Introduction
This paper focuses on the relationship between the United Nations (UN) and the United States (US), in particular where they come together at the crossroads of ideas, ideals, norms and power politics. What happens at that intersection will have a profound influence on our collective destiny. Is it true that ‘American idealism created the UN and American scepticism is killing it’? The UN Charter articulates the normative architecture of world order based on quintessentially US values and worldview. No other country has had as much influence on designing the international organisation or on its operations once established; and no other will have as critical a role in determining its agenda and actions, nor as devastating an impact on its fortunes by withholding support.
Washington is the biggest financial contributor to the United Nation’s (UN’s) regular and peacekeeping budgets, has the most to gain and therefore also the most to lose from the UN’s performance and non-performance. Because of the hostility to which the UN is frequently subjected in sections of the American polity, this may seem surprising. Yet the UN was created as an international expression of liberal political values and its anti-American elements have always been overshadowed by the embedded institutional points of exercising United States (US) influence on key collective decisions. The Security Council, the world’s most critical executive decision-making body, has often bent to US will and is constitutionally unable to act against US vital interests owing to the veto. Overall, the UN has been responsive and sensitive, rather than inattentive, to US concerns, interests and preferences. When Bill Clinton advised us that for Washington to say yes, the UN had to say no, not only did we listen; we also held our tongues at Clinton’s chutzpah in telling others to learn to say no.
The UN may be a flawed institution, yet has many faithful devotees. It’s ageing yet iconic headquarters is located at the intersection of Interdependence Avenue and Multilateral Cooperation Street in Manhattan. But its destiny lies at the crossroads of Indifference Avenue and Hostility Street in Washington.
Three basic propositions can be put forward:
- The world is a better and safer place for all of us because the Cold War was fought, because of how it was fought, and because of who won;
- The world is a better and safer place for all of us because the UN exists, because of what it does, and because of what it symbolises;
- Therefore the world will be a better and safer place for all of us if the indispensable superpower and the indispensable international organisation work in tandem rather than at cross-purposes.
UN Normative Mandates
Gradually over the course of the last century the idea of an international community bound together by shared values, benefits and responsibilities, and common rules and procedures, took hold of peoples’ imagination. The UN is the institutional embodiment of that development. In this sense it is first and foremost the repository of international idealism, the belief that human beings belong to one family, inhabit the same planet and have joint custodial responsibility to husband resources and protect the environment for future generations. Its greatest strength is that it is the only universal forum for international cooperation and management. From its symbolism, universality and authenticated structures and procedures flow its qualities of a unique font of authority and legitimacy for international action.
Reflecting this, the core UN mandates are primarily normative; to preserve peace, promote development, protect human rights and conserve the environment. Operational plans are implementation strategies of these quintessentially normative mandates.
War has been as ubiquitous in human history as the wish for peace is universal. The 20th century captured the paradox only too well. We emplaced increasing normative, legislative and operational fetters on the right of states to go to war, yet the last century turned out to be the most murderous in history. Until the World War I, war was an accepted and normal part of the states system, with distinctive rules, norms and etiquette. In that Hobbesian world, the only protection against aggression was countervailing power, which increased both the cost of victory and the risk of failure. Since 1945, the UN has spawned a corpus of law to stigmatise aggression and create a robust norm against it.
In the theatre of world politics, the UN has been centre stage in preventing and managing conflicts, regulating armaments, championing human rights and international humanitarian law, liberating the colonised, providing economic and technical aid in the newly liberated countries, organising elections, empowering women, educating children, feeding the hungry, sheltering the dispossessed and displaced, housing the refugees, tending to the sick, and coordinating disaster relief and assistance; all on a 24/7 basis. Backstage, the UN helps to coordinate and manage a myriad of mundane activities whose pervasive influence on our daily lives would startle most people if they paused to think about it.
US Exceptionalism?
The global public goods of peace, prosperity, sustainable development, and good governance cannot be achieved by any one country acting on its own. Under conditions of modern civilisation, no country is an island sufficient unto itself anymore. ‘9/11’ was a decisive repudiation of the belief that the most powerful country ever in human history could shelter behind supposedly impregnable lines of continental defence. Yet while the terrorists destroyed the World Trade Centre, caused some damage to the Pentagon and shook American self-confidence momentarily, they did not and cannot destroy the idea and symbolism of the United States; the metaphor of the shining city on the hill burning bright with the hopes of all humankind, in particular the oppressed, the downtrodden and the outcasts. That is, in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln, a nation ‘conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men [and women] are created equal’. It has been the particular genius of America to welcome the despised and discarded dregs of other societies, to offer them the chance to live the American dream, to watch their dreams turn into reality, and then to harness those dreams to forge the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth. Barack Obama as president is the American dream come true.
If power and wealth corrupt, might supreme power and wealth corrupt supremely? Because of the sustaining belief in being a virtuous power, the US is averse to domesticating international values and norms on, for instance, greenhouse gas emissions, the death penalty, landmines and the pursuit of universal justice. But this self-image of exceptionalism is neither congruent with how others see it, nor conducive to securing their cooperation. The reality of international inequality structures the relationship between the de facto imperial centre and all others.
Contrary to instant explanations offered after 9/11 that the US is the terrorists’ target of choice because of its success, dynamism and openness, the core basis of international respect for the US, albeit with reservations and caveats, is its extraordinary success as a society, economy and polity. In truth the peace of the world since 1945 has depended more on American power and wisdom than UN felicity.
Global Power and Global Authority
While power is the capacity to implement policy and enforce rules, authority is the right to make the policy and set the rules. The US has global power and reach but lacks international authority. The UN has authority but no power and, as such, practices only part of its Charter. Headquartered in the US, universal in membership, it symbolises global governance but is not world government.
Washington finds it difficult to comprehend why the UN does not accept the history of the exercise of American power being virtuous in intent and beneficent in results. But authority too is weakened when it becomes just a handmaiden to power. The Bush administration’s assaults on UN-centred law undermined the norm of a world of laws, the efficacy of international law and the legitimacy of the UN as the authoritative validation of international behaviour.
The distance from hubris to delusion is short; the Bush Administration covered that short distnce in a sprint. It rejected President Truman’s counsel that America must deny itself the licence to do always as it pleases, ignored President Kennedy’s wisdom that America is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and rode roughshod over four decades of tradition of enlightened self-interest and liberal internationalism as the guiding normative template of US foreign policy.
Progress towards the good international society requires that force be harnessed to authority rather than lawful authority being hijacked to pursue the agenda of power politics. The UN seeks to replace the balance of power with a community of power and represents the dream of a world ruled by reason. It is the means of outlawing war and mobilising the collective will of the world community to deter, apprehend and punish international law-breakers. It was meant to be the framework within which members of the international system negotiated agreements on the rules of behaviour and the legal norms of proper conduct in order to preserve the society of states.
Just as America is a nation of laws, so the UN is dedicated to establishing the rule of international law. Not to be controversial, but lest we forget; we did successfully disarm Saddam Hussein. The UN Charter was a triumph of hope and idealism over the experience of two world wars. The flame of idealism flickered in the chill winds of the Cold War but resists being extinguished. In the midst of the swirling tides of change, the UN must strive for a balance between the desirable and the possible. It is still the symbol of our dreams for a better world, where weakness can be compensated by justice and fairness, and the law of the jungle replaced by the rule of law.
Iraq was not the first and will not be the last US-led military mission outside the UN framework. The Rand Corporation’s study of US combat and UN peace operations concluded that non-UN operations tend to be more costly, as with US or EU missions in Europe, or less competent, as with regional organisations other than European. The UN is better at low profile, small footprint operations where soft power assets of international legitimacy and political impartiality compensate for hard power deficit. Military reversals are less damaging to the UN because military force is not the source of its credibility; whereas they strike at the very basis of US influence.
The sense of shared values and solidarity that makes up an international community may have frayed a thread too far. There is many more state actors, whose interests and perspectives diverge markedly compared to the simpler world of 1945. Many of them are buffeted by cross-pressures from several non-state actors. The issues they have to confront are more numerous, complex and challenging, for example hot button items like global warming, HIV/AIDS and nuclear terrorism that were not on the international agenda in June 1945. A ‘community’ exists to the extent that its members share certain core values and agree on what is legitimate behaviour. The serious disagreements among the states of the world on many key issues may be evidence of a growing loss of the sense of international community on which the UN is predicated.
History’s learning curve shows that the UN ideal can neither be attained nor abandoned. The UN record shows a surprising capacity for institutional innovation, conceptual advances, policy adaptation, and organisational learning with respect to peacekeeping, human security, human rights, atrocity crimes, international criminal justice, sanctions, pandemics and terrorism.
Promise and Performance Gaps
The UN has been receptive rather than resistant to reforms. Yet the responses to calls for UN action are not as prompt, effective or uniform as they should be. The gap between promise and performance remains unacceptably large. The world becoming more peaceful is no consolation to the suffering people of Burma, Darfur, Libya, or North Korea. To the extent that civilians now comprise the overwhelming conflict-related casualties; their protection will determine the credibility of the UN’s peace and security mandate.
The UN will remain relevant for setting international standards and norms to regulate interstate behaviour. Norms, laws and treaties for governing the global commons – from global warming and nuclear proliferation to terrorism and trade – will either be negotiated in UN forums, or ratified by the UN-centred intergovernmental machinery. Its humanitarian service delivery functions are widely appreciated. Its peace operations offer the best crossover between cost efficiency and effectiveness. The almost total withdrawal of Western countries, including Australia, from UN peace operations, is profoundly regrettable. Good international citizenship would resist the drift into a world of de facto peacekeeping apartheid.
International Expectations and Collective Action
There is no foreseeable substitute for the institutional and political legitimacy of the UN international organisation. It remains our one and best hope for unity of purpose and action in a world of almost infinite diversity – a world in which problems without passports require solutions without passports. Unbridled nationalism and the raw interplay of power must be mediated and moderated in its international framework.
If international consensus exists, the UN can provide the most authoritative forum for translating that into new norms, treaties, policies and operations. No other forum could leverage that process more efficiently or as effectively. What the UN cannot do is to manufacture and fabricate international consensus where none exists. It cannot be the centre for harmonising national interests – and mediating or reconciling them into the international interest – when the divisions are too deep to be papered over by diplomacy, when the disputes are too intractable to be resolved around the negotiating table.
Of course the UN is an international bureaucracy with many failings and flaws; and a forum often used and abused by governments for finger pointing, not problem solving. There is a UN proclivity to seek fresh legislation as the solution to the problem of failures of implementation. Too often has the UN demonstrated a failure to tackle urgent collective action problems due to institutionalised unwillingness, inability, or incapacity.
Yet the UN remains the focus of international expectations and the locus of collective action. The reason for this is that more, much more than the attributes of bureaucratic rigidity, institutional timidity and intergovernmental trench warfare; the UNi s the one body that houses the divided fragments of humanity. It is an idea, a symbol of an imagined and constructed community of strangers. It exists to bring about a world where fear is changed to hope, want gives way to dignity, and apprehensions are turned into aspirations. In the words of illustrious Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN was ‘not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell’.
True; but the concept of hell is incomplete without the accompanying concept of heaven.
