UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNewsNetwork / 04 September 2008 -- A litany of failures and shattered goals has been a hallmark of George W. Bush’s foreign policy in such strategic states as Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Russia. Yet in the midst of this bleak landscape, there has been one success for Bush. Looking back on the almost eight years of his presidency, the one arena where Bush has shown some mastery in international affairs is, counter-intuitively, the most unlikely place on the planet—namely, the United Nations. For good or ill, Bush has attained more victories in that body than in any other forum or country—an intriguing fact, given that from the start of his White House service, Bush has treated the UN as the bête noire of global politics. 

Most Americans are unaware of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the Bush administration and the United Nations. Indeed over the past eight years, the public clamor of angry voices and the harsh accusations which have passed between the administration and the UN seem to have drowned out much of what Bush and his diplomats have quietly been doing behind the scenes in that building on New York’s East River. Even today, the public impression of the Bush administration in its relations with the UN has been one of a broken diplomacy, in which each side has shown a hostility, indifference, or contempt toward the other. Much of this notion derives from the openly unilateralist policies of President Bush, from the refusal of the UN to back the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, from Congressional anger over the UN scandals like the Oil-for-Food program, and from a general antipathy, especially among the Republican Party’s ultra rightwing, toward any international organization that might erode U.S. sovereignty. 

However, the true tale turns out to be quite different from what would appear to be a profile of failure. In fact, in its nearly 92 months in the White House, the Bush administration has pursued a conservative but pragmatic mission at the United Nations under a stealth cover that has seen it carefully selecting its causes and focusing its energies, whether as a routine participant in the demarches at the UN Security Council; as a sponsor of numerous UN resolutions, sanctions, and other initiatives; as a regular contributor to the UN’s upkeep; or as an overseer of policies and appointments within the departments of the UN. This has been especially true with respect to American policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.

For the most part, the United States has diligently pursued goals at the UN when it had a particular interest, but not expended as much effort when its specific aims were not aligned with the aspirations of other states at the UN. It has, nonetheless, within this global stadium, practiced a sort of realism that seeks to come to terms with the international community rather than simply resorting to its infamous ideological crusades that have so often torn asunder relations with the outside world.

From the start of his time in office, President Bush established—albeit quietly —an official and ongoing relationship with the UN. In pursuit of this course, he has delivered  a speech at the opening session of each UN General Assembly. Whether his addresses have included messages of welcome, admonition, criticism, or praise, he has never hinted that he would withdraw from the organization or abandon it. Quite the contrary, he has acknowledged the influence of the assembly simply in making his trip—partly, of course, out of his duty as head of the host nation, but partly out of a desire to assert his own brand of leadership in this global arena.

President Bush has apparently adhered to all the standard U.S. foreign policy requirements with regard to the UN, appointing four ambassadors to the organization. Three of these ambassadors have been mainstream internationalists and have faithfully represented Bush’s views: John Negroponte, John Danforth, and Zalmay Khalilzad. The only exception Bush made to this line-up was his designation in 2005 of John Bolton, a right-wing ideologue who had long been openly ill disposed toward the assembly. But even Bolton told Time Magazine following his appointment, “The UN can be a useful instrument of American foreign policy.”

Lastly, and equally un-remarked upon during his two terms, President Bush has worked directly with the two secretaries general of the period, Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon, in a professional manner. They, in turn, have maintained friendly ties with Bush, despite periodic U.S.-UN acrimony. The personal ties of each of these secretaries general with the United States undoubtedly reinforced positive sentiments in each of them about America from the start. Annan attended Macalester College in Minnesota as an undergraduate and Ban Ki-moon earned a master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School at Harvard in 1985.Moreover, Annan and Ban have both recognized the reality that the United States is the largest donor to the UN and the only superpower on the planet. For each of these leaders, it has been imperative to assure that disagreements with the Bush administration do not spin out of control and derail U.S. participation in the body. Whatever his own goals, Bush is unlikely to have been entirely unaffected or unmoved by the attentiveness to U.S.-UN bonds shown by these two individuals. 

Activism at the Security Council

The Security Council is the most important organ of the UN. The council determines what the UN will do on all peace and war issues. During the Bush era, the United States has, to the astonishment of many, proven to be an active player in almost every Security Council proceeding. But Washington, even though it commands a veto, has not always been able to get its way on the council, as four other nations—China, Russia, Great Britain, and France—also possess the veto and have the ability to block U.S. initiatives at any time. Simply the threat of a Russian veto, for example, forced Kosovo to declare independence without authorization from the Security Council in February 2008. Both Russia and China slowed the pace of UN intervention in Darfur with veto threats throughout 2007. This means that diplomacy has predominated in the Security Council, and Washington has often had to settle for less than what it originally sought. Nonetheless, on many occasions, the United States has decisively influenced and guided the council in its deliberations. 

The Bush administration has only had to veto resolutions ten times in eight years,  less than Ronald Reagan (41 times in eight years), or even Gerald Ford (13 times in three years), though more than Nixon (five times in five years), Carter (four times in four years), and Clinton (three times in eight years). In turn, Bush has been vetoed just three times. Only Ford, with one veto used against him, and Bush’s father, who never had the veto used against him, had better records at the UN. 

The breadth of U.S. engagement in the Security Council has been considerable under George W. Bush, with a fourth of all Security Council resolutions in UN history occurring during his administration. Washington has asked for and won many Security Council resolutions on its own. Some have reflected the Bush administration’s conservative concerns, but more often they have been in answer to diplomatic imperatives and pragmatic needs in world crises. Among the most important have been legitimizing the U.S. mission to Afghanistan, fashioning a common program against terrorism, recognizing the U.S. occupation of Iraq, stabilizing the security situation in Haiti, upholding the peace in Lebanon, imposing sanctions on North Korea and Iran, and backing 17 ongoing peacekeeping operations. 

In his first nine months in office, President Bush paid scant attention to the UN or to the Security Council, tarrying on appointing an ambassador. His administration repudiated a series of UN-sponsored global treaties, including the International Criminal Court, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming. The United States also delayed paying its $826 million arrears in dues to the UN as was mandated by the Helms-Biden legislation. 

Following the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the United States immediately strove for and won support from the UN Security Council for retaliatory moves against the Afghanistan-based conspirators and their Taliban hosts. On September 12, the council officially affirmed its solidarity with America, passing a resolution that invoked the UN Charter’s “inherent right of individual or collective self-defense” and authorized “all necessary steps” to strike back at “those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsor of these acts.” This decree later gave international legitimacy for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Soon after the council’s actions, President Bush appointed a new U.S. ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, and paid up its dues.

Thereafter, Washington returned regularly to the Security Council to seek assistance for the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The council, with American blessing, designated a UN special envoy to help set up Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban provisional government and a two-year transitional administration—all ratified by a loya jirga (Grand Assembly). The special envoy also helped write a new Afghan constitution, and in October 2004, again under UN guidance, the nation elected its new president, Hamid Karzai. Still, the UN maintained quite a small footprint in Afghanistan out of deference to the United States and coalition forces. 

Given the assistance the UN had rendered the United States in Afghanistan, Bush next asked the council to investigate weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq—a nation Bush had labeled part of an “axis of evil” (along with North Korea and Iran) and claimed was backing Al Qaeda terrorists. In September 2002, Bush addressed the General Assembly and demanded that the UN send weapons inspectors back into Iraq. The council quickly agreed and on November 7, 2002, asked Baghdad to restart the inspection process. In time, Bush expressed dissatisfaction with the work of the inspectors and on February 5, 2003, he sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the council to make clear that America believed Iraq was still hiding weapons of mass destruction. Many diplomats at the UN felt Powell’s statement was misleading, if not full of outright falsehoods. The United States briefly considered requesting a second resolution to justify invading the country, but dropped its efforts in the face of a threatened French veto.

Finally, in mid- March 2003, without UN authorization, the United States attacked Iraq. Washington’s action, in one stroke, overturned America’s long-held doctrine of containment and deterrence in favor of preventive war, an act considered unlawful under the UN Charter, and put the United States in direct confrontation with the United Nations. The UN refusal in turn to endorse the invasion aroused many American opponents of the body who openly questioned the authority of the organization to pass judgment on the U.S. strike. Some critics, including the Republican leadership in both the House and Senate, began to cite UN scandals like the Iraqi Oil-for-Food imbroglio and sexual excesses by UN forces in Congo in an attempt to discredit Secretary-General Kofi Annan whom they blamed for the refusal to condone the Iraq invasion. Bush himself had warned earlier that the UN risked going the way of the League of Nations—an idea that then seemed a distinct possibility. 

Washington’s cries of foul play and misdeeds in the Oil-for-Food scandal proved to be both exaggerated and a distortion of important facts surrounding the program’s management by the Security Council. First, the United States was intimately involved in the design and the oversight of the Oil-for-Food scheme, undermining American claims that the secretary general deserved complete blame for the resulting illegalities. Second, the critics also continually failed to recognize that key members of the Security Council—including the United States— were aware of unlawful oil shipments to allies Jordan, Turkey, and Syria, but had turned a blind eye in the name of greater Middle East stability. 

Yet soon after its foray into Iraq, America found itself virtually isolated from the world community. A concerned Bush reluctantly returned to the UN Security Council to ask its backing for the U.S. occupation of the country. On May 22, 2003 the council took steps to support Washington and authorized an exclusive U.S. role in Iraq with a limited UN partnership. Shortly afterward, the UN sent officials into that country. Within a few months, this move resulted in the deaths of 23 UN personnel in a car bomb attack. Still, by 2005, the UN had overseen two elections and assisted in writing and supervising a referendum on the nation’s new constitution.

The U.S. unilateral action in Iraq and American criticism of the Oil-for-Food Program had another consequence for the UN—it motivated Secretary-General Kofi Annan t  seek reforms in order to upgrade the UN’s capacity to handle terrorism and reconfigure its collective security mandate, as well as tighten its management practices. These reforms were negotiated by member states for months and presented at a highly visible meeting of world leaders during the September 2005 General Assembly. However, Bush’s newly appointed envoy to the UN, John Bolton, scuttled many of Annan’s proposed changes. Some important pieces of this agenda survived, including a new Human Rights Council, the Peacebuilding Commission, the Democracy Fund (an American initiative), the doctrine on the responsibility of all nations to protect threatened peoples of the world, and several internal fixes—but  Washington lost important initiatives designed to obtain a more rigorous definition of terrorism and tighter financing controls over UN management and budget.

Meanwhile, a special UN commission began an investigation of Kofi Annan’s role in the Oil-for-Food scandal, but soon cleared him, though his son was implicated in the sordid affair. This marked one of the most fraught and tense periods of relations between the United States and the UN during the Bush years. Still, the president carefully sidestepped a campaign by members of his own party to oust Kofi Annan and also helped block passage of the United Nations Reform Act of 2005, sponsored by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-IL). This bill could have partially killed further U.S. financing for the UN. Over time, Washington continued to ask for more UN help for Iraq, and in July 2007, in a New York Times op-ed, America’s envoy to the UN, Ambassador Khalilzad, publicly urged the international body to take a larger role in the country.

Putting Out More Fires

Other crises required the attention of the Bush administration at the UN during these years. In February 2004, the Haitian regime of the Reverend Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown by armed groups that seized four cities and forced the president to flee. An interim government took over and asked for UN assistance. An advanced guard of some 1,000 U.S. Marines arrived under the UN flag to restore order, and eventually 7,000 peacekeeping troops, led by Brazil, replaced them. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice personally thanked Secretary-General Annan for bringing in UN forces to relieve U.S. peacekeepers. 

The following year, in response to an outcry from many Lebanese citizens, Washington successfully pressed the Security Council to pass a resolution demanding that Syrian soldiers then occupying Lebanon leave immediately. Washington also secured a resolution setting up an investigatory commission to track down and punish the killers of former Lebanese Premier Rafik Hariri, who was mysteriously assassinated in February 2005—a probe which is still ongoing. By 2006, the Syrian military had departed. And, in August 2006, during the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon, after having blocked multiple Security Council attempts at a permanent ceasefire, the Bush administration relented and allowed the council to assume a central role in ending the 34-day war. Under a council mandate, a UN force composed of several European and Arab nations was brought in to help the Lebanese army maintain the peace in the southern part of the country. 

Also, in the summer of 2006, North Korea successfully tested long-range ballistic missiles, and then later detonated a nuclear device. In response to these actions, the United States chose not to be drawn into bilateral discussions with North Korea, and instead used the Security Council to condemn the tests. In October of 2006, after Washington made some key compromises to ensure its passage, the council unanimously voted in favor of imposing economic and military sanctions on the North Korean government. 

As these crises were occurring, Iran’s government became a renewed focus of American concern. Washington became convinced that Tehran was violating the conditions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and surreptitiously enriching uranium in order to build its own nuclear weapons capacity, giving it the potential to threaten and intimidate other countries in the Middle East, particularly Israel. Bush officials began to lean heavily on the council to enact sanctions against the Iranian regime. The council subsequently passed a first set of sanctions in December 2006, a second round in March 2007, and a third round a year later. Together, these measures restrict trade and penalize Iranian banks and officials. 

These brief accounts of a series of U.S. actions in the Security Council are selected from dozens of American initiatives, but they reflect many of the central priorities of Bush’s foreign policy in his two terms in office, and show that the council has become a much-utilized tool in America’s diplomatic kit during the Bush era. Washington has remained a participant in many other discussions of crises not alluded to here— including votes on whether to renew, expand or end various peacekeeping mission  in places like Sierra Leone, Congo and Darfur. Resolutions on terrorism, AIDS, global warming, and other related matters have also been launched by a succession of Bush envoys in the council over the past seven-plus years.

Agencies: Beyond Security

The Bush administration has continued to provide funding to the regular UN budget and to all of the body’s principal agencies throughout its seven-year tenure in a manner not so different from the preceding Clinton administration. Under Bush, the United States has paid between $300 million and $400 million per year in regular dues, or nearly a quarter of the UN budget. It bears noting that, late in Bush’s term, the United States began falling behind in its payments at the UN for the first time in a decade. Today, it is in arrears totaling nearly $1 billion. The excuse offered by the administration is that the United States is going through financial difficulties of its own at this time, but it will eventually pay off its indebtedness.

The White House also has disbursed its share of mandatory dues annually to such UN organizations as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—after the Bush administration rejoined the organization in October 2003 following a 19-year absence—and the International Labor Organization (ILO); as well as making voluntary yearly contributions to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). In all, the United States contributes to the entire UN system some $5 billion annually. Finally, the U.S. State Department in January 2007 announced that it would provide more than $80 million a year over the next five years to renovate the almost 60-year-old UN headquarters building. 

Beyond these figures and apart from regular annual dues, the United States also bears the partial expense of the UN’s peacekeeping operations—over $1 billion a year out of a total budget of $6.7 billion. Peacekeeping in particular has seen a massive expansion in the past decade, most of which has been under the Bush administration, including new missions in Darfur, Chad, the Central African Republic, Nepal, and Somalia, along with the enlargement of missions in Lebanon, Haiti, Liberia, and Congo. As a result of administration under-budgeting and a variety of congressional restrictions, however, Washington has accumulated about $1.2 billion in debt to that account. The administration has drawn some sharp criticism over this debt. With one hand it has slapped down overspending by the UN, while with the other has consistently voted in favor of undertaking new and augmented peacekeeping missions. 

The administration has proven ideologically opposed to the work of certain other UN-related agencies. For example, it tried without success to get the head of the IAEA fired. It has denounced the work of the new Human Rights Council and vowed not to join it due to the fact that its membership has included several authoritarian states. It has withheld funds related to family planning programs at the UN Population Fund because of the administration’s stance against abortion. It has carried on a doctrinal war against some UN conferences on, for example, global warming and a small arms accord. All but unnoticed, however, Bush envoys have worked closely on multiple occasions with many UN agencies in recent years, most notably with the WHO and the World Food Program, with UNICEF in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami of December 2004, and with the FAO on preventing and containing outbreaks of avian flu. (Constructive work with the World Food Programme and UNICEF, of course, may be attributed in part to the fact that they are led by American appointees.) 

All the President’s Men

The Bush family has had its own historic links with the UN throughout the years. The president’s grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush, was a Republican internationalist who supported the United Nations. The president’s father and former (forty-first) president, George H. W. Bush, served as the U.S. envoy to the UN from 1971 to 1973 and was regarded as a highly successful ambassador. In addition, Jenna Bush, the president’s daughter, worked as an intern for UNICEF in Latin America and wrote a book about an AIDS-afflicted girl entitled Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope. The president’s wife, Laura, publicly lobbied the UN Security Council to take measures against the Myanmar (Burmese) government after its crackdown on demonstrators in 2007. She also serves as honorary ambassador for the UN Literacy Decade through UNESCO and has appeared at several events to promote her work with the organization. 

The United States has also been proactive in ensuring that its diplomats and political friends are represented in the organization. Washington arranged for Ann Veneman, Bush’s secretary of agriculture, to become the new head of UNICEF in May 2005. The next month, the administration secured the appointment of Christopher Burnham as the undersecretary general for management, who stayed in the post until December 2006. Washington pressed successfully for the former managing editor of Reverend Sung Myung Moon’s Washington Times, Josette Sheeran Shiner, to take over as director of the World Food Program in April 2007. And, when Ban Ki-moon ascended to the secretary general post, Washington convinced him to designate a U.S. career diplomat, Burton Lynn Pascoe, as the new head of the Department of Political Affairs. The United States has sprinkled other administration appointees throughout the UN bureaucracy. 

Hush-Hush in UN Corridors

President Bush’s engagement with the UN is, in some ways, similar to the behavior of past American presidents. Many newcomers to the White House express an initial disdain, even indifference toward the UN. But, as crises mount, they discover that the organization can prove highly useful in securing Washington’s international goals. What remains different about the Bush era is the fact that its involvement with the UN, as far as the public is concerned, remains very hush-hush. Bush officials play down any participation in or dependence on the body. Indeed, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a recent piece in Foreign Affairs entitled “The New American Realism,” defending the achievements of the Bush administration, barely even mentioned the UN. 

In fact, administration officials have openly disparaged the international body and condoned anti-UN statements made by others. Instead, they remain intent on  holding together two goals at cross-purposes. On the one hand, they apparently want to keep a distance from the institution out of a concern about alienating an intransigent anti-UN constituency within their own ranks. On the other hand, they want to show that the United States is superior to and above the UN from an implied, if unarticulated, allegiance to the credo of American exceptionalism—the notion that America is a special nation with a unique voice which should not be subject to global dictates. Nonetheless, the administration has regularly sought to steer the UN toward Bush objectives around the globe. 

This treatment of the UN has weakened the public perception of its viability, at least in the United States, if not abroad. As a consequence of Washington’s admittedly stealth dealings with the body, most Americans seem to know little about the institution except its negatives and what it has not done—its failure to stop massacres in Srebrenica and Rwanda, its complicity in the Oil-for-Food scandal and sexual harassment by UN peacekeepers, its bungling of reforms, and its do-nothing record on crises from Kosovo to Darfur. Few Americans have gained any sense of the depth or seriousness of the U.S. commitment to the organization.

At the same time, the president’s semisecret approach to the body has hampered the aim of energizing or corraling support for the UN within Congress and with the U.S. public. The Bush policy has been designed, deliberately or not, to suggest publicly that the UN plays a minor role in global affairs and is not a significant factor in America’s security policies. Such a perception flies utterly in the face of the record of the Bush administration’s involvement with the UN over the past seven years. Yet Bush’s use of the UN has, ironically, strengthened its long-term and immediate role in global affairs as far as the internal politics of the organization are concerned, even if the American public’s support may be declining. 

On Deck?

Where does that leave the next White House occupant on January 20, 2009? It is not entirely clear at this juncture. America’s relations with the UN have not been a topic of much discussion during the 2008 campaign. But, whether it be a Mc ain or Obama presidency, there is little question that U.S. participation in the Security Council, funding of the UN and its agencies, and a strong American presence in the UN system will continue—and that, indeed, many of the Bush policies at the United Nations will stay on course, though altered or amended in various ways. 

A McCain presidency would likely expand the Bush agenda at the UN, as McCain has preached the virtues of multilateralism. Indeed, during the campaign, McCain has said “we have to strengthen our global alliances” and spoken about “strengthening existing international institutions,” “upholding international laws and norms,” standing up for “international good citizenship,” serving as “good stewards of our planet” (especially in relation to global warming and halting nuclear proliferation), and increasing funding for the IAEA. But McCain has never directly talked about the UN itself. Instead he has focused on his own idea of a new “League of Democracies” to bring stability to the earth. He claims, however, that the league would not “supplant” the UN, merely “complement” it. 

Senator Obama, for his part, has said that one of his first official acts as president would be to address the United Nations and declare, “America is back.” An Obama presidency, though, would undoubtedly reconfigure some of Bush’s UN policies. Obama will revamp U.S.-Iraq strategy in order to launch the effort of bringing home American troops, possibly using the UN to bolster his exit strategy during the transitional period. He may also enhance the UN presence in Afghanistan to help end the hostilities there. On North Korea and Iran, he would probably continue Bush initiatives, albeit with more sustained efforts to hold direct talks with the leaders of both nations. Obama, in short, is likely to be more proactive at the UN than McCain. But, either way, the UN is poised to come out from the shadows in 2009.

Labels: United Nations, U.N., MaximsNews, Stephen Schlesinger, George W. Bush, Oil-For-Food Program, UN Security Council, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, John Negroponte, John Danforth, Zalmay Khalilzad, Kofi Annan, China, Russia, France, Peacekeepers, Darfur, UN Children's Fund, UNICEF, International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA

 

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