The following article is the first of two parts. Part II may be found here.
The United Nations General Assembly recently held its speech-athon of global leaders.
This annual event does two things well: it takes inventory of international woes while demonstrating the diplomatic skill of staying awake for one’s country.
It begs us to brush up on what we know and think we know about the UN for its viability as a resource going forward.
The world conference on Manhattan’s East Side, unlike scientific or sales conferences, is permanently in session, now into its 77th year as marked by the UN’s birthday this week (Oct. 24).
Its power to convene continues impressively, undeterred by the war in Ukraine, by the woozy post-COVID-19 worldscape, and by the UN’s own low-iron bureaucracy.
But despite the UN’s frustratingly slow pace on actual issues, it continues to grow robustly in doing its most basic function: bringing people together and somehow keeping them at the table.
Proof? Paralysis in the Security Council reminds that to veto so often means you must continue to show up.
Globally we are all convening more often in new and novel ways, specifically, online through personal email and the overly personal twitters and instagrams.
Access to such inexpensive, real-time online communication creates issue momentum.
The infotech revolution popularized and enlivened the world wide web, and it is as recent as the young millennials knowing no other way.
Coincidentally, another under-utilized web, the United Nations Organization, was so enlivened, too. But not by that revolution, rather by a devolution, the political devolution and demise of the Soviet Union. The fall of walls, both online and in Berlin, collapsed the superpower stalemate of communist East versus free West, and it has not been the same since.
Those falls, during the fall of 1989, rebooted interest in the UN Organization. New UN stakeholders were getting online. They were understanding better UN potential and more importantly each other - as the UN architects had designed in the 1940s.
Former Eastern Bloc countries now had logins, figuratively speaking, and joined the facebook page parade.
UN Membership swelled up to near universal of the world’s states, including from Africa and Asia. The cobwebby UN was no longer a flatform, rather now a platform, for takeoff.
More issues were brought to its doorstep and their consideration was deeper and increasingly consequential. This has proved an irreversible course for more, not less, multilateral modalities in the conduct of interstate diplomacy.
It was not long until the early 1990s that the stress test of all stress tests, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, indeed validated the UN’s latent capacities.
UN Security Council agreement was not only possible, but made headlines daily, in real time, for UN actions castigating, isolating, and then battling Saddam’s brigand in the sand.
The UN went from molasses-watching to the starship Enterprise, with a few moments from "Rocky III" thrown in for excitement.
Then after several overly ambitious attempts at peacekeeping in Africa and bedeviling and bedamned crises in Croatia, Syria, and elsewhere, headiness for UN fixes gave way to hangovers and slowness.
Russia, using that time well, into the new century gradually regenerated its molted shell. It returned boisterously to the UN buffet and has been making messes at that table ever since, leaving it worse than it found it — by design.
At the same time, and distinct from Moscow’s desires to beat down the west, Beijing has been plotting to “best the west”.
China, patient in its planned resurgence as the world’s middle kingdom, woke up in the 2000s to opportunities through multilateralism and has since invested more of itself in UN properties.
Its plan?
To hijack the UN brand and its machinery.
That way it could replace the UN’s liberal international software with communist Beijing’s authoritarian knock-off version - as ‘the better way’ to get the job done, so China argues.
As for the United States, the fall of the Berlin Wall lead to the rise of the UN as a more valuable resource for its diplomacy.
Instead of the secretary of state making a few-hour visit each autumn for opening speeches and photo ops, our president and his team have made it an annual exercise extending into a week’s stay, including replicating the State Department on several floors of nearby hotels not to mention White House operations from the East Side of Manhattan.
This creates many opportunities for advancing US foreign policy interests at the highest levels possible. Often away from the glare of cameras and raised expectations certain understandings and step wise decisions might evolve between world leaders, some for the record, others decidedly not.
In the trade we call this "diplomatic speed dating."
The stakes in UN gamesmanship are critical to our national security: maintaining an international order built on cooperation instead of driven by coercion.
Otherwise, the elaborate machinery of the UN, from arms control to UNICEF, from safety in the airs to quelling future pandemics, from defending human rights to checking the surge of terrorism, could be turned against humanity instead of by, of and for it.
Today, taking this news to Newsmax readership and reflecting its views back to diplomacy’s frontlines, therefore, builds a stronger national urgency for mastering the chessboard called the United Nations Organization.
Public demand across America for effective U.S. participation in the United Nations and indeed in all multilateral arenas would strengthen those in Washington wanting to do just that.
What do you think?
Hugh Dugan served as Acting Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs and Senior Director for International Organization Affairs in the National Security Council after having advised 11 U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations since 1989. Read Hugh Dugan's Reports — More Here.
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