The UN: where words go to die
The headline in yesterday’s Financial Times (FT) spoke volumes. It declared:
- ‘Enfeebled’ UN fights for relevance in divided world: A cold war-style stalemate over Ukraine and Sino-American tensions have left the Security Council at a low ebb
Most notably, the FT reported that:
For diplomats and UN veterans, the swirl of this week’s General Assembly will be tinged with nostalgia. For most of the UN’s nearly eight decades, this was its high point when world leaders met to argue over the pressing causes of the day. No longer. …
‘It’s the place where leaders come and give public speeches but that really nothing meaningful gets done.’
But some of the world’s most powerful leaders no longer even see the UN as a place to peddle their propaganda. That’s how useless it has become.
Biden showed up, of course; playing homecoming king never gets old (pun intended). But he was the only leader of the “P5” to do so. The P5, of course, are the five veto-wielding permanent members of the UN’s purportedly influential Security Council.
Xi of China, Putin of Russia, Sunak of the United Kingdom, and Macron of France all had something better to do. That undermines the headline reports about the stalemate over Ukraine causing some leaders to avoid this annual gathering. After all, absentees Xi and Putin are on one side of that cold-war-style stalemate, and absentees Sunak and Macron are on the other.
Besides, some of us have been deriding the UN for years as just a place where leaders go to blow hot air. I refer you to “Leaders Blow Hot Air at UN General Assembly. Meanwhile, Over in Myanmar” on September 26, 2007.
Corruption: The UN’s middle name
The idea of a “global talking shop” doesn’t bother me. I, too, believe in Churchill’s quip that it’s better to “jaw-jaw” than “war-war.” No, what bothers me is that the UN has always been corrupt from head to toe.
Remember the 2005 Oil-for-Food programme? A 2005 report found that UN leaders lorded over illicit, unethical, and corrupt behavior. It saw this $64 billion UN programme operate as the biggest kickback scheme in history.
So, forget stalemates over Ukraine or Sino-American tensions. The UN couldn’t oversee a lemonade stand without someone taking a bribe.
The editors at the FT might clutch their pearls to learn that I summarized the UN’s enfeebled, divided state way back on March 22, 2005:
The United Nations is one of the most disunited, corrupt, and ungovernable organizations in the world. And, if its leader were held to the minimal standards of governance leaders at charitable organizations are held to, the UN’s leader would have already been indicted on a battery of criminal and civil offenses.
I titled that commentary “Kofi Annan’s Sweeping Reforms to Save His Job!” Annan, the then-secretary-general, retired the following year in evident frustration. After all, he ended up being little more than a “secular pope” – with no power to end corruption at the UN and even less to end conflicts around the world.
Death by irrelevance and incompetence
Alas, nothing defines the UN quite like UN peacekeepers preying on Haitians, UN peacekeepers dithering as Africans died, and UN leaders covering for predatory peacekeepers, much as Catholic Church leaders do for pedophile priests.
So forgive me for dismissing the FT’s lament about the UN Security Council being at a “low ebb.” And, frankly, calling the United Nations irrelevant is like saying the Titanic had a leak.
The UN’s demise isn’t merely the symptom of a “cold-war-style stalemate. It’s the fading novelty and vainglory of an organization that was always more mirage than miracle.
None-P5 leaders have been pleading for years for structural reforms to make the UN more protective than pontifical. And no reform would do that more than increasing the P5 to include India and one rotating nation from South America, Africa, and the Middle East.
While at it, this purportedly democratic institution should abolish its unanimous consent rules. A one-member veto should rule only in dictatorships like China and Russia.
Yesterday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Security Council. During it, he decried that Putin is using his veto to prevent over 90% of the other leaders from merely condemning his genocidal invasion of Ukraine.
Institutions claiming to be democratic — criminal juries, the US Senate, the EU, NATO, the UN — should replace unanimous consent rules with supermajority rules. For example, require only a two-thirds or three-quarters vote to enact policies.