From great hope to scapegoat - US support of the United Nations

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1996 by Stanley Meisler

Soon after the inauguration of President Clinton, Republican critics, led by former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, began a drumbeat of derision against the United Nations. They accused Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali of usurping unwarranted power, and they berated the Clinton foreign policy team for supposedly falling under his sway. At its most fatuous moment, the Republican attack included a bill-introduced on the eve of the U.N.'s 50th anniversary-calling for the United States to withdraw from the international organization altogether.

During the last three years, the U.N. has crashed from great heights. At the end of the Persian Gulf War, the feeling in New York was that the U.N. could do anything--so long as the United States, its allies, and Russia agreed. This euphoric mood did not last. By the end of 1995, thanks to America's refusal to pay all its dues, the U.N. was fast approaching bankruptcy. Even more humiliating, the organization was so poorly regarded as a guardian of peace that the United States insisted it have no more than a minor role in the implementation of the Dayton peace accords. Yet it was not the Republican drumbeat that brought the U.N. down. The irony is that the U.N.'s troubles were fueled mainly by its most powerful friends in the Clinton administration.

Instead of defending the U.N. as the most logical instrument for peaceful settlement of Third World crises in a chaotic post-cold War world, the Clinton administration has chosen to berate the organization as unwise (in Somalia), cowardly (in Bosnia), and inept (in its bureaucracy). The U.S. has also created a leadership crisis by announcing it will veto Boutros-Ghali's bid for a second term. Washington has every right to hold the U.N. to high standards. But the administration's attacks on the U.N. have been so shrill that they have rendered it incapable of dealing with many of the conflicts that now cry out for help.

The Clinton administration has not organized any kind of campaign against the U.N.; instead, it has slowly slipped into a posture of negativism. U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright had come to New York espousing a doctrine of "assertive multilateralism," in which the United States would strengthen

Stanley Meisler is the U.N. correspondent of the Los Angeles Times and author of United Nations: The First Fifty Years. the U.N. while asserting leadership over it. The U.N.'s Somalia mission--tailored to American specifications and run by a retired American admiral--was the model. But the mission soon crumbled into a fiasco. In panic, the Clinton administration not only abandoned "assertive multilateralism" but swiftly branded the U.N. the sole culprit in Somalia. Having used the U.N. as a scapegoat once, the Clinton administration soon found that the world organization could be used as a convenient shield to hide the American failure to come up with a coherent policy for Bosnia.

At the same time, the administration devised a strategy of defending the U.N. in Congress by attacking its management and administration. Tough-minded in their demands for reform of the U.N. bureaucracy, Ambassador Albright and Secretary of State Warren Christopher have tried to persuade Congress that a hard-nosed Clinton administration is whipping the U.N. into a lean organization worthy of American support. The case for reform is strong--the U.N, bureaucracy is often denounced as bloated and inefficient--but the strategy has come at a cost: the failure to make a positive and thoughtful case that, unless the United States wants to play the role of world policeman, it needs the U.N. to deal with the world's conflagations.

Great Expectations

Since it began, the U.N. has seen its fortunes rise and fall frenetically. President Franklin D. Roosevelt conceived of it as a League of Nations with teeth; he envisioned the Big Five on the Security Council as the Five Policemen who would ensure order in a chaotic world. Americans had high hopes at first that the organization would be an instrument for universal peace. Those hopes, of course, were quickly dashed by the Cold War. The United States was able to galvanize the U.N. into defending South Korea against North Korean aggression in 1950, but only because the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council at the time. The enmity between the United States and the Soviet Union paralyzed the Security Council for most of the next 40 years, allowing it to deal only with those problems that were peripheral to the Cold War, like Israel (in the early years), the Suez Canal crisis, the bloody independence of the Beigian Congo, and the civil war in Cyprus. When Third World countries took over the General Assembly and turned the U.N. into an America-bashing society in the 1970s and early 1980s, the organization's reputation plummeted.

But by the early 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and victory in the Persian Gulf, many Americans had renewed hope that the U.N. could finally do what its founding fathers intended. With the United States and Russia in frequent agreement, Ambassador Albright described the Security Council as an "international 911 number." Countries in distress called, and the Security Council responded by dispatching peacekeepers to Cambodia, El Salvador, Angola, Mozambique, Haiti, and other trouble spots. But the U.N.'s self-confidence was shattered by the debacle in Somalia and the crisis in Bosnia.