In his January State of the Union address, President Barack Obama asked a rhetorical question: “How do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?” The image of a global constable dates back to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940s conception of the United States, Britain, Russia, and China as “four policemen” keeping the peace in a postwar world. His vision took shape in the United Nations and its Security Council — dominated for generations by those very powers plus, at Churchill’s insistence, France.
Yet more than 70 years later, almost no one answered the president’s plaintive query from his Senate podium with reference to the world body headquartered on the East River. Last week, interviews were held for a leader to succeed U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon when his term ends later this year; the U.S. media mostly ignored the proceedings. While the world obsesses over the U.S. presidential election, the campaign to helm the world’s premier body is an afterthought at best for Americans. While the U.N. did make headlines last week, it was because the U.S. Senate held hearings at which lawmakers threatened to withhold dues to the world body if it could not end a pervasive pattern of sexual abuse by peacekeepers. According to Gallup, the U.N.’s approval rating among Americans stands at 38 percent, and has been below 50 percent for the past 13 years. While Obama reversed the George W. Bush administration’s disdain toward Turtle Bay, U.S. re-engagement has been weighed down by deep doubts that the world body can deliver on the highest-stakes assignments.
There is a growing, if tacit, worldwide acknowledgement that the U.N. increasingly isn’t where the action is on international affairs. At the same time, as the president detailed in his March interview with Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, there is no nation or organization that can plausibly fill the void left by a United States that is necessarily selective about its global engagement. Europe is mired in internal divisions, economic stasis, and a historic refugee crisis. The Middle East is in perpetual turmoil. China’s and Russia’s ideas of enlightened self-interest involve deploying ever more sophisticated tools in service of age-old aims of power and control. What were once dubbed “rising powers” — India, Brazil, and South Africa — are sinking under the weight of corruption and domestic turmoil. And NATO’s shortcomings have become presidential campaign fodder; other regional organizations are uniformly far weaker.
And yet by default, the U.N. is key to maintaining order in a world of threats that are oblivious to national borders. Whether the problem is climate change, refugees, sectarian conflicts, nuclear proliferation, humanitarian disasters, or patrolling fragile peace settlements, the U.N. and its specialized agencies are grinding it out at the forefront, keeping bad situations from getting far worse. They do much of the spadework of international affairs that, when it makes headlines at all, features political leaders gathered for photo ops, not experts who spent years making the handshake possible. While the U.N. can’t stop the Islamic State, it can play a key role in stabilizing post-conflict states, curbing global pandemics, and mitigating the destabilizing effects of refugee flows.
In late March, Anthony Banbury, a former U.S. National Security Council official and outgoing U.N. assistant secretary-general, published a confessional New York Times op-ed titled, “I Love the U.N., but It Is Failing.” Banbury chronicled a litany of seemingly intractable ills: “colossal mismanagement,” sclerotic hiring systems, bureaucracy run amok, wasted money, needlessly prolonged peacekeeping missions that distract leaders and divert funds from fundamental societal needs, and lax troop recruitment standards that have led to an epidemic of sexual assault perpetrated by blue helmets — despite years of high-profile efforts to curtail such abuses. As the organization prepares to elect a new secretary-general to replace Ban Ki-moon, Banbury begs member states to rethink what they want out of the world body.
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