Monitoring Policy Making at the United Nations |
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Ian Williams: "Helms's Coffee for Kofi" 
Ian Williams
Helms's Coffee for Kofi
The Nation magazine (New York)
March 3, 1997, pp. 21-23
In his State of the Union Message, Bill Clinton referred to the state of the United Nations -- in the fine print. He talked of paying "our debts and dues...to a reforming United Nations." This seemingly generous gesture to newly appointed Secretary General Kofi Annan begs the question of just what sorts of changes are needed at the U.N. The qualifier "reformed" suggests that the honeymoon between Annan and Washington is unlikely to be long or blissful.Indeed, there is already a morning-after-the-party feel to it, epitomized by Senator Jesse Helms's invocation to the U.N. to "wake up and smell the coffee," and the Senator's talk of "benchmarking" U.N. reforms before the United States pays the $1.6 billion in dues that it owes to the organization.
Even by Helms's curmudgeonly standards, this was a remarkable snub from the head of the Foreign Relations Committee to the man the United States had moved the earth, if not the heavens, to install as Secretary General (by single-handedly blocking reelection of his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali). The implication is that Annan won't be on the Senator's Christmas card list.
In their unsuccessful attempt to rally international support to boot out Boutros-Ghali, then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright's staff had disingenuously assured other U.N. delegations that Congress would not allow the overdue $1.6 billion to be paid as long as he remained Secretary General. Of course, as the U.S. delegation pointed out immediately after his ouster, that didn't mean America would pay if someone else were elected.
In fact, the whole affair had more to do with persuading Helms to support Albright's nomination as Secretary of State than it did with persuading Congress to pay up. By now it is clear that what appeared to be Clinton's tactic of pre-emptive capitulation to conservatives is actually a long-term strategy. There is little hope of a determined Administration attempt to persuade Congress to honor its fiduciary obligations to the U.N.
Reneging on the debt is a strategy also espoused by Albright herself. The omission in her first press conference of any mention of prioritizing payment of back dues was more than just an oversight for someone who has used the U.N. as her stepping stone. No one who observed Albright playing to the Capitol Hill gallery during her time as U.N. ambassador would suspect her of having either the inclination or, in her own pungent diction, the cojones, to take Helms to task on this issue. Despite the talk of "multilateral assertiveness" back in 1993, this Administration will continue to subordinate foreign policy to domestic polls and lobbies.
White House waffling about "bipartisanship" and compromise in fact dooms any serious support for the U.N. from the outset of Clinton's second term. Compromising with Helms and his friends on "reform" is impossible in any real sense, since his underlying policy is to destroy, not recast, the U.N. The changes that the Senator envisages and that the U.S. delegation pushes are actually about cuts, not efficiency.
Those cuts are either politically loaded against operations the United States doesn't approve of, or across-the-board Wall Street-style retrenchments that measure success by numbers of employees laid off. (The same attitude was behind the disgusting spectacle of the United States holding up reinforcement and resupply of the U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda in 1994 for domestic budgetary reasons, as death squads roamed that country.) Compromise with such implacable hostility leads the Administration now to support a unilateral reduction of the U. S. share of peace keeping levies, from 31 percent to 25 percent.
There are potential differences over more than money. Clinton has yet to revoke Presidential Decision Directive 25 of May 1994, which led to the Rwanda debacle. This imposes on new peacekeeping operations the test of whether they serve the narrowly defined national interest of the United States. (For how many countries was stopping the flow of Haitian refugees to Florida a national interest? Yet 184 other countries accepted their cost assessment for peacekeeping in Haiti without demurring.) The country whose Founding Fathers cited "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" in explaining its reasons for declaring independence now shows little or no concern for what even its closest allies think, let alone its handpicked nominee for Secretary General. Even before the veto of Boutros-Ghali, Malcolm Rifkind, Foreign Secretary of a normally obsequious Britain, was complaining about U.S. "representation without taxation." Indeed, the U.S. failure to secure a single other vote in support of its veto represented a resounding diplomatic failure, one that betrays not just a brand of isolationism but dangerous delusions of omnipotence.
The differences in personality between the Ghanaian Kofi Annan and the Egyptian Boutros-Ghali will postpone but not avert the end of the honeymoon period, such as it is. Annan is a modest person (though his ability is widely recognized), while BoutrosGhali was not. Patrician intellectual Boutros-Ghali could not suffer fools or Albright easily; Annan will smile and not take offense quickly even when it is clearly intended, as from Helms or even the White House.
However, it would be a foolish miscalculation if the Administration confused Annan's personal amenability with a malleability of principles. As he said in his first press conference, as well as being the chief clerk that the United States expects him to be, a U.N. Secretary General "also has a political and diplomatic role, and above all a moral voice which should be heard periodically when necessary." That presumably will include occasions when what must be said will contravene U.S. policy positions.
It seems likely that the souring of the honeymoon with Annan will come over the Middle East, if perhaps more slowly than it did with Boutros-Ghali. This is the subject of most of the seventy vetoes the United States has cast since its first in 1970. It is also the area that probably caused the overthrow of Boutros-Ghali, while revealing something about Annan as well.
In Annan's inauguration speech in December, he spoke of the U.N. offering its services where it could be of help. When Boutros-Ghali had done that in a letter to Yitzhak Rabin after the 1994 Hebron massacre, he quipped, he got a reply from "Rubin" instead of "Rabin." Albright's press officer, James Rubin, roundly denounced him for "unhelpful" behavior. It should be noted that Rubin got the last laugh: He was on Clinton's task force to determine whether and how Boutros-Ghali should go.
Last spring the Israelis shelled a U.N. camp at Qana, in southern Lebanon, injuring some Fijian U.N. peacekeepers and killing more than a hundred civilian refugees. The follow-up investigative report from Gen. Frank Van Kappen of the Netherlands determined that it was no accident. The White House and Albright wanted the report suppressed. BoutrosGhali, who had tried very hard, in the spirit of Camp David, to reintegrate Israel into the U.N., drew a line there.
One fly on the wall told me that when the Israeli charge d'affaires complained that releasing the report would "cause deep wounds in Israeli society," Boutros-Ghali sharply retorted that the shelling had caused some pretty deep wounds in the Lebanese refugees. To the fury of the White House, the U.N. released the report. It was very likely the final straw for the Clinton Administration, which announced its opposition to a second term for Boutros-Ghali shortly afterward.
In contrast, Kofi Annan's staff proudly say that the "Israelis love him" because of his efforts to massage and tone down that very report in his capacity as head of peacekeeping affairs. He will always go for the middle of the road and won't rock the boat, said one associate, who stressed that this difference from his predecessor is simply a matter of approach, not of fundamental commitment, to the issues. The truth of that assessment was proved by the remarkably dull appointments and reappointments Annan made at the end of January, confirming almost all of Boutros-Ghali's choices for various U.N. posts.
There is no doubt that Annan has a sense of political realism— for example, the French got the peacekeeping head job, which was widely regarded as their price for not vetoing Annan's candidacy. But he also has a bottom line. Even before visiting Washington in late January, Annan had reminded Albright and outgoing Secretary of State Warren Christopher in private meetings that other countries, particularly developing ones, had different ideas of reform from those currently held in Washington. While in the capital he firmly reminded people that the arrears were a legal debt, not a subject for "benchmarking" negotiations. It remains to be seen whether his quiet approach is more effective than his predecessor's more strident one. In any case, this Administration and this Secretary of State (who was widely disliked at the U.N.) need reminding that there is more to foreign affairs than listening to whoever last wandered into a Democratic National Committee meeting with a checkbook.
There are a few promising signs that some legislators are embarrassed by the arrears in U.N. dues, and hopes that Helms will not try to block the $960 million mooted by the White House for next year. But this underestimates the Senator's antipathy for multilateralism in all its facets, including the World Bank and the I.M.F. No one who has seen Albright's toadying to Helms, or watched Clinton the past four years, can expect much of them.
Unfortunately, while the U.N. is merely useful to the United States, the United States is almost as indispensable to the U.N. as it thinks it is. And while Teddy Roosevelt at the beginning of the American Century advised talking softly but carrying a big stick, Bill Clinton and Congress are seguing out of it by shouting often and loudly but carrying an empty checkbook. No one wants to see a return to Rooseveltian Rough Riderism, of course, but it would be nice if Clinton decided that the United States will indeed carry out what it agreed to when it framed and signed the UN Charter back in 1945.
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