WHAT'S THE POINT OF DIPLOMACY IF IT DOESN'T SERVE POLITICS?

Politics trumps diplomacy in UN reform dispute (Warren Hoge, 11/22/05, The New York Times)

At issue is how management-reform proposals that would broaden the power of the secretary general's office are being pressed assertively by Bolton and aggravating tensions between the 191-member General Assembly, with its entrenched bureaucracy, and the office of the secretary general.

"It looks like it could be a real train wreck," said Edward Luck, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University in New York and a former president of the UN Association of the United States. "It's a basic clash over who's in charge: Is it the General Assembly or is it the secretary general?"

The clash is being seen in crisis terms in the offices of Secretary General Kofi Annan. "This is serious stuff," said Mark Malloch Brown, Annan's chief of staff. "I think in many ways it is setting the outcome of whether the United Nations matters or not in 10 years' time." [...]

Distrust has deepened in the debate over change because many nations believe that the secretary general's office has been tacking too close to the United States in its effort to repair relations with Washington that were damaged over the war in Iraq and the scandal-ridden oil-for-food program.

"One gets the impression that other countries are suspicious that the secretary general and his aides are really puppets being manipulated by Washington," Luck said.

The only chance the UN has to matter in the future is by tacking to our line and joining the fight to make states conform to Anglo-American of democratic legitimacy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 22, 2005 8:13 AM