Muscular diplomacy is one thing.
But John Bolton has been all
muscle and no diplomacy as the
United States ambassador to the United
Nations. Now he’s threatening to hold up
its entire two-year operating budget
unless his demands for major reforms
are met almost immediately.
As it happens, the American reform
agenda contains many good elements.
No one can seriously argue that the U.N.
is a rationally structured, efficiently
managed body. And letting countries like
Cuba, Libya and Sudan sit on a human
rights commission that judges the
records of other countries diminishes
the U.N.’s most important authority, its
moral authority. But just as the Senate
feared when it declined to confirm Mr.Bolton in the job, his blustering unilateral
style is turning him into one of the
biggest obstacles to achieving changes
that had been within reach before he
appeared on the scene.
Two basic changes are needed to
repair the U.N.’s tarnished reputation.
First, significant authority over appointments
and management needs to be
shifted from the General Assembly,
which has 191 members, to the Secretary
General’s office. Just as important, the
Secretary General (a new one will be
chosen next year) must exercise this
new authority wisely, boldly and effectively.
The most important specific reforms
include establishing a permanent human
rights council made up of countries that
respect human rights, creating a commission to oversee the reconstruction of
societies devastated by armed conflict,
and giving the Secretary General the
authority to recommend ending missions
that have outlived their usefulness and
to make senior appointments based on
merit, not regional quotas.
Doing these things will require a close
alliance between
reformers and the Secretary
General’s office
and the ability to convince
General Assembly
members that a
more credible and
effective U.N. is in
their interests. Those
are exactly the areas
where Mr.Bolton has
done the most damage.
His demands and
his threats to bypass
the U.N. if it doesn’t
bow to them have fed
the impression that
the whole reform agenda is a power grab
by Washington. Hard as it is for Americans
to believe, much of the world now
suspects Secretary General Kofi Annan
of being Washington’s lackey.
Mr.Annan made a promising start earlier
this year at building a consensus for
reform, only to have it derailed by Mr.Bolton. Soon after taking over the American
mission this summer, he issued a
long list of last-minute demands. As a
result, a special international summit
meeting that had been organized to
adopt real reforms ended up endorsing a
document that was mostly fudge and
mush.
Mr. Bolton’s latest threat, to block the
next U.N. budget, is likely to be equally
counterproductive. America’s most successful
U.N. ambassadors, whether they
served Republican or Democratic presidents,
have known how to harness American
power to patient, skillful diplomacy.
Regrettably, Mr. Bolton has failed to
profit from their example.
Extract from
The New York Times Editorial,
02/12/2005.
