What's Wrong at the United Nations?

By Charles William Maynes

Is it possible that, in a repetition of history, the United States will be largely responsible for the failure of another global institution? By refusing to join the League of Nations, in the view of many historians, the United States doomed that institution to failure. Now a growing number of observers fear that the United States will be primarily responsible for the downfall of the United Nations. In August 1995 Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott warned that if current trends continue, "the UN might very quickly join the League of Nations on the ash heap of history."

Since he made that statement, things have got much worse. The New Republic greeted United Nations Day in 1996 with a call for letting the UN "wither away into irrelevance." The UN's 50th birthday was celebrated in the House of Representatives by the introduction of the first resolution in years calling for the United States to withdraw from the world body. A year later a fifth of the House of Representatives had endorsed that position. In the fall of 1996, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, demanded a 50 percent cut in the UN budget and warned that if it did not take place, he would lead an effort in the Senate to end U.S. membership in the UN. Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, a leader in the Congress on international affairs, has called for a 20 percent cut in an institution that has already cut its staff one-third since the mid-1980s. So the congressional mood is clear.

Attitudes in the White House are not much better. When asked by the press to explain why the president had not met with the then Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to convey the reasons for U.S. opposition to his reelection, White House officials replied that the UN was not an important enough institution to put such a meeting on the president's schedule.

These signs of official hostility or indifference have had a particular effect on U.S. financial support for the UN. The United States is now $1.5 billion in arrears on its legally mandated UN dues. The last Congress approved the Administration's FY 1997 request for peacekeeping expenses ($282 million) and regular dues ($314 million), but it rejected most funding for the administration's five-year $743-million-plan to pay back the U.S. debt for UN peacekeeping and approved only $50 million of the $142 million requested for FY 1997. Congress also rejected funds to pay the U.S. debt for the regular dues.

United States hostility toward the United Nations is beginning to arouse the ire of other governments, which is one reason why the United States was so embarrassingly unsuccessful in December 1996 in rallying support to oppose the reelection of Boutros-Ghali. Only a few months ago, it was easy for any journalist in New York to find foreign representatives willing to criticize the Egyptian incumbent. Nevertheless, when his reelection as Secretary General came to a vote before the Security Council in the fall of 1996, all fourteen of the other members, including Great Britain, opposed the United States, which was then forced to cast its veto. The extent of the U.S. isolation was underscored when not a single other government in the world went out of its way to support the U.S. position. Though the U.S. view ultimately prevailed, thanks to the veto, and a new Secretary General, Kofi Annan, was elected, the unpopularity of the United States in the world body was clear.

What explains this turn of events with U.S. officials increasingly hostile to the UN and U.S. positions progressively resisted? Only a few years ago U.S. officials were talking about a renaissance. In the wake of the end to the Cold War, the UN moved from triumph to triumph: authorization for Operation Desert Storm, which drove Iraq out of Kuwait; implementation of the UN plan for Namibia, which led to that country's independence; creation of a coalition government in Cambodia, which restored Prince Sihanouk to the throne; and, finally, success in helping stage a peaceful election in Nicaragua and in negotiating a settlement of the civil war in El Salvador, which together brought an end to the crisis in Central America.

The shorthand answer is Bosnia and Somalia. In Bosnia, critics accused the UN of incompetence and cowardliness in defending the Bosnian people against "Serb aggression." UN "peacekeepers" seemed to stand by as Bosnian Serb forces shelled Sarajevo or as Bosnian Serb troops besieged or overran so-called "safe havens," apparently killing many of the defenders. Outrage grew when U.S. officials claimed the reason they could not intervene was that UN officials were "vetoing" proposals that NATO aircraft strike back at Bosnian Serb military positions.

The truth is much more complex. What few people understood is that allied governments were playing an elaborate shell game to confuse the press and mask their own policies. Under intense media pressure to "do something" to stop the killing in Bosnia, these same governments would vote in NATO councils to take direct action against the Bosnian Serbs, including the use of force, if necessary, to stop the killing.

But the British and the French had their own generals seconded to the UN to run the peacekeeping operation. The British and the French also had their own troops on the ground in Bosnia, while the United States did not. Throughout the crisis the British and the French generals, like the U.S. generals in Somalia, were taking orders not only from the United Nations but also from their own governments, which strongly opposed the use of force beyond self-defense. Indeed, virtually all of the states contributing troops opposed the use of force, which, they believed, would expose their lightly defended troops on the ground to retaliation. Cognizant of these concerns, UN civilian leaders were in no position either to order reluctant commanders to use force or to veto the use of force on these few occasions when their military commanders deemed it necessary.

Command arrangements permitted everyone to engage in high hypocrisy with disastrous results for the United Nations. Washington could hold the high moral ground, making brave calls for military action because it had no troops at risk. The British and the French could vote for seemingly tough measures publicly while privately they made sure that nothing dangerous would ever happen.

A similar cloud of hypocrisy surrounds the controversy of the so-called "safe" havens. When Security Council members first proposed the creation of "safe havens" to protect trapped Bosnian Muslims from the encircling Bosnian Serbs, the Secretary General informed the council that the United Nations would need at least 35,000 troops to carry out the mission. The council turned him down flat because of the cost and the unwillingness of member states to contribute the necessary money and troops. Council members finally granted him 7,000 troops, which arrived months late and in no position to carry out even a watered-down mandate.

The "safe havens" could never be safe for those on either side of the line. Council members, for example, never insisted on an all-around cease-fire. Those inside the "safe havens" were permitted to use them as a base from which to launch attacks against the encircling Bosnian Serbs, who then attacked in return, often mercilessly. Supporters of the Bosnian Muslims justified this unusual arrangement on the grounds that the Bosnian Serbs had committed aggression and therefore one could not reasonably ask the Bosnian Muslims to accept a cease-fire. That may have been a legitimate moral position but it doomed the "safe haven" concept from the beginning. Indeed, if the UN had accepted such arrangements in the Middle East or Cyprus where the United Nations maintains peacekeeping troops between two opposing sides, war would have resumed years ago. As it was, after a certain point, the Bosnian Serbs decided to crush a number of the "safe havens" as the war moved toward its climax. The UN troops who were interposed between the opposing Bosnian forces, in fact were never strong enough to mount a credible defense. Just as UN forces in Lebanon in 1982 were forced to stand aside when Israel suddenly launched a cross-border offensive against the Palestinians on the other side of the UN lines, so UN forces in Bosnia also had to stand aside. Criticism of the UN in both cases is hypocritical because no state, especially the United States, was ever willing to grant the United Nations the military forces necessary to carry out the mission that it was now being criticized for failing to complete.

In Somalia, the UN effort was also judged a failure but again the truth is more embarrassing. The principal reason Boutros-Ghali is no longer Secretary General is the general belief in Congress that he was in charge of the disastrous mission to capture General Aideed, which resulted in the death of 18 U.S. Rangers. The White House itself spread that impression. It was only in his election debate with Bob Dole that the president admitted the truth. That operation was under the complete control and direction of the U.S. government. In other words, Boutros-Ghali was made the scapegoat for a disastrous U.S. miscalculation.

All this is not to say that the UN performance in Bosnia and Somalia is without blame. In both crises, UN officials made unwise decisions and counterproductive statements. Because of his previous association with Somalia while a senior Egyptian official, Boutros-Ghali was a controversial figure in Somalia and should have avoided direct involvement in the crisis. In Bosnia the Secretary General should have been more vocal regarding the human dimensions of the war. He probably should have been more critical in public of the shell game that key member states, including the United States, were playing. But a close examination of the record will show that the principal culprits were the major powers themselves.

There are other explanations for the current plight of the United Nations. Some of the current difficulties flow from the Republican decision to deny Bill Clinton support almost from the day he entered office. A striking fact about congressional attitudes toward the United Nations is the complete collapse of Republican support for it. In Clinton's first year in office, as a study of the United Nations Association has pointed out, "90 percent of the GOP's 178 House members either voted against the United Nations every time (112) or all but once (49). This record contrasts sharply with the last year of the Bush administration, when 65 or more Republicans, including then-gadfly Newt Gingrich, supported the UN at least 25 percent more often than during the first years of the Clinton administration."

Many American conservatives attack the UN for alleged "waste, fraud, and abuse," of which there is bound to be some (as there is in any large organization). But one suspects that the real goal is not to root out these practices. Conservative critics comb the UN system for examples of waste because their larger purpose is to delegitimize the United Nations and ultimately either close down the organization or cause it to fade into insignificance. And in fact, the real problem at the United Nations, as in many governments in the post-Cold War era, is less "waste, fraud, and abuse" than outdated mandates and programs that the organization finds hard to abandon or adjust because of vested interests.

Like the U.S. government, the United Nations is full of programs that may be reasonably managed but whose time has passed. The United Nations has fewer employees than the state of Wyoming; yet it has far greater responsibilities and these are growing. Many of these employees were hired in an era when the requirements of the organization were different. In an ideal world, they would be offered generous early retirement so that more appropriate personnel could replace them. The United Nations, however, because of its perilous finances cannot do this.

In the post-Cold War environment, the UN needs to refocus its program on priority areas: peace and security, humanitarian assistance, and human rights and democracy.

In the peace and security area, the United Nations needs to develop a new strategy for dealing with a post-Cold War world. Its traditional contribution of "peacekeeping" between two warring parties that have agreed to accept an impartial force between them along a declared line is no longer relevant to many of the crises that face the world, most of which involve civil conflict within societies. Yet member states are unwilling to contribute troops to the task of imposing order on a society convulsed by civil war or a breakdown of domestic order. The answer will have to be a combination of early intervention diplomatically and development of specially designated troops who would volunteer for such assignments where they made sense. Those troops could be "earmarked" within national armies and trained for this duty. They should be on ready alert so that the United Nations would no longer face the delays that so marred its performance in Bosnia.

Such units should also be created at the regional level. The Clinton administration deserves praise for developing the concept of an "African Crisis Response Force." Efforts should be made to develop such units in other regions of the world. In Haiti, for example, it is a disgrace that a hemisphere as rich as our own is not able to finance and staff the UN operation on that island at a regional level. The Organization of American States should develop a capacity to handle the Haitis of the future.

The United Nations has been heavily involved in the development field and certainly it should not abandon that field at the conceptual level. New ideas are welcome from any source. But at the operational level, it should progressively shed responsibility to the international development banks, which have more resources and expertise. The various UN development funds should be consolidated into one fund that would concentrate on the issues of emergency assistance in the wake of man-made and natural disasters.

Finally, the United Nations has an important role in the field of human rights and democratic freedoms. In recent years, as the Cold War has faded away, the organization has played a much more important role in both areas. Here again, the world must be prudent. The United Nations is not a global government. It cannot impose standards on states. But it can make the issue of how the world's citizens are treated a much more transparent matter. It can work with governments to help establish the rule of law and to encourage them to respect the basic standards of civilized behavior toward their citizens.

Could the appointment of Madeleine Albright as Secretary of State alter this picture? It might. Secretary Albright has persuaded the president to make payment of U.S. arrears to the United Nations a high priority in the administration. She also understands that the United States is increasingly paying a very high diplomatic cost for its policies toward the UN and that it is an important diplomatic tool for Washington in many key areas-security, economic cooperation, and human rights. The United States cannot be a world leader outside the United Nations if it is isolated within that body.

For all of this to happen, however, the president himself must demonstrate to the country and the Congress that he is determined to see the United States meet its obligations to the United Nations and that he personally cares about the future character of the organization. There can no longer be suggestions from the White House that the organization is not important enough for the president to worry about it. The president's mention of the UN funding question in his State of the Union message was a step in the right direction.

With strong U.S. support, the UN itself could begin to refocus its efforts to reflect the new environment. Such a UN, however, would not cost less money. Indeed, it would cost more. But it would be an organization that most citizens would see as more relevant to the conditions that now prevail. It would be an organization that the critics would find it harder to attack and challenge. It would be an organization that might survive well into the next century and beyond.

Charles William Maynes ('80)CHARLES WILLIAM MAYNES ('80) was editor of Foreign Policy, 1980-1997, and is now the president of The Eurasia Foundation.






[back]Return to COSMOS 1997 Table of Contents
[back]Return to COSMOS Journals
[back]Return to COSMOS Home Page