Reuters: “Some 2.6 billion people in the world, mainly in Africa and Asia, lack access to basic sanitation, increasing the risk of diarrhea and other diseases fatal to children, said a U.N. report released on Thursday.
UNICEF, the U.N. children’s fund, in a study on water and sanitation in developing nations, concluded that U.N. goals could be met on clean water, especially in urban areas, but the same was not true for access to the crudest of toilets.”
The night before last I was privy to a sneak preview of an ambitious foreign policy manifesto that is being rolled out on Capitol Hill today. The plan, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century, is the product of a two-year long series of meetings of a bi-partisan brain trust of foreign policy and national security experts convened at the Woodrow Wilson school. Under the steering of Anne-Marie Slaughter and G. John Ickenberry, the Princeton Project on National Security has attempted to comprehensively outline a sustainable 21st Century American foreign policy. As Dr. Slaughter put it last night, the group’s inspiration was to create the intellectual equivalent to George Kennan’s famous X Article in Foreign Affairs, but updated for our time.
They may have come close.
The report is wide-ranging. And in terms of United States engagement with the world, the group recognizes the centrality of multilateral institutions to promoting American security interests. To that end, it calls for a widespread reform of the security and peace apparatus of the United Nations. Some of these reforms draw directly from the 2004 U.N. High Level Panel report that recommended expanding the Security Council to make it more geographically diverse. It also suggests developing mechanisms for the United Nations to authorize the use of force retroactively in cases demanding immediate action or when political stalemate has effectively blocked all action.
But perhaps the most eye-catching recommendation is that an expansion of the Council should correspond with an abolition of the veto on resolutions authorizing direct action in response to a crisis. The current veto process, the report argues, does not serve the interest of the United States. “America does not need it to block action of which we do not approve; we are almost always pushing the Security Council to take action, rather than not, and in those cases where we are unpersuaded of the wisdom of a particular course, we prefer to use diplomacy rather than the veto. Instead, the veto is a license for prevarication, obstructionism, and disillusionment. The veto should instead be replaced by a supermajority vote – of perhaps three quarters of voting members – in an enlarged Security Council.” The document then stresses that the veto can be used to block politically motivated condemnatory resolutions.
The entire document is well worth a read. If nothing else, it will inspire lively debate over the role of multilateral institutions in American national security.
“More than half of all children who do not go to school are girls. Achieving universal primary education is a Millennium Development Goal and one of UNICEF’s primary objectives.
At a panel discussion organized by the US Mission to the United Nations in New York, UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman gave a keynote address on the vital importance of educating girls in the developing world.” More
“The United Nations atomic watchdog agency has called on all Member States to provide political, financial, and technical support to prevent nuclear and radiological terrorism.
The call, which also seeks necessary funds for the Nuclear Security Fund, came in a resolution passed by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Conference, which was attended by more than 100 Member States and ended last week.” More
In his op-ed lambasting the “ineffective” United Nations, the Miami Herald’s Carlos Alberto Montaner seems to forget that the United Nations has a Security Council with five veto-wielding members. Throughout the editorial he repeatedly cites the large membership of the General Assembly as a sui generis barrier to solving international crises, but he fails to ever mention the smaller Security Council, which is the United Nations organ entrusted to take on global crises as they emerge.Says Montaner, “The United Nations is a costly, clumsy and corrupt bureaucracy that has not achieved any of the objectives entrusted to it at the time of its creation. The idea of establishing the principle of a majority — one vote to every nation — to settle the international clashes and crashes was foolish. How can Brazil’s vote have the same value as the vote of the Seychelle Islands?”
Further demonstrating his seeming unfamiliarity Security Council–and the United Nations system–Montaner writes, “When a crisis occurs in the world, the principal actors solve, alleviate or deflect it by holding conversations in the corridors or negotiations behind closed doors, and then taking the outcome to the plenum of the assembly so that it may be approved. And if not even this can be accomplished — as happened during the civil war in the Balkans in former Yugoslavia — the organization is bypassed…”
It is the 15 member Security Council, not the 192 member General Assembly, that works to solve international crises like the 34 day war in Lebanon this summer, or the recent flare up in East Timor. Though it would undermine his argument, it would be appropriate to make this distinction if one’s principal objection to the United Nations is that its members, taken as a whole, cannot work together to solve international crises.
Finally, Montaner asks, “Objectively speaking, what good is the United Nations? To serve as a worldwide stage for a clown like Chavez?”
Since Hugo Chavez’ rant last week, this has been a favorite refrain from the anti-UN crowd. But Hugo Chavez does not speak for the United Nations, he speaks for Hugo Chavez. If one national leaders’ personal distain for the leader of another member state proves that the United Nations is fatally flawed, then it would be hard to see how any international organization could ever exist in the first place. Thankfully, international relations transcend personal animosities.
From Salon: “I want to vote for Ted Turner for president … of the world. Turner gave a speech at the World Trade Organization’s Public Forum this morning in Geneva that is equal parts inspiring and enlightening, and cuts right to the core of what this blog cares about. It is, in short, a program for making the world work.”
The SC: The Security Council today held its last consultations under the Council Presidency of ROK. Tomorrow, Russia will take over the rotating Presidency of the Security Council for March under Ambassador Vitaly Churkin.
The SG: At the Fifth Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations in Vienna, Austria today, the SG emphasized the role of youth in ensuring a “prosperous, equitable and peaceful future.”
The SG: In Ethiopia over the weekend, the SG is now in the United Arab Emirates. Today he met with Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashed Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, where the two discussed developments in the region, including Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, and in the Middle East Peace Process.
