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John Boonstra

Ban Ki-moon is “second best in the world”

We knew he was hip, but "second best in the world?"

United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon is the second-highest ranked world political leader who has the confidence of many people around the world.

Ban Ki-moon inspired more confidence than any other political leader polled, except United States President Barack Obama, the United Nations information centre in Pretoria said on Tuesday, referring to a survey by WorldPublicOpinion.org.

Coming in second behind Barack Obama -- whose public speaking, I think we can agree, is a little more inspirational -- is not too shabby for the South Korean.

The poll asked nearly 20,000 respondants in countries that represent 62% of the world's population their impressions of world leaders.  From World Public Opinion:

US President Barack Obama has the confidence of many publics around the world - inspiring far more confidence than any other world political leader according to a new poll of 20 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org. A year ago, President Bush was one of the least trusted leaders in the world.

What difference a year makes!  And for his part, it would seem that Asian publics propelled the Secretary General to second place.

Views of Ban Ki-moon are particularly positive in Africa and in Asia - nearly all Asian nations give him positive confidence scores led by South Korea (90%). Indonesia is an exception: views are divided. Large majorities in both Kenya (70%) and Nigeria (69%) express confidence in him.

Countries polled in Western Europe have confidence in the Secretary General, including Britain, Germany, and France, but Poland and Russia do not, and Ukraine is divided. A majority of Americans (57%) report little confidence in him, while Mexico leans toward having confidence (38% to 33%.)

Ban Ki-moon is hip — but then, we already knew that

Evaluating the S-G's performance thus far, Stephen Schlesinger looks at some of the places where Ban has accomplished quite a lot, but which haven't received that much attention: places like Kosovo, Haiti, and Sri Lanka, where Ban's frequent trips have all brought about at least some level of improvement in extraordinarily complex circumstances. Schlesinger sees the point that many like to make, that Ban is less charismatic than certain other S-Gs. But, he argues, Ban can be pretty hip himself.

The problem for Ban is his diffident manner, which stands in stark contrast with that of his predecessor, Kofi Annan, a larger than life secretary-general who dominated the scene through his flair, eloquence, and star power. Ban, by contrast, is neither charismatic nor an inspirational speaker - indeed, his English is not as good as Annan's. In his own way, though, he is an engaging, polite man, hip to contemporary cultural icons, and even given to singing at public occasions with wry lyrics and verses. [emphasis mine]

This seems as good a time as any to repost Ban's success in breaking it down with Jay-Z:

Rapping skills aside, Ban's legacy will be judged, as Schlesinger concludes, by "what he has accomplished rather than by personal foibles or flatness of style."

(Collective) Security Council

Andrew Bast adds to Mark's takedown of David Rothkopf's bit of indiscriminate UN-bashing:

To begin with, Rothkopf repeatedly refers to the "U.N.," when it's clear that he's talking about just the Security Council, the instance of the organization that handles matters of international peace and security. But to reduce it to a mechanism for conflict resolution, as Rothkopf does, misses the point. The theory underpinning the composition of the council, rather than elementary, is a rather nuanced and high-minded concept in international relations known as collective security. Put simply, an attack on one member state constitutes an attack on all. The logic behind the theory is to create significant disincentives for aggression, thereby increasing stability among the society of states. The best example of collective security at work was the council's response to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

This is a good point -- that the complexity underlying the Security Council system is often taken for granted, or, worse, misinterpreted as simplicity. Now, one might quibble that the composition of the Council as it actually exists means in reality that an attack on one member state that is supported by a permanent member of the Security Council constitutes an "attack on all." But in this respect, one could even see the relative polarization of the Council's permanent members -- with the U.S., UK, and France often on one side, and Russia and China on the other -- as a sort of benefit. Every country in the world is probably an ally of one of these five, so an attack on any will be strongly dissuaded.

The problem, of course, is that aggression is not limited solely to state-on-state invasion, and that the same alliances that dissuade this sort of aggression can make it more complicated to take collective action to stop a country's internal strife (see, for example, Sudan). This dynamic, though, is not a fault of the construction, or peace and conflict function, of the UN Security Council; it is a development in geopolitics, with which international security norms, writ even larger than the Security Council, have not yet fully caught up. How to make "collective security" incorporate the safety and well-being of a particular state's citizens, without impinging on that state's sovereignty, is a question even bigger than the Security Council. As a mechanism for resolving conflicts and maintaining peace, the Council is in fact evolving along with international relations, as it has to -- but, as, say, the contrasting cases of Kosovo and the second Iraq war suggest, this progression is not a neat and linear one.

(image from flickr user Dipp under a Creative Commons license)

Coup in Honduras

It's mainly being looked at through a Hugo Chavez-centric lens, but yesterday, the Honduran military arrested the country's president, Manuel Zelaya, in Latin America's first post-Cold War coup. Zelaya was an ally of the Venezuelan leader, and Chavez is already blaming the CIA for having a hand in Zelaya's ouster.

The reality seems to be that this was more of an internal Honduran political affair. The Huffington Post, in fact, is reporting that the Obama Administration had been trying "for weeks" to avert a coup. So both Chavez and the United States (as well as other bedfellows like Fidel Castro and the Organization for American States) are calling on the military to restore Zelaya to power.

It's tough to say what is less democratic here, since the immediate cause of the coup was a rather Chavez-like attempt on the part of Zelaya to negate his term limits, but the U.S. State Department is playing the safe card of, you know, opposing military coups and not looking like they’re trying to topple governments in Latin America. Given U.S. history in the region, that's probably the safe bet.

Here's a video from China's CCTV. I was on the lookout for bias, but the most I found was some apparent indignation that Zelaya was "detained while still in his pajamas!"

UPDATE: Brookings' Kevin Casas-Zamora argues (in The Argument, of course) that, even though he started this whole thing, Manuel Zelaya needs to be reinstated.

Bolton’s Bombs: Regime change, or…bombs

Let us return to Boltonland, shall we? With yet another ridiculous op-ed in a major paper, former U.S. ambassador to the UN (*shudder*) John Bolton gives us the current state of the Battle for Iran (war has already begun!): the people are longing to rise up, but they only need a helpful American hand to help them overthrow their government (not that we haven't tried that before...); a feckless and "empathetic" Barack Obama is so eager to sit down and sip tea with Iran's hardest hardliners that he can't understand that Iran is going to nuke everyone and everything no matter what we do; and if we just poke a stick into Iran's complicated ethnic politics, everything will be hunky-dory.

Ummm...

As vehement as his hatred for diplomacy may be, Bolton's chief target here is, quite simply, the Obama Administration. The op-ed, like many others on Iran, is written for baldly partisan purposes. Nowhere does Bolton actually suggest how the United States could "support" his desired goal of regime change; he is able to get away with such ambiguous criticism because, were his preferred policies of strict belligerence and hawkish interference to actually be pursued, his party would bear the inevitable political fallout. As it is, though, even when he admits that "we’re not really in a position now to offer much concrete assistance" (h/t ThinkProgress), his criticism will emerge unscathed. And whenever something violent or unsavory happens in Iran -- imagine that! -- he will undoubtedly reclaim his mantle as the right wing's favorite bullish prognosticator.

No danger of flying pig flu

That is, swine flu the H1N1 virus doesn't look like it's mixing with its avian counterpart to form some sort of volatile, death-defying H1N1+H5N1 (H5N2?) super-pandemic.

The World Health Organisation said on Thursday that the H1N1 virus was stable and there was no sign yet of it mixing with other influenza viruses.

Some health officials have raised concerns that if H1N1, known by many as swine flu, combined with the much deadlier H5N1 bird flu virus then the pandemic could claim many more lives.

"The virus is still very stable," WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan told reporters at a news briefing in Moscow when asked if there were any signs of the virus mixing with other strains such as avian flu.

A stable pandemic is still a pandemic, sure, but it befits the calm way with which the virus should be treated to make note of this relative stability.

(image from flickr user ittybittiesforyou under a Creative Commons license)

Kasparov check-mates his own logic

I can understand why Garry Kasparov hearts dissidents, since he's one of Russia's most prominent himself. And he may be able to beat anyone but a computer in chess, but his logic falls seriously short here:

But the Soviet Union used tanks to quash dissent when it could. Dictatorships use force when they can get away with it, not when a U.S. president makes a strong statement.

Okay, agreed. Nothing Barack Obama says or doesn't say about the Iranian "revolution" will affect how the country's leadership, who seem to be pretty desperate to hang on to power, employs violence. But then how does this follow?

President Dwight Eisenhower might have learned that lesson in 1956 when he said nothing and the Soviets sent tanks into Budapest anyway. Likewise, in 1968 the Soviets cracked down in Czechoslovakia even though the West said little. Regardless of what Mr. Obama says, the Iranian leaders will use all the force at their disposal to stay in power.

"That lesson" is not that silence from a U.S. president will cause a dictatorship to send in tanks to quash dissidents; it is, in fact, the opposite, as Kasparov said in the previous paragraph. There is no relationship between what the "leader of the free world" says and what the leader of an unfree country does to his own people. So, contrary to the thrust of this much emulated argument, Barack Obama not issuing his "support" for Iranian dissidents will not "cause" a greater crackdown in Iran. History is being twisted into erroneous causation here, and it's being used for purely political purposes.

(image from flickr user arellis49 under a Creative Commons license)