Tough Love for the U.N.
Moynihan, Kirkpatrick and now John Bolton.
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
Tuesday, March 8, 2005 12:01 a.m.
According to press reports, Secretary General Kofi Annan has been holding high-level private conferences on how to save the U.N. from its growing irrelevance. He's said to be looking for a dose of tough love, some bare-knuckled truth-telling about all the ways the U.N. has failed and what's to be done about it.
So we can only assume that Mr. Annan was sincere yesterday when he welcomed President Bush's decision to nominate John Bolton to succeed John Danforth as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. As the media wasted no time in explaining, Mr. Bolton is a "hard-liner," guilty of such violations of diplomatic protocol as calling North Korea "a hellish nightmare" ruled by a "tyrannical dictator." More such violations will be required if Mr. Bolton's mission is to succeed.
Right now, the U.N. is beset by two great crises. The first is of efficacy. Over the past few years, the world has seen a depressing series of demonstrations of everything the U.N. can't do. It cannot prevent mass killing in Rwanda, Bosnia and now Darfur. It cannot competently (never mind ethically) administer an Oil for Food program. It cannot speedily deliver assistance to the victims of natural catastrophes. It cannot enforce its own Security Council resolutions. It cannot stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It cannot even define terrorism.
Up to a point, these failures can be blamed on inadequate resources--although so far that hasn't prevented the U.N. from spending more lavishly on its staff than the average American corporation. Up to a point, too, the failures are the fault of U.N. member states and not the organization itself.
But the deeper reason for these failures is that the U.N. is beset by a moral crisis. This league of nations makes no distinction, and takes no sides, between democrats and dictators, between the civilized and the barbaric. So we have such spectacles as the 2001 Durban Summit, which was meant to address racism and ended up espousing anti-Semitism. Or this year's sex-trafficking by U.N. peacekeepers. Or the long-running embarrassment of the Human Rights Commission, on which Cuba and Zimbabwe now sit. Thus the U.N. has become an institution with no moral capital, which is the underlying reason for its impotence.
In the face of both these crises, we can think of no better candidate than Mr. Bolton to confront them. During his most recent State Department tour, he engineered the Proliferation Security Initiative, the most successful and meaningful multilateral effort undertaken by this Administration--or the previous one, for that matter. He negotiated the 2001 Treaty of Moscow, the most comprehensive nuclear disarmament treaty in history. In the real world, this is called "getting stuff done," something the U.N. could learn more about.
In an earlier job at State, Mr. Bolton was also responsible for the repeal, in 1991, of the 1975 Zionism is Racism resolution, championed by Uganda's Idi Amin. That resolution all but crippled the U.N.'s reputation in the U.S., while its repeal opened the way, if only briefly, for the possibility that it might again enjoy America's trust. Having America's trust, it should be said, is the only way the U.N. stands any chance of surviving as a relevant or productive international institution.
Of course, it would not do if Mr. Bolton's nomination wasn't greeted by the usual bellyaching of our supposed multilateralists. Sure enough, John Kerry obliged, calling the appointment "baggage we cannot afford" and reminding us why Americans prefer to call him Senator.
It is now 60 years since the San Francisco Conference inaugurated the U.N. In that time, U.S. interests have more often been stymied than advanced by our participation. But the U.N. has also been the place where past ambassadors such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick made America's case. We expect Mr. Bolton will carry on in that tradition, and perhaps even rescue the U.N. from itself.
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