10 Hard realities About the U.N. on its Troubled 75th Anniversary

 

10 Hard Realities About the U.N. on Its Troubled 75th Anniversary

Stewart M. Patrick Monday, Sept. 21, 2020

The opening of the 75th United Nations General Assembly finds international cooperation in crisis and the U.N. in the crosshairs. Many critiques, especially from the United States, focus on the institution itself, as if it were somehow disembodied from the interests and policies of its major member states. The U.N.’s troubled anniversary is an opportune moment not only to reassess its strengths and weaknesses, but also to temper expectations of what multilateralism can possibly deliver when the U.N.’s leading members turn it into a geopolitical football—or are absent without leave. With these ends in mind, I offer the following 10 propositions.

There are many United Nations. Broad-brush critiques of the U.N. often gloss over the distinct institutional components of the U.N. system, ignoring the relative strengths and weaknesses of each and their utility to the United States. The most important of these are a U.N. Security Council dominated by permanent members, where little gets done without U.S. assent; a General Assembly, with universal membership, that possesses budgetary but little other authority beyond the ability to pass symbolic resolutions; the U.N. Secretariat, which can be a bastion of cronyism but whose performance depends strongly on who is secretary-general; and the multiple specialized and technical agencies, from the International Atomic Energy Agency to the World Food Program, some but not all of which do indispensable work.

The U.N. is no longer the only game in town, but it remains the world’s premier multilateral body. By virtue of its universal membership, binding Charter, multidimensional mandate and primacy in matters of global peace and security, the U.N. remains the foundational bedrock for international cooperation. To be sure, since 1945, nations have created scores of regional and subregional organizations, alliances and informal mini-lateral groupings like the G-7 and G-20 to assist with global governance. Still, nothing else comes close to the U.N. and its many affiliated agencies and bodies—including the Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—in terms of their existing technical capabilities and perceived international legitimacy. It is an illusion to imagine that all of these strengths could be recreated on an ad hoc basis.

The U.N. is built for frustration—not least for its most powerful member. Although the U.S. was a lead architect of the U.N. Charter, that blueprint guarantees outcomes that are often subpar from an American perspective. The veto provision, which Washington has always backed, allows other permanent Security Council members, notably China and Russia, to thwart U.S. preferences. Likewise, the one-state-one-vote format in the General Assembly permits ideological coalitions to play to the galleries rather than exercise real responsibility. Finally, the U.N.’s budgetary processes and labyrinthine reporting structure, which empower the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council over major U.N. donors, is a constant aggravation. These are facts of life that American diplomats can hope to ameliorate but never eliminate.

Multilateral bodies do not spring magically to life in crises, nor are they immune from geopolitics. There is a strong temptation to blame U.N. agencies like the World Health Organization for failures in international cooperation, like the haphazard and uncoordinated response to COVID-19. An honest appraisal would concede that multilateral institutions reflect the preferences of their major members. The pandemic failures of the WHO, the Security Council, the G-20 and the G-7 all reflect decisions by China and the U.S. to prioritize strategic rivalry over practical problem-solving. If a fully fledged, new Cold War emerges between the U.S. and China, we should anticipate an enduring collapse of Security Council cooperation, akin to the Soviet period.

The United States does better inside the multilateral tent. International organizations can accomplish little without strong U.S. involvement. When America defects—as it has under President Donald Trump, leaving the Paris Agreement on climate change, the WHO and the U.N.’s Human Rights Council—it undercuts not only international cooperation, but its own long-term interests. The troubled Human Rights Council is a case in point. By abandoning that admittedly flawed body, rather than fight the good fight, the U.S. guaranteed that foxes would run the henhouse. In a similar vein, the White House has warned of rising Chinese influence within U.N. agencies, but the Trump administration created this opening for Beijing, by retreating from multilateral diplomacy in New York and bilateral diplomacy around the world. It’s hard to beat something with nothing.

The empty General Assembly Hall will be a potent symbol of Trump’s “America First” agenda, which has seen the U.S. turn its back on the world, and the world lose faith in the U.S.

The U.N. does not infringe on U.S. sovereignty. Membership in the United Nations poses no threat to U.S. constitutional independence, because it does not involve a hierarchical relationship of political subordination to a supranational entity, but rather a voluntary, intergovernmental arrangement among sovereign governments. What U.N. membership does require is that each nation accepts modest constraints on its notional freedom of action. This is in fact the very purpose of multilateral cooperation: to bind all parties to basic rules and responsibilities, so they can resolve shared challenges and advance common aims.

Holding the U.N. accountable remains a challenge. The U.N. and other multilateral bodies do create accountability challenges, because they require governments to delegate authority to international secretariats that may not be responsive to their desires. As anybody who’s ever hired a contractor knows, agents don’t always follow their principal’s instructions to the letter. Compounding the problem of oversight, member states typically “pool” their authority within the governing boards of international organizations, meaning that each gets only a partial, albeit sometimes weighted, say. Given the dynamics of delegation and pooling, both Congress and the White House must remain vigilant to the possibility that global bodies may go off track.

U.S. funding for the U.N. is generous but still modest. In 2018, the U.S. contributed just over $10 billion to the world body, more than any other nation but less than 1.5 percent of the $700 billion it spent on the American military. About two thirds of this came as voluntary contributions to agencies like the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The remainder reflected assessed U.S. contributions to the U.N.’s regular and peacekeeping budgets, with America’s share pegged at 28 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Although the U.S. peacekeeping assessment exceeds the U.S. share of the world economy—23.4 percent—this $2 billion annual expenditure is money well spent. For only $6 per American, Washington supports the life-saving work of 95,000 personnel in 13 missions around the world, at a fraction of the cost of sending U.S. soldiers to perform similar tasks.

Security Council reform is imperative—but unlikely. Any discussion of U.N. reform invariably raises the need to adjust the composition of the Security Council to global power shifts, not least India’s emergence as a major strategic player and, soon, the world’s most populous nation. A Security Council whose permanent membership continues to give too much weight to Europe is courting a legitimacy crisis. Absent a global catastrophe, however, diplomacy seems unlikely to break the logjam among the main aspirants to permanent membership and their regional competitors, including the demands of a united African bloc.

The U.N.’s future depends on America. This year’s virtual General Assembly seems a fitting coda to President Donald Trump’s four years in office. The U.S. has always been ambivalent about multilateral cooperation, but Trump’s predecessors expressed their frustration in terms of the U.N.’s failure to live up to its founding ideals—rather than by rejecting the entire internationalist vision that inspired its creators and the purposes to which it is consecrated. Indeed, Trump is the first American president one could imagine actually withdrawing the U.S. from the U.N. entirely. The empty General Assembly Hall this week will be a potent symbol of Trump’s “America First” agenda, which has seen the U.S. turn its back on the world, and the world lose faith in the United States.

Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World” (Brookings Press: 2018). His weekly WPR column appears every Monday.