Diplomatic Memo – Budget Fights Are Brewing at the United Nations – NYTimes.com

Its hard to argue with $2473/page—and not thing the UN a wasteful place.  Still, look at how many languages the EU must include?  And remember: multilateralism isn’t for sissies.

It is budget season at the United Nations, and that is just one of several fights brewing. The two-month period of intense haggling is expected to be especially heated this year within the innocuous-sounding “Fifth Committee” that handles the crucial money decisions.

First, some major donors are demanding that Brazil, Russia, India and China absorb a larger share of the organization’s costs to reflect their new economic weight. Those countries, however, are having none of it.

Then comes the widespread frustration that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon presented a two-year regular budget of about $4.89 billion. At first glance, that seems to be a mere 0.5 percent increase over current spending — except an annex of nebulous “add-ons” is likely to push the number to at least $5.4 billion, a leap of more than 12 percent, which many members argue is unsustainable.

via Diplomatic Memo – Budget Fights Are Brewing at the United Nations – NYTimes.com.

U.S. Envoy, Susan Rice, Sets Tone of Engagement With U.N. – NYTimes.com

The US approach to the UN varies by administration.  Now the pendulum is swinging back toward engagement–linking into the larger discussion of the value of multilateral approaches.  The personality at the middle is the new U.S. ambassador who has a strong national security background:

In articulating why the United Nations matters, Ms. Rice stressed her central focus as she revolved between those foreign policy posts and the Brookings Institution. “I happen to believe, as the president does, that our security and well-being as Americans are inextricably linked to the security and well-being of people elsewhere,” she said in an interview. “Indifference is costly in moral and humanitarian terms, and it’s costly in security terms.”

Ms. Rice, 44, is viewed around the United Nations as smart, hard-working and thorough, as well as prone to dispense with diplomatic niceties. In her Security Council speeches, ambassadors said, she usually jettisons the tradition of beginning by thanking all and sundry for their contributions to the previous meeting.

She said her most important accomplishment to date was persuading China and Russia last June to go along with tough new Security Council sanctions against North Korea, including an asset freeze and arms export embargo, to try to bring its nuclear weapons program to heel.

She also pushed for the United States to rejoin the Human Rights Council, which the Bush White House mocked, and where new American influence thwarted an attempt to drop the special rapporteur investigating human rights abuses in Sudan. The United States has also started paying the United Nations hundreds of millions of dollars in financial arrears, and voices more support for peacekeeping efforts.

via U.S. Envoy, Susan Rice, Sets Tone of Engagement With U.N. – NYTimes.com.

Washington Aims to Shuffle IMF Seats – WSJ.com

What role does or should the G-20 play in world affairs?  Many see it as a bloc of convenience, and yet it seems to exist in a parallel to other multilateral bodies such as the UN or NATO.

New approaches involving the G-20 are brewing to reshape the 50+ year old IMF, a body created in a different world from today:

“The changes will take a lot of bargaining,” said a G-20 official from a large developing country. “But we are in a bargaining mood.”

The U.S. is pushing two proposals. Under the first, the number of seats on the IMF board would fall to 20 from 24 by 2012, with developing countries that already have chairs retaining them. The U.S. doesn’t name countries that should give up seats but it is clear some would be European.

The second U.S. proposal would essentially shift five percentage points of ownership of the IMF from traditional industrialized countries to developing countries. Currently, industrialized countries have about a 60% ownership stake.

Under this proposal, Europe also would lose clout. The U.S. and Europe have roughly the same size economy, but Europe has twice the ownership shares of the U.S., says Edwin Truman, who worked in the Clinton and Obama Treasury Departments and is now at the Peterson Institute of International Economics.

via Washington Aims to Shuffle IMF Seats – WSJ.com.

This Land – Holding Firm Against Plots by Evildoers – Series – NYTimes.com

The John Birch Society lives on…

Tall, white-haired and 70, Mr. Thompson was a soldier in the ideological wars long before Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck joined the contentious scene. He claims to have infiltrated Marxist groups in the Pacific Northwest back in the 1960s. “I would go casual,” he said, laughing.

But dressed now in his preferred attire of dark blazer and red tie, he spoke earnestly of wanting to thwart the “insiders,” as he calls them. “It’s a war between good and evil,” he said. “And sometimes it takes a strange twist.”

via This Land – Holding Firm Against Plots by Evildoers – Series – NYTimes.com.

The New Way to Solve Complex Global Problems: Minilateralism

Sitting at UN conferences, one has to ask the hard question:  what difference do these meetings really make?  Beyond the soft law accretion, public awareness and mobilization, and other real effects–how do we explain the failure of agreements over the past 10 years, and the lack of signitories to keep their committments to the most important of the most recent one, the Milennium Development Goals?

The big idea, courtesey of Moises Naim in FP.com:

The pattern is clear: Since the early 1990s, the need for effective multicountry collaboration has soared, but at the same time multilateral talks have inevitably failed; deadlines have been missed; financial commitments and promises have not been honored; execution has stalled; and international collective action has fallen far short of what was offered and, more importantly, needed. These failures represent not only the perpetual lack of international consensus, but also a flawed obsession with multilateralism as the panacea for all the world’s ills.

So what is to be done? To start, let’s forget about trying to get the planet’s nearly 200 countries to agree. We need to abandon that fool’s errand in favor of a new idea: minilateralism.

via Minilateralism: The magic number to get real international action. – By Moisés Naím | Foreign Policy.

Count on Steven Walt to cite this as an idea close to his heart:

Need I point out that this is a decidedly realist approach? Realists have always emphasized the role of power and argued that the agenda of world politics — including the prospects for meaningful cooperation — depends mostly on the actions of the major powers.

But…an idea that he notes, “will work in some contexts but not in others.”  Perhaps a dose of realism is what institutions and arrangements based on idealism need to make them more pragmatic and workable.

“The Dysfunctional Human Rights Council” – NYTimes.com

Will engagement work?  (And who says  NYT doesn’t criticize UN dysfunctionalities…)

The council frequently and unsparingly condemns Israel, but when it comes to Sudan’s genocide in Darfur or the murderous crimes of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, it has cynically and shamefully pulled its punches. Last month, it endorsed an ill-considered Pakistani resolution against defaming religions that could easily be used to justify censorship and official persecution of unbelievers.

The council’s weakness is part of a larger problem at the United Nations. Rather than risk criticism of their own policies, members all too willingly enable each other’s excesses — and call it respect for national sovereignty. And like too many other United Nations bodies, the council apportions membership on the basis of regional bloc politics, not merit or performance. As a result, countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Cuba — all current members — sit in judgment of others’ human rights performance, while routinely abusing the rights of their own people.

via Editorial – The Dysfunctional Human Rights Council – NYTimes.com.

Fixing IOs is possible, necessary

A new aricle (preview only available at Foreign Affairs) by Stephen G. Brooks  and William C. Wohlforth –both from Dartmouth–make the case that yes, we need to fix international organizations, and yes the US has the clout to still make it work.  The reason is clear: “no one sitting down to design the perfect global framework for the twenty-first century would come up with anything like the current one.”

Nonetheless, there are hardheaded reasons to believe that the United States has the means and the motive to spearhead the foundation of a new institutional order. It still has the power and legitimacy such an effort would require, as well as a strong incentive to mount it, because overall, international institutions channel the United States’ power and enhance its security.

Insider View on What’s Wrong with the UN system

Buyer beware:

I joined the UN as a youthful idealist, but ended up testifying to Congress on the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. For all its good intentions, the UN is broken and unfixable … by Michael Soussan.

Jesse Helms, from UN critic to reformer

With the passing of legendary North Carolina Senator the blogosphere and water coolers are abuzz with consideration of his legacy.  One interesting angle–noted by WSJ columnist John Fund–is Helms as UN goad and spur, where he “was the first to highlight United Nations corruption, an issue on which he was clearly ahead of his time.”

In December 2000 Helms moved “opponent” to “fan”, as Richard C. Holbrook, President Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations orchestrated a 16 month rapprochement in managing the (unmanageable) Security Council to nearly fully address the Congressional reform agenda.  An interesting reminder, as from the basement meeting rooms of the UN, it seemed that any conservative voice needing a backer in Washington–Senator Helms, a willing compatriot–was always only a phone call away.

Mac Thiessen advocates for a sympathetic memory in the Post, arguing that Helms warrants snaps for his bipartisan achievements.  To quote William Saffire in 1997:

“Jesse Helms, bete noire of knee-jerk liberals . . . is turning out to be the most effectively bipartisan chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since Arthur Vandenberg. . . . Let us see if he gets the credit for statesmanship that he deserves from a striped-pants establishment.”

But then again, Hitchens captures the widely held view by observers and wonks alike that Helms’ stranglehold on the foreign policy establishment was, at best, problematic and at worst, a national embarrassment.