part of the explanation for the UN's sluggishness and inefficiency. They have equal voting rights in the decision body, the General Assembly. A majority, the 132 developing countries, tend to resist reform measures they fear will be disadvantageous to their interests and a chipping away of the many prerogatives their members have accrued over the years in Secretariat positions and committee assignments. In changing times, when the United States is suffering from loss of respect in the world and economic balances are shifting, this group seems to have concluded that its members cannot be bullied into compliance with the wishes of the United States. If they are correct, the alternative is to reassure them and bargain with them.

It remains to be seen whether the current abrasive U.S. tactics will overcome this resistance. As this is written, the United States has blocked adoption of all but a small portion of the 2006-2007 UN budget and threatens to block authorization of the large withheld portion until adequate reform measures are adopted before a deadline it sets. The only authority to do that derives from the U.S. threat to withhold its payment of dues. That is blackmail. Withholding payment as threatened would be a violation of the Charter and an overt flouting of the international rule of law. Threatening to do so is probably a violation but certainly is incompatible with the spirit of the legal obligation and of the commitment that members make to fulfill their Charter obligations. 10

It can be argued that the U.S. hard-nosed tactics in the UN reform arena have been counterproductive. A potentially better reform deal might have been available had the United States not blasted what had been achieved before the summit and the 60th General Assembly took up the issues. Ambassador Bolton wrought havoc when he repudiated the Millennial Development Goals (MDGs), support for which might have been a U.S. component of a "big deal." Could the bloc of developing countries have been induced to swallow reform measures that have been sticking in their throats since then? It is not as though the goals themselves are bad for this country. The United States signed on in 2000. Not even President Bush's later repudiation of his ambassador's position by recommitting to the MDG in his General Assembly address has reversed the adverse tide.

There is an underlying issue about the standing of a treaty obligation in the U.S. constitutional system. Article 6 of the Constitution establishes that a treaty is the supreme law of the land alongside the Constitution itself and laws adopted by Congress. Since paying the UN bill requires a congressional appropriation, this treaty obligation is labeled "nonself-fulfilling," as are other treaty provisions. Therefore, the United States is not obligated to pay unless Congress acts. Some authorities argue that even so, the international obligation remains valid.11 The dilemma is apparent. Congress should enable the country to fulfill its obligations in international agreements that have been constitutionally undertaken. Sooner rather than later, a way should be found to remove this obstruction to reasonable relations with the rest of the world.

Disapproval of international legal obligations for this country goes beyond the doctrine of nonself-fulfillment. Ambassador Bolton and the late Senator Jesse Helms said that treaties do not create legal obligations at all, only moral or political ones. This approach challenges the fundamental and common sense principle of international order that agreements entered into have to be carried out (pacta sunt servanda) and also weakens the pursuit of American interests abroad because negotiating partners cannot be certain that the United States will fulfill the obligations it ostensibly undertakes.

The Charter's provisions concerning international peace and security directly impose serious obligations on members. Perhaps the most important clause is Article 2, paragraph 4 that requires members to "refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. . . ." There are two exceptions to that prohibition. One is a Security Council decision to employ or authorize the use of force under its powers of compulsion in Chapter VII. The second is the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense in the event of an armed attack on a UN member, as acknowledged in Article 51.

Twice the United States took the initiative in obtaining Security Council authorization to employ force and then organized and led the coalitions of national units that responded to the need identified by the Security Council. The aggression by North Korea against South Korea in 1950 was repelled. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1989 was overturned.

The United States also was supportive both in the formulation of the concept of peacekeeping and in the Security Council authorization and conduct of UN peacekeeping operations beginning with Suez in 1957. In most instances U.S. logistical and other support is indispensable. Because peacekeeping operations are idiosyncratic-no two are identical--each one is determined on an ad hoc basis and confronts American policymakers with difficult decisions. Thus the United States managed to steer a very difficult course in support of the UN mission in the Congo, 1960-1964, despite complex issues both with NATO allies and the Soviet Union, as well as abrasive political contention at home.

When the desperate travails of thousands of Somalis reached into Western homes via television in 1992, a humanitarian dimension stretched the Security Council's peace and security mandate to encompass large-scale, life-threatening domestic disasters amid civil disorder. The linked, parallel UN- and U.S.-led military missions were resoundingly unsuccessful. The grisly killings of U.S. Army Rangers induced the United States to evacuate the country at full speed. Even though this debacle served for some years as a powerful impediment to further UN interventions, the UN's concept of peace and security would never be the same.

In the Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina cases, American leaders, rendered gun-shy by memories of Vietnam and Somalia and sensing no direct U.S. interests at stake, allowed genocidal slaughter to reap ghastly harvests. In Bosnia, NATO, employing U.S. warplanes, brought an end to the violent ethnic cleansing. The use of force without UN Security Council authorization was called illegal (for that reason) but legitimate because there was no other way to end the fierce ethnic violence. In Rwanda, no UN members wanted to stand up to the real need for major UN intervention. In the case of Darfur, the slaughter--President Bush called it genocide---was the main reason to intervene. The United States played a critical role, backing up the UN and other interveners in the endgame negotiation that resulted in an uneasy and precarious agreement for a cessation of fighting and negotiations toward a lasting solution.

The Darfur situation erupted just as a new concept of the UN's mandate was taking hold. "The responsibility to protect" mandates external intervention when the responsible government does not protect its people against major domestic disaster. With the United States helping to push this idea as part of the UN reform package, it was approved by the summit meeting of world leaders in September 2005 and adopted by the 60th General Assembly. The item is headed "Responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity." It spells out the dual mandate: for every state to protect its citizens and for the international community to intervene through the United Nations when national authorities are manifestly failing to provide such protection.

When the Security Council decides that there exists a threat to the peace, a breech of the peace, or an act of aggression, it acquires very wide compulsory authority to deal with the problem.12 The United States played a helpful role in innovatively interpreting that compulsory authority of the Security Council's as enabling it to create tribunals with case-specific mandates to deal with individual cases against perpetrators of serious crimes against humanity. The United States went along with the initiatives to create such tribunals for Rwanda and the formerYugoslavia and has cooperated with them since.

The United States also participated in the planning to create the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC is very different from the other two. Its authority does not depend on the Security Council. It was created by an international treaty. It has authority to deal with cases from any member country. It is a permanent institution. Because of what many believe excessive concern that the ICC might be employed against U.S. military personnel, the United States has turned against it. It has refused to join the 100 members. In the case of the ICC, the United States has engaged in a worldwide campaign to obtain assurances from other states that they would oppose decisions to act against Americans. One critic describes the United States as waging "a holy war" against the ICC.13 U.S. hostility to the ICC does not reconcile with its presumed interest in the development of a system of justice to build deterrence against mass destructive violations of human rights.

The United States has demonstrated its contempt for the rule prohibiting the use of force against another state (Article 2/4 of the Charter) by undertaking a string of forceful unilateral interventions--Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama. None of them involved the sort of threat that justified the claim of self-defense.

The Nicaragua case stands out as an especially livid example of this U.S. predilection for force. The fact that the U.S. government disapproved of the Nicaraguan government did not justify the attempt to overturn it by inspiring and supporting the Contra invasion. Article 2/4 clearly outlaws the use of force to achieve regime change. When the United States lost its plea that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) did not have jurisdiction to try the case entered by Nicaragua, it withdrew from the case and did not contest the Nicaraguan claims on the merits. The Court, unable for technical reasons of law to address the charge that the United States had violated Article 2/4, found that the rule had become customary international law and that the United States had violated that.

One consequence of the Nicaragua case was that the United States withdrew its optional acceptance of the Court's compulsory jurisdiction. In its appeal on jurisdiction, it argued that it could not be sued before the Court because its original acceptance was subject to the Connally Amendment condition that the ICJ's jurisdiction could not extend to the domestic affairs of the United States as it itself determined them. Since a rule of reciprocity applied, Nicaragua could claim the same exemption to block the Court's jurisdiction. The Court rejected that argument. The United States also attempted, just days before the trial, to register another qualification with the UN Registrar of treaties, this one to exclude any cases with Latin American or Caribbean countries. That request was rejected.14 Many legal authorities believe that the Nicaragua case turned the United States against submitting to international legal proceedings and toward other means of resolving disputes such as arbitration.

After 9/11 the United States invaded Afghanistan in legitimate self-defense endorsed by the Security Council. However, without having such authority to make war against Iraq, the United States did so in the company of a group comprising a coalition of the willing. As the pitfalls became more apparent and the way out more elusive, the United States found itself relying on UN assistance to organize elections and to help install a democratically elected government. As this is written, the outlook remains uncertain. A new government has just been formed. The hopeful/anguished predictions that an Iraqi government in office will result in a more secure and peaceful country remain untested. So are the hopes that reconstruction, to be followed by prosperity, can proceed.

Important new treaties emerge with some frequency. Many are UN treaties in the sense that they originate there and are approved by the General Assembly for ratification by states that elect to do so. As a leading great power, the United States often participates in the drafting and approval procedures of UN and other treaties. It ratifies some but not many.

The United States is particularly resistant to human rights accords, most of which it shuns. It has not, for example, ratified the Convention on All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the proposed protocol to ban child soldiers; and the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The Covenant is an interesting case. It is the sibling of the UN Covenant on Political and Civil Rights, which the United States ratified. Both are binding treaty spin-offs of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with which the name of Eleanor Roosevelt is so closely associated and which the United States supported very strongly. Although it was specifically intended not to be a binding treaty, the Declaration is an authentic statement of relevant rules. In its 58 years, it has come to enjoy very wide respect and acceptance. It has been referred to as "arguably the single most important international instrument ever negotiated." 15

The United States has been developing an intense allergy to arms control treaties ranging from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty to the (Small) Arms Trade Treaty. Others include the Biological Weapons Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Start III Treaty, and the treaty to ban land mines.

Three U.S. nonratifications are especially well known: the Kyoto Protocol, the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Finally, the exclamation point: The United States has not ratified the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties!

America, Exceptional?

Rhetoric aside, the United States, on balance, has not been a consistent advocate of the rule of law since World War II. Although controversy attaches to the charges that the United States has often violated international rules prohibiting the use of force,that fact speaks for itself. It is evident that the United States has not attached great importance to the UN as a legal instrument or as a source of law applicable to itself. It may well be that as the Charter was shaped in its early stages, the Wilsonian inspiration lost out to the realist perception that power is the driving force in the international system. History lent considerable support to that assertion. FDR and Churchill saw the period from Versailles to World War II as proof that peace depended on sufficient power in its defense. The "Four Policemen" were the heart of the peace and security system they sought.

It is also evident that the United States has not differed from many other states in its persistent compulsion to protect itself against the perceived hazards of rules that might intrude on its freedom of action.

The United States appears to have grown more leery of international law as the decades passed. The cold war frightened Americans, and their leaders did little to assuage their concerns. President Eisenhower, to be sure, was an avuncular, calming figure. Even he, however, saw Castro's Cuba as threatening enough to warrant planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion, which, as it turned out, President Kennedy undertook. Consequently, freedom not to be bound by such petty restrictions as the "do not attack thy neighbor" rule seemed very important. President Truman observed in 1945 that: "We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength,that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please." 16

The 9/11 attacks, of course, scared the country. The citizenry was vulnerable to the snake oil packaged in the White House to disguise the strategies that, it seems more and more likely, the inner circle of the national leadership embraced when they assumed office. They've surely shown that they relish freedom from restraint, domestic and international.

There is good reason to regret that we seem unable to have a longer perspective about the place of law in the international system. We avidly pursue rules that we believe serve our interest in the short term. One scholar charges that the United States seeks to modify international law to accord with its interests by claiming a right of self-defense against terrorists and enunciating the doctrine of "preemptive self-defense." Power has its advantages. Coupled with "deliberate pursuit of normative change" it will stretch, even alter, "the limits of international law."17 The practice of states indeed can produce "customary law." Will we be happy with the legal environment we are creating?

We believe in the rule of law at home. The world now is as much a part of our environment as the 50 states are. The notion that we would benefit from a more orderly neighborhood should appeal to most Americans. Why do we not understand the long-term national interest in an orderly world ruled by law? The FDR-Churchill image of policemen patrolling their international beats and enforcing the rules is very appealing. Certainly we've had enough experience of policemen who believe they don't need rules.

The national belief in American exceptionalism leads us to claim exemptions from the rules we want others to comply with. The paradox is that we thereby end up being no better than others. It turns out that we are not exceptional at all. Harry Truman was right to believe that we should be.

Notes

1. The term "international law" appears only once in the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals and then as the determinant of whether or not an issue fell within the "domestic jurisdiction" of a state. In the San Francisco Conference, the United States found that term too confining and succeeded in having it removed from Article 2/7 in order to extend the zone of safeguarded "domestic jurisdiction." The Dumbarton Oaks Proposals can be found in Charter of the United Nations, Report to the President on the Results of the San Francisco Conference by the Chairman of the United States Delegation, the Secretary of State, June 26, 1945. Department of State Publication 2349, pp. 176233 (recto).

2. Stephen Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, Boulder, Colorado, 2003, 264.

3. Article 2/7. The UN was not to "intervene in matters . . . essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state. . . ."

5. That cautionary measure boomeranged when a U.S. case against Bulgaria before the International Court of Justice came to naught in 1960 because, under the rule of reciprocity, the Bulgarians claimed the same right. Even though the issue plainly did not involve Bulgaria's domestic jurisdiction, the ICJ ruled that Bulgaria could claim it did, thus aborting the American initiative. John F. Murphy, The United States and the Rule of Law in International Affairs (Cambridge, England, 2004), 253-55, 279.

6. It also authorized the Economic and Social Council to submit conventions to the General Assembly and to convene conferences within its areas of competence. See Charter, Article 62/3 and 62/4.

7. Schlesinger, op. cit., 5-6. Most of his life, Truman carried in a wallet Tennyson's dream of peace stanzas from Locksely Hall.

9. Edward C. Luck, Mixed Messages: American Politics and International Organization, 1919-1999, 1999, 238 ff.

11. The principle is of long standing. It originated in a Supreme Court decision of Chief Justice Marshall in 1829. For more on the problem of nonself-fulfilling treaties, see Murphy, op. cit., 76ff.

Right after March 2003 everyone was unhappy-the United Nations could not impede U.S. hegemony, and the UN could not approve requisite action against Saddam Hussein. Kofi Annan's solution was thus to ask 16 former senior government officials-the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change (HLP)-to describe what ailed the UN and propose a way forward. The blue-ribbon panel's December 2004 report, A More Secure World, contains a laundry list of recommendations-unkindly described as the "101 Dalmatians" for that number in a laundry list of proposals. In March 2005 the HLP's propositions were endorsed with certain minor modifications in Annan's own In Larger Freedom.

Once seen as a window of opportunity to revisit the United Nations in light of changes in world politics since 1945, the September 2005 World Summit negotiations exposed the same debilitating political and bureaucratic conflicts that regularly paralyze the organization and that the summit was supposed to address. Birthdays are often good moments to take stock. However, the results of the UN's 50th anniversary in 1995 should have led world leaders and observers to look askance on the prospects for any major overhaul of the UN in 2005, especially without American leadership. "A once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform and revive the United Nations has been squandered," said the lead editorial in The New York Times about the largest ever gathering of princes, presidents, and prime ministers.

Even members of the UN fan club had to admit that the overall results constituted considerably less than Annan's plea that "the UN must undergo the most sweeping overhaul in its 60-year history." The main results-depending on future developments, probably the two new institutions (the Peacebuilding Commission and Human Rights Council) along with an endorsement of the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) civilians in wars zones -pale in comparison with the needs. Kofi Annan struggled hard to see the bright side in arguing in The Wall Street Journal that "the glass is at least half full." I would argue that at least we have a glass.

Where does that leave U.S.-UN relations especially as regards the politics of high security and the use of force, the main reason the world organization was founded six decades ago? Conventional wisdom now holds that terrorism and 9/11 altered international relations. The crossroad was not born solely of terrorism, however; it is multisourced and of long gestation. It accentuates the implications of the postcold-war trend toward a UN system based on one superpower. The preponderance of the United States-militarily, economically, and culturally-is ever more striking. What kind of collective security organization is possible when Washington's gear, according to former European Union Commissioner of External Relations Chris Patten, is "unilateralist overdrive"?

UN member states have failed to integrate adequately the full implications of what former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine dubbed the hyper-puissance. Bipolarity has given way to what was supposed to be U.S. primacy, but the military prowess in Afghanistan and Iraq makes "primacy" an understatement. Scholars speculate about the nuances of economic and cultural leverage in the international system resulting from U.S. soft power, but the hard currency of international politics undoubtedly remains military might. Before the war on Iraq, the "hyperpower" was already spending more on its military than the next 15-25 countries (depending on who was counting); with additional appropriations for Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington now spends more than the rest of the world's militaries combined.

A good case can be made for the cost-effectiveness of UN peacekeeping-even in the record-breaking year for expenditures of 2005. The UN's $5 billion annual expenditure amounts to a month of U.S. expenditures in Iraq. But here the point is a political one, namely that Security Council efforts to control U.S. actions increasingly resemble the Roman Senate's attempts to control the emperor. UN diplomats almost unanimously describe the debate surrounding Iraq as "a referendum not on the means of disarming Iraq but on the American use of power."

Today there are two world "organizations," the United Nations (global in membership) and the United States (global in reach). Critics of U.S. hegemony argue that enforcement decisions should be based on UN authority instead of U.S. capacity. But the two are inseparable.

I have my doubts about the imminent approach of "the twilight of the unilateral world" -in any event, what Charles Krauthammer first identified in 1990 as the unilateral "moment" is likely to continue for some time. The stark reality of U.S. military hegemony in the contemporary international system puts a damper on humanitarian intervention or other international decisions to use force until Europeans invest more in an independent military capacity. To date neither populations nor parliaments on the Continent have demonstrated any willingness to contribute a fair share to the Western defense burden or to reconfigure their forces to make them useful for international deployments. Europe's continued free riding and failure to develop a truly independent capacity-indeed, its military capabilities continue to decline vis-à-vis those of the United States-constrain UN military expansion or humanitarian intervention.

Moreover, the downsizing of the U.S. armed forces over the last 15 years means an insufficient supply of equipment and manpower to meet the demands for UN peace operations. There are bottlenecks in the logistics chain-especially in airlift capacity-that make improbable a rapid international response to a fast-moving, Rwanda-like genocide. With half of the U.S. Army tied down in Iraq and a quarter of its reserves overseas, questions are being raised even about the capacity to respond to a serious national security threat or a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina let alone minor "distractions" like Haiti or major ones like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Mass starvation, rape, and suffering will reappear in the post-9/11 world, and we will know about them rapidly. For at least some conscience-shocking cases of mass suffering there simply will be no viable alternative to military coercion for human protection purposes. Modest deployments-the British in Sierra Leone in 2000, the French in Ituri in the summer of 2003, the December 2004 European Union (EU) takeover of NATO operation in Bosnia-suggest some flexibility for action in smaller crises.

The EU's A Secure Europe in a Better World lacks the crispness of its American counterpart-the National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Although spending on hardware falls considerably short of targets, the number of European troops deployed abroad has doubled over the last decade and approaches the so-called Headline Goals, which set EU targets in terms of military and civilian crisis management. As two Europeans have noted: "This incremental approach may move some way further yet, but it will come up against budgetary ceilings, against the unwillingness of some governments to invest in the weapon and support systems needed, and against the resistance of uninformed national publics."

There is little doubt, however, that American air-lift capacity, military muscle, and technology are required for deployments of larger and longer duration such as would be required in the Sudan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For better or worse, the United States in the Security Council is what Secretary of State Dean Rusk called the fat boy in the canoe: "When we roll, everyone rolls with us." With Washington's focus elsewhere, the danger is not too much but rather far too little UN security efforts where they are needed.

It is soothing, for example, to those of us who are preoccupied with positive normative developments to point proudly to paragraphs 138-139 about the R2P in the World Summit Outcome Document. On the one hand, that clearly is true. On the other hand, the summit did nothing to change the geopolitical reality that "never again" is inaccurate. "Here we go again" is more like it.

The actual impact of the two new institutions, the Peacebuilding Commission and the Human Rights Council, is unknown at this juncture. Washington's vote against the latter and its refusal to be a candidate hardly augur well-nor does the election of such human rights "stalwarts" as Algeria, China, Russia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba.

In more somber moments, I am afraid that the collective yawn since early 2003 in the face of slow-motion genocide in Darfur could be more destructive of the fabric of international law than the 800,000 deaths in Rwanda. At least in 1994 there was an attempt to maintain the fiction that no such horror was under way because using the G- word would have implied the necessity to act. "Darfur has shown that the energy spent fighting over whether to call the events there 'genocide' was misplaced," one analyst has written. "[It] is not a magic word that triggers intervention."

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide literally appears not to be worth the paper on which it is reproduced because this time the facts are not disputed. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lamented, "the publishing industry manages to respond more quickly to genocide than the UN and world leaders do." The U.S. Congress condemned Darfur unanimously, voting 422-0 in July 2004 that Khartoum was committing "genocide." Secretary of State Colin Powell actually used the dreaded term in a speech in September of that year. European Union parliamentarians urged Sudan to end actions that could be "construed as tantamount to genocide." Although the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur waffled somewhat, it concluded that "in some instances individuals, including Government officials, may commit acts with genocidal intent."

Military overstretch and giving priority to strategic concerns to the virtual exclusion of humanitarian ones is the sad reality of the post-9/11 world. But there is more possible bad news. Its repeated failure to come to the rescue mocks the value of the emerging norms and ultimately may further erode public support for the United Nations in spite of the 60th-anniversary celebrations.

Notes

i See High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (New York, 2004); and Kofi Annan, In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All, UN document A/59/2005, 21 March 2005.

ii See Thomas G. Weiss and Barbara Crossette, “The United Nations: Post-Summit Outlook, Great
Decisions 2006 (New York, 2006), 9-22. This essay draws on that analysis.

iv Kofi Annan, “In Larger Freedom: Decision Time at the UN,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 84, no. 3 (2005): 66.

v International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa,
2001); and Thomas G. Weiss and Don Hubert, The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, and
Background (Ottawa, 2001).

vi See Thomas G. Weiss and Barbara Crossette, “The United Nations: The Post-Summit Outlook,” Great
Decisions 2006 (New York, 2006), 9-20.

vii Kofi Annan, “A Glass at Least Half-Full,” The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2005. viii Chris Patten, "Jaw-Jaw, Not War-War," Financial Times, 15 February 2002.

ix See Joseph E. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It
Alone (New York, 2002).

x Center for Defense Information, “U.S. Military Spending, Fiscal Years 1945-2008,” available at
www.cdi.org/news/mrp/us-military-spending.pdf.

xi See Ian Johnstone, ed., Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2006 (Boulder, Colo., 2006).

xii James Traub, “The Next Resolution,” The New York Times Magazine, April 13, 2003, 51.

xiii Cora Bell, “The Twilight of the Unipolar World,” The American Interest I, no. 2 (2005): 18-29.

xiv Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990/1991): 23-33; and “The
Unipolar Moment Revisited,” National Interest, 70 (winter 2002/2003): 5-17.

xv Andrew Moravcsik argues for a division of labor between American enforcement and European
peacekeeping in “Striking a New Transatlantic Bargain,” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 4 (2003): 74-89.

xvi See Alan J. Kuperman, The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Washington,
D.C., 2001).

xvii A Secure Europe in a Better World, available at http://ue.eu.int/pressData/en/reports/78367.pdf.

xviii National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, available at
http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/secstrat/htm.

xix See Bastian Giegrich and William Wallace, “Not Such a Soft Power: The External Deployment of
European Forces,” Survival 46, no. 2 (2004): 163-182, quote 179.

xx Quoted by Lincoln Palmer Bloomfield, Accidental Encounters with History (and some lessons learned)
(Cohasset, Mass., 2005), 14. xxi Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (New York, 2001).

xxii Scott Straus, “Darfur and the Genocide Debate,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 1 (2005): 123-133., quotes
from 124 and 131.

xxiii Nicholas D. Kristof, “Genocide in Slow Motion,” New York Review of Books LIII, no. 2 (February 9, 2006): 14. See also Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, A Short History of a Long War (London, 2005); and Gérard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (Ithaca, 2005).

xxiv UN OCHA, “Sudan: US Congress Unanimously Defines Darfur Violence as ‘Genocide’,” July 23,
2004, available at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2004/07/mil-040723-irin03.htm xxv "The Crisis in Darfur," Written remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington,
D.C., September 9, 2004, available at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/36032.htm.

xxvi Agence France Presse, “EU Lawmakers Call Darfur ‘Crisis Genocide,’” 16 September 2004, available
at www.middle -east-online.com/ english/sudan/?id=11287. xxvii Report of the International Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General, Geneva, 25
January 2005, 4, available at www.un.org/News/dh/sudan/com_inq_darfur.pdf.

xxvii Agence France Presse, “EU Lawmakers Call Darfur ‘Crisis Genocide,’” 16 September 2004, available
at www.middle -east-online.com/english/sudan/?id=11287. xxvii Report of the International Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General, Geneva, 25
January 2005, 4, available at www.un.org/News/dh/sudan/com_inq_darfur.pdf

The U.S.-UN Relationship-a Difficult but Necessary Partnership
Nancy Soderberg

The relationship between the United States and the United Nations over the last five years has been a tense one to say the least. Yet as the Bush administration struggles with the many world challenges it confronts--the war in Iraq, the war against terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, efforts by Iran and North Korea to seek nuclear weapons, and the crisis in Darfur, to name just a few--Washington is increasingly turning to the United Nations for help. Is the shift from UN-bashing to cooperation real? Is the UN up to the job?

The answers to those questions are complex. On the one hand, the early Bush effort to sideline the UN was never realistic. Despite its shortcomings, the UN is an essential partner in today's global challenges-simply because those challenges are just that-global. By definition, no nation-even the great, lone superpower-can meet them on its own. It is less a change of heart than the real world that is pushing the Bush administration away from the dangerous myth that it can go it alone. Whether the UN is up to the task depends less on the UN secretary general than on the willingness of capitals to work with Washington. It is far from clear that the world is prepared to do so.

Secretary General Kofi Annan will likely prove to be one of the body's most effective secretaries general in the UN's history. Despite many problems-poor oversight over the Oil-for-Food Program and his son's business activities-his toughest challenge is overcoming member states' reluctance to reform the institution. He has set the path, but the world has declined to take up the challenge. Until it does, the United Nations will not be able to fulfill the goals of its Charter, and the U.S./UN relationship will remain a difficult--but necessary--one.

Last September in New York most of the world's leaders gathered at the United Nations "World Summit" for what was supposed to be a strong endorsement of a visionary plan for global governance in the 21st century. But the ideological clash between the United States and much of the developing world brought the meeting to the brink of failure.

Weary diplomats had been scrambling to come up with face-saving compromises, but in the end, the member states failed to take up the challenge put forward by the secretary general. In brief, he laid out a good deal-for the United States and the developed world: get serious about investing in development, debt relief, and infectious diseases. In exchange, the developing world must get serious about the threats of terrorism and proliferation.

This summit was years in the making. In the aftermath of the international community's grave failures in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s, Secretary General Annan set up several commissions to address the issue of protecting civilians when governments fail to do so and to look at ways to meet the developing world's urgent needs.

After the Iraq war in 2003, he recognized the gap in perceptions of threats between the developing and the developed worlds. For the United States, that threat is primarily terrorism and weapons of mass destruction; for the developing world, it is the threat of underdevelopment, poverty, debt, HIV/Aids, and other infectious diseases.

Mr. Annan offered sensible proposals in his March report calling for the developed world to commit 0.7 percent of gross national product to development, ease trade barriers, and slash debt in exchange for a commitment by the developing world to implement good governance and get serious about ending support for terrorists and weapons proliferation. Such steps were part of the effort to reach the UN's Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

All summer diplomats whittled away at draft after draft, making scant progress. Throughout the process much of the developing world had seemed stuck in the 1960s, arguing for the legitimacy of terrorism in liberation struggles, undermining the urgent need for UN management reform, and pathetically showing its inability to agree on how to expand the Security Council. The strongest opposition to the text was led by a collection of undemocratic states, including Pakistan and Algeria, and, increasingly, Russia and China, which have opposed any perceived intrusion on state sovereignty.

The United States also blocked progress. It fought against its own ideological hot buttons, such as the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the International Criminal Court, specific levels of development aid, disarmament and nonproliferation, and abortion rights. Washington began to engage seriously only in mid-August when John Bolton, as the new U.S. permanent representative to the UN, sought initially to restart the process from scratch-thus annoying many and undermining a number of its own justified positions. The result of so many pressures from so many sides was a convoluted draft with pages of disputed text in brackets that diplomats were still arguing over as their leaders arrived in New York.

The end result was mixed. The United States agreed that the specific targets for development assistance can be mentioned but not specifically endorsed. Diplomats, after much wrangling, agreed to recognize the world's responsibility to protect civilians and improve peacekeeping operations. For example, a new Peacebuilding Commission will focus on the needs of nations in and emerging from conflict. The Commission will succeed only if member states allow it to react to crises quickly and creatively. It will also have to be well staffed and well funded-something member states have not always been willing to do with other bodies.

Another important achievement was the replacement of the discredited Commission on Human Rights, hijacked over the past decade by Syria, Cuba, Libya, Sudan, and others into the club of the repressive. The new Human Rights Council, however, is at risk of simply replicating the problems of its predecessor. Member states still cannot agree that those eligible for election to the Council must at a minimum respect human rights. There is some progress. In the May 9, 2006, election for membership in the new Council, at least human rights violators Iran and Venezuela failed to garner enough votes for membership. Other abusers that had been on the Human Rights Commission, including Sudan, Zimbabwe, Libya, Syria, and Vietnam, were apparently shamed into not running. However, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia were among the 47 nations elected. The United States declined to run for the new body because, as U.S. Ambassador John Bolton aptly put it, "We want a butterfly. We're not going to put lipstick on a caterpillar and declare it a success." Although the new body is far from perfect, the United States is wrong not to be on it. Like the International Criminal Court, the Human Rights Council is now a reality, and the United States should be working for change from within, not ignoring it from the sidelines. With time progress can be made in ensuring that members of the new Council have a strong commitment to the protection and promotion of human rights-and some day even to democracy.

The World Summit document also expressed agreement to some long-overdue updates to the UN Charter such as winding up the Trusteeship Council, marking completion of the UN's historic decolonization role, and deleting antiquated references to "enemy states" in the Charter.

Although important, these achievements are far from sufficient for preparing the UN and the world for the 21st century. They fail to address the toughest peace and security issues: terrorism, use of force, nonproliferation, and Security Council reform. Even after September 11, 2001, a hard-core group continues to block any definition of terrorism, preferring instead to cling to the 1960s mentality of supporting freedom fighters and to an anti-Israel effort to justify the continued terrorism of Hamas and Hezbollah. Until the developing world gets serious about terrorism, the United States cannot count on real help from the UN.

The World Summit also failed to address nonproliferation. That is a particular problem for the United States because of the grave threat that weapons of mass destruction might fall into the hands of terrorists. But the world does not yet agree on the issue. Secretary General Annan was right when he said the issue of nonproliferation is by far the biggest failure of the document. "Some states wanted to give absolute priority to nonproliferation, while others insisted that efforts to strengthen the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) must include further steps toward disarmament. Thus, the failure of the NPT review conference in May was repeated." Facing opposition from the United States, coupled with skepticism from the developing world, the proposals regarding disarmament and nonproliferation and criteria for the use of force are essentially dead.

US-UN Relations

U.S.-UN RELATIONS (With Policy Recommendations)
August 2006

U.S.-UN RELATIONS
(With Policy Recommendations)

Foreword by Donald Blinken and George Schwab
New York, August 2006

Contents

Acknowledgment

Foreword

Introduction: How Does the UN System Fit into American Foreign Policy Interests?
Benjamin Rivlin

No More Business as Usual
John R. Bolton

Who Needs the United Nations? We All Do.
Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

The Survivors: The United States and the United Nations in Troubled Times
Edward C. Luck

The Rule of Law, the United States, and the United Nations: An Ambiguous Record
Lawrence S. Finkelstein

Notes

Notes

The U.S.-UN Relationship-a Difficult but Necessary Partnership
Nancy Soderberg

US-UN Relations

U.S.-UN RELATIONS (With Policy Recommendations) August 2006

U.S.-UN RELATIONS (With Policy Recommendations)

Foreword by Donald Blinken and George Schwab New York, August 2006

Contents

Acknowledgment

Foreword

Introduction: How Does the UN System Fit into American Foreign Policy Interests? Benjamin Rivlin

No More Business as Usual John R. Bolton

Who Needs the United Nations? We All Do. Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

The Survivors: The United States and the United Nations in Troubled Times Edward C. Luck

The Rule of Law, the United States, and the United Nations: An Ambiguous Record Lawrence S. Finkelstein

Notes

Notes

The U.S.-UN Relationship-a Difficult but Necessary Partnership Nancy Soderberg

U.S.-UN RELATIONS (With Policy Recommendations)
August 2006

U.S.-UN RELATIONS
(With Policy Recommendations)

Foreword by Donald Blinken and George Schwab
New York, August 2006

Introduction: How Does the UN System Fit into American Foreign Policy Interests?
Benjamin Rivlin

No More Business as Usual
John R. Bolton

Who Needs the United Nations? We All Do.
Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

The Survivors: The United States and the United Nations in Troubled Times
Edward C. Luck

The Rule of Law, the United States, and the United Nations: An Ambiguous Record
Lawrence S. Finkelstein

The U.S.-UN Relationship-a Difficult but Necessary Partnership
Nancy Soderberg