Why America Still Needs the United Nations

Shashi Tharoor

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003

Summary:  Multilateralism is a means, not an end, and there is no more multilateral body than the UN. That may make it unwieldy at times, but the UN's inclusiveness is the key to the legitimacy only it can confer. The organization thus remains an essential force in international politics, and one the United States benefits from greatly.

Shashi Tharoor is UN Undersecretary-General for Communications and Public Information and the author of eight books, including the forthcoming Nehru: The Invention of India. These are his personal views.

Third, UN peacekeeping is highly cost-effective. The UN is used to running operations on a shoestring, and it spends less per year on peacekeeping worldwide than is spent on the budgets of the New York City Fire and Police Departments. UN peacekeeping is also far cheaper than the alternative, which is war. Two days of Operation Desert Storm in 1991 cost more than the entire UN peacekeeping budget that year, and one week of Operation Iraqi Freedom would amply pay for all UN peacekeeping for 2003. The UN operation that ended the Iran-Iraq War cost less annually than the crude oil carried in two supertankers. Considering how many supertankers were placed at risk during that ruinous conflict, this makes peacekeeping an extraordinary bargain.

None of this is to deny that the Security Council's record has been mixed. The body has acted unwisely at times and failed to act altogether at others: one need only think of the fate of the "safe areas" in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda for instances of each. The council has also sometimes been too divided to succeed, as was the case in early 2003 over Iraq. And all too often, member states have passed resolutions they had no intention of implementing. But the UN, at its best, is only a mirror of the world: it reflects divisions and disagreements as well as hopes and convictions. Sometimes it only muddles through. As Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN's second secretary-general, put it, the UN was not created to take humanity to heaven but to save it from hell.

And this it has done innumerable times, especially during the Cold War, when it prevented regional or local conflicts from igniting a superpower conflagration. To suggest, on the basis of the disagreement over Iraq, that the Security Council has become dysfunctional or irrelevant is to greatly distort the record by viewing it through the prism of just one issue. Even while disagreeing on Iraq, the members of the Security Council unanimously agreed on a host of other vital issues, from Congo to Côte d'Ivoire, from Cyprus to Afghanistan. Indeed, the Security Council remains on the whole a remarkably harmonious body. Authorizing wars has never been among its principal responsibilities -- only twice in its 58 years of existence has the council explicitly done so -- and it seems unduly harsh to condemn it solely over its handling of so rare a challenge. In any case, it would be folly to discredit an entire institution for a disagreement among its members. One would not close down the Senate (or even the Texas legislature) because its members failed to agree on one bill. The UN's record of success and failure is no worse than that of most representative national institutions, yet its detractors seem to expect the UN to succeed (or at least to agree with the United States) all the time.

Too often, the UN's critics seem to miss another fundamental characteristic of the world body: the way it functions both as a stage and as an actor. On the one hand, the UN is a stage on which its member states declaim their differences and their convergences. Yet the UN is also an actor (particularly in the person of the secretary-general, his staff, agencies, and operations) that executes the policies made on its stage. The general public usually fails to see this distinction and views the UN as a shapeless aggregation. Sins (of omission or commission) committed by individual governments on the UN stage are thus routinely blamed on the organization itself. Sometimes member states deliberately contribute to this confusion, as when American officials blamed the UN for not preventing genocide in Rwanda -- despite the fact that Washington itself had blocked the Security Council from taking action in that crisis.

Indeed, one of the more unpleasant, if convenient, uses to which the UN has regularly been put has been to serve as a pliant scapegoat for the failures of its member states. Former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali ruefully noted this point when alleged UN deficiencies were blamed for the purely American-made disaster in Mogadishu in October 1993. And Annan has often joked that the abbreviation by which he is known inside the organization -- "SG" -- stands for "scapegoat," not "secretary-general." There is, sadly, considerable utility in having an institution that, by embodying the collective will (or lack thereof) of 191 member states, can safely be blamed for the errors that no individual state could politically afford to admit. But those who need a whipping boy must be careful not to flog him to death.

IN IT TOGETHER

The UN's relevance does not stand or fall on its conduct on any one issue. When the crisis has passed, the world will still be left with, to use Annan's phrase, innumerable "problems without passports" -- threats such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the degradation of our common environment, contagious disease and chronic starvation, human rights and human wrongs, mass illiteracy and massive displacement. These are problems that no one country, however powerful, can solve alone. The problems are the shared responsibility of humankind and cry out for solutions that, like the problems themselves, also cross frontiers. The UN exists to find these solutions through the common endeavor of all states. It is the indispensable global organization for a globalizing world.

Large portions of the world's population require the UN's assistance to surmount problems they cannot overcome on their own. As these words are written, civil war rages in Congo and Liberia and sputters in Côte d'Ivoire, while long-running conflicts may be close to permanent solution in Cyprus and Sierra Leone. The arduous task of nation building proceeds fitfully in Afghanistan, the Balkans, East Timor, and Iraq. Twenty million refugees and displaced persons, from Palestine to Liberia and beyond, depend on the UN for shelter and succor. Decades of development in Africa are being wiped out by the scourge of hiv/aids (and its deadly interaction with famine and drought), and the Millennium Development Goals -- agreed on with much fanfare in September 2000, at the UN's Millennium Summit, the largest gathering of heads of government in human history -- remain unfulfilled. Too many countries still lack the wherewithal to eliminate poverty, educate girls, safeguard health, and provide their people with clean drinking water. If the UN did not exist to help tackle these problems, they would undoubtedly end up on the doorstep of the world's only superpower.