Mark Steyn: There is no cure for the UN

The Spectator (U.K.) ^ | 09/17/05 | Mark Steyn

[Pokey78]

Kofi Annan is the very embodiment of transnationalism’s polite fictions: a dapper soft-spoken African, he seems the soul of moderation. Even when what he’s actually saying is highly immoderate, and even when he’s standing next to some disgusting dictator as he says it, he’s always a reliably decaffeinated Kofi.

So what if his brother and his son and his son’s best pal are under investigation in the UN oil-for-food scandal? So what if his secretariat got a $1.4 billion oil-for-food administration fee yet apparently couldn’t afford an auditor for the programme? So what if the head of Kofi’s budget oversight committee was too busy sluicing hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself to notice whether anybody else was on the take? So what if Saddam Hussein used the UN as a money-laundering operation to advance his geopolitical aims? Paul Volcker’s independent report has decided that, even though Mr Annan knew of the kickbacks since at least 2001, the secretary-general is guilty of sins of omission rather than commission. He and his deputy, Canada’s Louise Frechette, simply failed to notice the world’s all-time biggest scam exponentially expanding under their noses and with the enthusiastic participation of their closest colleagues.

Possibly they carelessly assumed it was just the usual nickel’n’dime UN corruption — like the child-sex rings and drug cartels that operate out of pretty well every peacekeeping operation. But the point is, while it may have happened on Kofi’s watch, he wasn’t watching, so that’s OK. Like OJ promising to hunt down the real killers, Mr Annan and Mme Frechette are committed to staying in their jobs and redoubling their efforts to spearhead the reforms the UN vitally needs. As the media ‘talking points’ distributed by the secretary-general to his underlings put it, ‘It is time to focus on the important reform agenda’ because ‘the inquiry’s findings underscore the vital importance of proposed management reforms’. And if we say ‘vital’ and ‘focus’ and ‘underscore’ often enough, this whole thing will fade away and it will be back to business as usual.

I, too, am in favour of Kofi Annan staying on, not just till his term expires in December 2006, but for five, ten years after that, if he wishes. If I was as eager for UN ‘reform’ as its supporters claim to be, I’d toss Kofi to the sharks and get some new broom in to sweep clean. But if, as I do, you believe 90 per cent of UN ‘reforms’ are likely to be either meaningless or actively harmful, a discredited and damaged secretary-general clinging to office is as good as it’s likely to get — short of promoting Didier Bourguet, the UN staffer in Congo and the Central African Republic charged with running a paedophile ring. A UN that refuses to hold Kofi Annan to account will be harder to pass off as a UN that represents the world’s ‘moral authority’, in Clare Short’s blissfully surreal characterisation.

What’s important to understand is that Mr Annan’s ramshackle UN of humanitarian money-launderers, peacekeeper-rapists and a human rights commission that looks like a lifetime-achievement awards ceremony for the world’s torturers is not a momentary aberration. Nor can it be corrected by bureaucratic reforms designed to ensure that the failed budget oversight committee will henceforth be policed by a budget oversight committee oversight committee. The oil-for-food fiasco is the UN, the predictable spawn of its utopian fantasies and fetid realities. If Saddam grasped this more clearly than Clare Short or Polly Toynbee, well, that’s why he is — was — an A-list dictator and they’re not.

Why was there an oil-for-fraud programme in the first place? Because back in the 1990s, having thrown a big old multilateral Gulf war and gotten to the gates of Baghdad, the grand UN coalition then decided against toppling Saddam. So, having shirked the responsibilities that come with having a real policy, America, Britain and the rest were in the market for a pseudo-policy. And where does an advanced Western democracy go when it wants a pseudo-policy? Why, the UN! Saddam correctly calculated that the great powers were overinvested in oil-for-food as a figleaf for their lack of will and he reasoned that in such an environment their figleaf would also serve as a discreet veil for all kinds of other activities. He didn’t game the system, he simply understood far better than Clinton and Bush, Major and Blair how it worked.

That’s the essence of transnationalism. For weeks now the Bush administration has been advised — by Mr Blair among others — that they should sign on to all the multilateral guff being peddled at this week’s so-called ‘High-Level Plenary Meeting’ because come on, it’s mostly a lot of feelgood blather, so where’s the harm? When it comes to identifying which transnational tumours metastasising across the global scene are benign, the Prime Minister isn’t your most reliable diagnostician. As I recall, the principal beneficiaries of the United Kingdom’s signature on the European Declaration of Human Rights were supposed to be British transsexuals, who were very excited about it for some reason or another. Instead, it turned out to be boom time for suspected Islamist terrorists, non-citizens but now serenaded by every London judge with a soothing chorus of ‘Undeportable, that’s what you are.’

Transnationalism is the mechanism by which the world’s most enlightened progressives provide cover for its darkest forces. It’s a largely unconscious alliance but not an illogical one. Western proponents of ‘sustainable consumption’ and some of the other loopy NGO-beloved eco-concepts up for debate in New York this week have at least this much in common with psychotic Third World thugocracies: both groups find it hard to win free elections, both regard transnational bodies as useful for conferring a respect unearned at the ballot box, and neither is unduly troubled by the lack of accountability in global institutions.

Those of us who believe that big government is by definition remote government and that therefore the pretensions to world government of the UN make it potentially the worst of all should, in theory, argue for withdrawal from the organisation. A neighbour of mine periodically pins one of his ‘US OUT OF UN NOW!’ bumper stickers to the back of my rig, and I’m happy to drive around with it. Outside a few college towns and effete coastal enclaves, I don’t believe there would be any political downside for candidates campaigning on a platform of pulling out of the UN entirely, and I’d encourage Republicans to do so if only as a way of unnerving those lazy pols like John Kerry who are prone to mindless transnationalist boosterism. But as a matter of practical politics I can’t see the US leaving the UN any time soon.

Can the US force the UN to reform itself? I mean really reform itself, not just get-Kofi-off-the-hook reform. Well, look at it this way: with hindsight, the UN was most effective when it was least effective — that’s to say, the four decades between Korea and the Gulf when the Cold War mutually assured vetoes at least accurately represented the global stand-off. Now, however, we’re in a unipolar world. And, as a result, the UN is no longer a permanent talking-shop for the world’s powers but an alternative power in and of itself — a sort of ersatz superpower intended to counter the real one. Consider the 85 yes-or-no votes America made in the General Assembly in 2003:

The Arab League members voted against the US position 88.7 per cent of the time.

The ASEAN members voted against the US position 84.5 per cent of the time.

The Islamic Conference members voted against the US position 84.1 per cent of the time.

The African members voted against the US position 83.8 per cent of the time.

The Non-Aligned Movement members voted against the US position 82.7 per cent of the time.

And European Union members voted against the US position 54.5 per cent of the time.

You can take the view of the Will Hutton school that this is proof of America’s isolation and that the United States now needs to issue a ‘Declaration of Interdependence’ with the world. Or you can be like the proud mom in Irving Berlin’s Great War marching song: ‘They Were All Out Of Step But Jim’. But what the figures really demonstrate is that the logic of the post-Cold War UN is to be institutionally anti-American. Washington could seize on Kofi Annan’s present embarrassment and lean hard on him to reform this and reorganise that and reinvent the other and, if they threw their full diplomatic muscle behind it, they might get those anti-US votes down to — what, a tad over 80 per cent? And along the way they’d find that they’d ‘reformed’ a corrupt dysfunctional sclerotic anti-American club into a lean mean functioning effective anti-American club. Which is, if they’re honest, what most reformers mean by ‘reform’.

Obviously, within those various blocs, America has many friends. But the regional voting structure of the UN means that even relatively well-disposed allies become less friendly when their voice is filtered through geographic groupings that prize solidarity over all. For example, Libya became chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission because it was felt to be Africa’s turn and Africa put up only one candidate and the European Union had agreed to vote as a bloc and they didn’t wish to be seen to be disrespecting Africa by voting against its preferred candidate, so they abstained. So, by filtering Britain’s voice through one transnational body (the EU) into another (the UN) to vote on the candidate of a third (the African Union), Her Majesty’s Government is now on record as having no objection to the world’s leading human rights body being headed by a one-man dictatorship that blows up American airliners in British airspace. It’s a good thing the UN has ‘moral authority’, because the United Kingdom certainly doesn’t. Thus, transnationalism artificially diminishes the voice of second-tier powers and artificially inflates basket-case psycho states.

Any real reform of the UN would start by dismantling the deeply unhealthy regional structure. Instead, reformers complain that the permanent Security Council membership excludes all of Africa and Latin America, and demand that Brazil and South Africa be brought on board as regional house captains. That would be a disaster. An India that sits alongside America as a fellow democracy, trading partner and beneficiary of the Britannic inheritance is one thing. An India that represents an invented power bloc defined by the increasingly outmoded constraints of geography would just be a vehicle for taking those 85 per cent negative votes up to the Security Council.

Yet we’re now being told that the United States is obstructing the 60th anniversary ‘full-blown relaunching’, as the Washington Post puts it, by impeding the expansion of the Security Council. One can only hope so. ‘Relaunching’ the UN in a fast-changing world is like trying to redesign a horse-and-buggy for a moon-shot. Take last month’s first Sino-Russian war games, a rare joint venture by the two non-Western members of the Big Five. Moscow may see an alliance with Beijing as its only hope of retaining world-power status. By 2020, when the agreement on the 4,000-mile Russian-Chinese border comes up for renegotiation, the Far East of the Russian Federation, containing 80 per cent of the country’s resources, will have been de facto settled by the Chinese.

That’s not a corner of the world anyone thinks about much right now, but it will look profoundly different in 15 years’ time. How likely are we — or, more to the point, Kofi Annan, Louise Frechette and co. — to be able to construct formal structures for a world just a decade and a half hence? Given the unlikelihood of getting it right, it’s preferable to stick with the second world war victory parade preserved in aspic. The existing Security Council’s ever more obvious obsolescence will be the best counterweight to the lazy assumption that transnationalism is the wave of the future.

So I hope that by the time you read this the deliberations at Turtle Bay are poised somewhere between paralysis and meltdown. The polite fictions of Kofi Annan really belong to the lost world of 10 September 2001. It was very agreeable if you were one of the bespoke chaps cruising from summit to summit — UN, EU, G8 — mediating the cares of the planet. And it was all terribly sophisticated, as sophisticated as an urbane Paris boulevardier from the fin de siècle, impeccably coiffed and coutured but riddled with syphilis. Since Osama bin Laden blew apart those polite fictions, the effective international relationships — America and Australia, America and India — have taken place without the construction of permanent secretariats. Let’s keep it that way. The best way to avoid having to ‘reform’ transnational bureaucracies is not to have them in the first place.

[Felicity Fahrquar]

Let's go another step in thinking. What if President Bush said, "We are pulling out of the UN effective immediately and will use that money to pay for recovery from Katrina, Ophelia, etc. The UN is welcome to leave by December 2005 and after that we will be charging rent, giving parking tickets and allowing no diplomatic immunity for UN members in the US."

Wicked girl, now you're just toying with our emotions... :)

This is one of Steyn's best, and that's saying something.

[NZerFromHK]

See my post 40. I think the US should actually raise their guards against the ASEAN as well, because unlike the EU they are actually developing economically.

[maica]

We have to hope that all countries are being watched. Most Americans are so ignorant (as in unaware) of Asian countries that it is sad, and scary.

US Media power lives in the NY to DC corridor and PacRim is a concept they are oblivious to.

[Neophyte]

Well, I totally agree with your assertion that Mark Steyn's wit is biting:

"thugocracies", "Undeportable, that's what you are"

but would like to add my choice to your quotes:

he’s always a reliably decaffeinated Kofi.

[nothingnew]

Thanks Pokey

FMCDH(BITS)

[mmercier]

Too nauseating to read past:

>> a discredited and damaged secretary-general clinging to office is as good as it’s likely to get

Let them twist in the wind. We will pay one way or the other, might as well get a laugh out of the trillions these pygmies will cost us over the next decades.

[finnigan2]

"Western proponents of ‘sustainable consumption’ and some of the other loopy NGO-beloved eco-concepts up for debate in New York this week have at least this much in common with psychotic Third World thugocracies: both groups find it hard to win free elections, both regard transnational bodies as useful for conferring a respect unearned at the ballot box, and neither is unduly troubled by the lack of accountability in global institutions."

- Jeez, when I was in college years ago I can remember a bunch of us buying some cheap wine and sitting around all night arguing the merits of a statement like the one above. With insights like that, Steyn should be teaching international relations at some reputable university. I'm sure his lectures would be overbooked.

[NZerFromHK]

I think it is an absolute must, because Southeast Asian anti-Americanism are from a confident economically newly-developed people with classical nationalistic aspirations and perhaps with some religious fervours as well. They are not from rich, spoiled, hedonistic, but economically dim as is the European Union, nor are they from countries that are sunk in hopelessness as do many of the Thirfd World banana republics.

They have the thoughts, and the will, and the means to actually threaten America. In particular, watch out Malaysia because this is a country where Muslims do know how to make and do business. Do a "divide-and-conquer" approach to the camp: develop relations with Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, and perhspa (ugh) Vietnam, and isolate Burma (which is of course nasty and coincidentially also propped up by P.R. China), and engage Indonesia.

[maica]

I don't understand why these countries would want to challenge America, as opposed to becoming trading partners with America.

Have you ever visited the States? You should try to spend some time here. We are so strong economically, as well as emotionally, it is hard to imagine from afar.

[maica]

With insights like that, Steyn should be teaching international relations at some reputable university. I'm sure his lectures would be overbooked.
#####

He would be a Rock Star of lecturers.

[NZerFromHK]

Yes I have been to the US for four times (first time in 1991, and the most recent being 2 years ago) and with a brother as permanent resident. Spent time in all the popular tourist destinations (Hawaii, LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, NYC, Boston, Philly, DC, Niagara Falls, Orlando and Disney World), as well as places that are "Average America" like Pittsburgh, Rochester NY, and suburban SE Michigan. Understand the US better than most Asians.

In fact it is interesting to note about Southeast Asia. They are newly rich with new highrises and skyscrapers literally everywhere - they are going through what Boston or NYC went through 100 years ago. They have the newest rapid transit systems (subway/metro), and literally everyone owns 3G mobile phones and with the latest PDA and iPod in their pockets. They are not starving. When you were taught at school that we are progressing and the West is stagnating, you would have assumed the US is like Europe in stagnation. Of course they then become confident and thinking that they will be destined to become the driving seat of history in the 21st century.

Another thing to consider is that there is no postmodernism as an intellectual current in Southeast Asia. They have nationalism and modernistic development, and they view the West's postmodernism as a sign that "their primes are now a thing of the past". Of course American heartland disagrees with postmodernism, but most Southeast Asians are extremely ignorant of the American heartland like Missouri or Kentucky or Iowa.

If you look at photos of major Southeast Asian cities, you will notice how uniformly modernistic they are. Photos of Kuala Lumpur:

Singapore:

Jakarta

Bangkok:

Little do they realize how actually Middle America lives. Or maybe they do, but they are thinking "Look at these poor Americans! They are still using analogue mobile phones!"

[GretchenM]

bump

[Steve0113]

Steyn sees the UN for exactly what it is. He reminds me of an AC-130 circling over a target, blasting it into oblivion. This is (another) keeper.

[Victoria Delsoul]

Can the US force the UN to reform itself? I mean really reform itself, not just get-Kofi-off-the-hook reform. Well, look at it this way: with hindsight, the UN was most effective when it was least effective — that’s to say, the four decades between Korea and the Gulf when the Cold War mutually assured vetoes at least accurately represented the global stand-off. Now, however, we’re in a unipolar world. And, as a result, the UN is no longer a permanent talking-shop for the world’s powers but an alternative power in and of itself — a sort of ersatz superpower intended to counter the real one. Consider the 85 yes-or-no votes America made in the General Assembly in 2003:

Short answer: NO

[Watery Tart]

Transnationalism is the mechanism by which the world’s most enlightened progressives provide cover for its darkest forces. It’s a largely unconscious alliance but not an illogical one. Western proponents of ‘sustainable consumption’ and some of the other loopy NGO-beloved eco-concepts up for debate in New York this week have at least this much in common with psychotic Third World thugocracies: both groups find it hard to win free elections, both regard transnational bodies as useful for conferring a respect unearned at the ballot box, and neither is unduly troubled by the lack of accountability in global institutions.

Thanks, Pokey. Now compress this to fit into a tag-line....

[BartMan1]

College sophmores find it useful to argue the merits of Steyn's argument.

Grownups know it is true.

Your sarcasm is somewhat cryptic.

[finnigan2]

"Your sarcasm is somewhat cryptic."

- Sardonic perhaps, but not sarcastic. Everyone understands that college freshmen are idealistic by nature and take such ideas as Steyn presents very, very seriously.
You have to have had first hand experience with the breathtaking hypocrisy and cynicism of UN and NGO functionaries to really appreciate the truth of Steyn's observation on this point.
Unfortunately, most freshmen still retain the innocence which makes the statement debatable.

[knighthawk]

It will isolate the US from the rest of the world, but moving Bolton into the UN gave them a signal we don't take it anymore and maybe the UN knows the country who is paying for them is fed up with the corruption and dictators running the show.

[knighthawk]

Hey is the best!

[jokar]

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