Monitoring Policy Making at the United Nations |
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Ian Williams "Why the RIghts Loves the U.N." Why the Right Loves the U.N.
Ian Williams
Nation
April 13, 1992
The right has spent many years attacking the United Nations. Indeed, for years the Heritage Foundation had a special section with no other task than to calumniate the U.N. and all its works. Now, in the Bushian new world order, conservatives see hiterto hidden attractions in the organization. But be assured. "No. The Heritage Foundation hasn't changed position on the U.N. Absolutely not. There's been a change in the U.N., " says Burton Yale Pines, vice president of the Heritage Foundation and longtime head of the U.N.-baiting U.N. Assessment Project."Everything the new Secretary General has done -- the appointment of Governor Thornburgh as Under Secretary General, and the composition of the East European delegations -- means that the U.N. is no longer a forum for world Bolshevism and anti-Americanism," Pines told me. Dick Thornburgh is a "thoroughly competent supervisor and administrator who will make the organization more responsive to reality." Pine's -- and Heritage's -- plaudits confirm the worst fears of many at the U.N.: that Thornburgh's role is not just to cut the organization to the smaller size the United States wants but also to carve it into the shape the American right wants.
Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's ratifications of Bush's patronage appointment of the man Pennsylvania disappointed was followed by Boutros-Ghali's appointment of Joseph Verner Reed to an unspecified portfolio. Once described as a "14-carat nitwit" by Senator Thomas Eagleton, Reed, a former Chase Manhattan vice president, was made Ambassaor to Morocco by Reagan in 1981, and now has the job of organizing the U.N.'s fiftieth-anniversary celebrations.
Reed has also joined Burton Pines on the executive committee of the Institute of East-West Dynamics, which in its own way encapsulates the new relationship between the U.N. and Washington. A nonprofit oganization set up to promote profit, it offers training in free-market economic principles to the "economies in transition" in Eastern Europe. The institute seems to have secured an initial $250,000 grant from the United Nations Development Program, having been referred there by the State Department.
U.N.D.P. is the world's largest miltilateral development grant aid agency, and one can see that it may be doing good work from this description in Barron's magazine by Christopher Whalen: "The so-called United Nations Development Programme seeks `development approaches that are ecologically sound, self-sustaining and equitable in their distribution of resources and opportunites,' meaning socialist by design and directed from the top down." Whalen, who works for The Whalen Company, a consulting firm, added, "A large number of senior UN officials are Eupropean Socialists, who still believe, despite the overwhelming weight of evidence to the contrary, that centralized economic control is getting a bum rap."
Whalen's blast might seem a bit ungrateful, given that his father, Richard Whalen, the head of The Whalen Company, is on the board of advisers of the Institute of East-West Dynamics. Father and son are listed as "public policy experts" by the Heritage Foundation.
The current sweetheart relationship between Heritage and the U.N. began last October, when a group of conservative Congressmen wrote to John Bolton, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, pointing out what sterling work the the Institute of East-West Dynamics is doing: "This private voluntary organization, with which you are familiar, is, in our opinion, at least as worthy a recipient of such funds as any other such U.N.-affiliated organizations." They asked him to grant the institute $2 million.
Bolton, an Ed Meese disciple who led the campaign to withdraw U.S. membership from UNESCO, had no problem with the request. He approached U.N.D.P. in late November and suggested that it pay the institute the $2 million. A week later he congratulated U.N.D.P.'s administrator William Draper 3d for making the "initial contribution" of $250,000 to the institute, adding that "I trust UNDP will make the funds available to the Institute as soon as possible so as not to delay the implementation of this worthwhile endeavor."
Draper is a clubbable conservative, a friend of George Bush and generally well regarded in the U.N.D.P. Both he and U.N.D.P. were put in a difficult positions by this letter. U.N.D.P. is funded by voluntary contributions, and 10 percent of its cash comes from the U.S. government -- through Bolton. A U.N.D.P. spokesperson confirmed that the request had been made, but said that the quarter-million "for management training programs in Eastern Europe had not yet been approved. It is going through the regular appraisal process." That institute director Reed makes no secret of his desire to inherit Draper's job as head of the U.N.D.P. may help lubricate the appraisal machinery.
The key figure in all this is the president of the Institute oF East-West Dynamics, Pedro Sanjuan, an American who has retired as Director of Political Affairs for the U.N. A former director of the conservative American Enterprise Institute's Hemispheric Center, Sanjuan was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Insular Affairs by Reagan, after which he was given a job at the U.N. during Jeane Kirkpatrick's memorable time as U.S. ambassador. The connecting theme in Sanjuan's appointments to the board of the institute seems to be membership in the community of conservative American veterans of undeclared wars in Central America.
Sanjuan had a remarkably low profile at the U.N. for such a senior position. Many senior U.N. staff members assumed that his function was to "shadow" his Soviet nominal superior. One insider says "he spent a lot of time in Washington, allegedly putting out fires with the Heritage Foundation, for [former Secretary General] Perez de Cuellar," adding, however, "it's funny, he always seemed to have a can of kerosene and a box of matches when he went." Sanjuan fulfills the almost obligatory qualification of disparaging U.N.D.P., which, he says in a recent article for the International Freedom Foundation journal laissez-faire, "seems to be a falling prey to the predominance of ideology over pragmatism." Sanjuan, a charming and plausible person, steered a resolution through the General Assembly of the U.N. last October that endorsed the work of the Institute of East-West Dynamics. He persuaded Eastern Europeans to propose it, and it passed without a vote. "We thought the institute would get us more money," an Eastern European diplomat told me.
As the institute's own policy material suggests, this was a "first at the U.N." Normally, a different procedure is followed affiliating nongovernmental organizations. The General Assembly resolution short-circuited that procedure by calling on the Secretary General "to take appropriate measures in order to provide for cooperation between the Institute and the competent United Nations bodies." The General Assembly resolution claimed that the institute "has developed a comprehensive program of instruction for universities and international organizations to train managers and other professional persons" and "will also run parallel training program for parlimentarians." A press release heralded it as the "beginning of a new era of cooperation between the UN and market-oriented institutions, including foundations, corporations, and other Western organizations." It pointed out that the institute was "authorized to accept voluntary contributions from UN member states" -- so much for the Eastern Europeans' hopes it would give them money.
Although the resolution went through with no oppositions, Ron Spiers, an American who was a U.N. Under Secretary General, resigned from the institute's adivisory board in protest of this unprecedented use of the General Assembly to approve such an organization. Members of the U.S. mission were also unhappy about it, but told concerned U.N. staff members that they were operating under instructions from Washington -- presumably Bolton. Other U.N. employees did not learn of the resolution until the day before it passed. One senior official said, "The lawyers didn't like it, but the permanent five agreed to go along with it, so it went through. But a lot of people were angry about it."
So what was the rush? Well, at the end of February Pedro Sanjuan retired from the U.N. -- and for many months the address and phone number for the Institute of East-West Dynamics had been his home in Westchester County, New York. When the organization is up and running he expects to be paid $85,000 a year for his services.
Sanjuan is at pains to explain that the board of the institute is "bipartisan," which he seems to use in the peculiar American sense that blesses a group of conservatives who agree on everything but are prepared to accept patronage impartially from either Democrat or Republican incumbents. For example, the chairman of the institute is the Democrat Angier Biddle Duke, who was U.S. Ambassaor to El Salvador at a time when the United States was not noted for its restraining influence on the death squads. Duke was a member of PRODEMCA, which, The Washington Post reported in 1986, funded contra-associated groups in Nicaragua and helped pay for ads supporting Reagan's bid to fund military and "nonlethal" aid to the contras.
Another executive committee member, Peter Hannaford, has what many might see as a rather idiosyncratic commitment to democracy. His P.R. firm, The Hannaford Company, served as the initial headquarters for Ronald Reagan's presidential ambitions, and it represented the military rulers of Guatemala and Argentina during the years when death-squad killings were at their height. The Hannaford Company gave credit to Argentina's junta for "one of the most remarkable economic recoveries in modern history."
Also on the advisory board is Duncan Sellars, chairman of the International Freedom Foundation a former executive director of the Conservative Caucus. One of the I.F.F.'s less endearing traits is its uncritical support of the white South African government.
Sellars told The Nation, "The institute will fill a gap the U.N. has not filled hitherto. It will teach market methods, market economics. It's good to see groups like Pedro's channeling the U.N. in the right direction, espcially if it takes funds that would otherwise be used to support traditional U.N.D.P. policies. U.N.D.P. does promote the `third way,' mixed economies. I don't think Pedro would, and I certainly wouldn't countenance that. The institute will balance that `third way' approach."
While the institute has many plans, one has to look hard to see any concrete achievements, until recently. On March 8 the institute, with its new badge of respectability, co-sponsored with the Heritage Foundation a conference at the U.N. to advise the new Baltic delegations on how they could best use the U.N. Billed as speakers were Duke, Sanjuan, and Burton Yale Pines.
A session on how to use the media was addressed by Amity Shlaes, who wrote an article last October in The Wall Street Journal attacking U.N.D.P. because its budget "largely ignores East Europe's economic progress." She ended her speech by quoting Christopher Gacek, who at the time watched the U.N. for the Heritage Foundation but is curently with the American Enterprise Institute: "The danger now is that the U.N. is a rudderless place, and that it will remain rudderless." Gacek is also on the advisory board of the Institute of East-West Dynamics.
The institute exmplifies the conservative network's effect on the U.N., but the main thrust of "reform" in the United Nations is being carried out under the guise of increasing efficiency -- a function given expressly to Dick Thornburgh. To promote such "efficiency," bodies like the Center for Trans-National Corporations are being effectively neutralized, and under Thronburgh it is unlikely that other inititatives for conservatives' pet hates, such as debt forgiveness for the Third World, will receive much support.
The process is a win-win proposition for the American right. They will either gain control of the organization and use it to push their particular view of the world, or they will make the U.S. control so obvious they diminish whatever prestige the U.N. and its agencies have, making it ineffective as a platform for the concerns of the rest of the world. Either way, the prospect of a United Nations of America is one that can appeal to a narrow section of American, let alone world, politics. As the now-retired Ron Spires says, "You have to have diversity. If the U.N. seems too Western, it's going to lose its authority."
Boutros-Ghali, living in hope that Washington will pay its half-billion-dollar debt to the organization, is trapped. If the U.N. is to have a meaningful role in the new wolrd order, it needs U.S. support, certainly until Europe and Japan decide to match their political clout to their economic strength. But what profit is the U.N. if it loses its soul to the American far right, which has consistently opposed everything the organization stands for?
