United Nations Archive

If Hillary Clinton is elected president of the United States in November, fixing the failings of United Nations peacekeeping operations is unlikely to be one of her foreign policy priorities. Putting Russia in its place and balancing China in the Pacific will loom much larger on her to-do list. But the next administration is likely to find that crises involving blue helmets have a habit of creeping up its agenda. Clinton is presumably painfully aware of this. Her husband’s presidency was punctuated by peacekeeping failures from Somalia to Srebrenica, and the failure to give U.N. personnel effective back-up during the […]

So far, the Olympic Games in Rio are off to a good start. No major disasters have occurred, despite serious worries about security and environmental conditions. But the games—and particularly the downsides like excessive costs, corruption and imbalances of power and influence—have raised questions of politics and economics that bear many similarities to some of the major trends in international affairs. One innovative proposal for fixing the Olympics provides a useful comparison to some notions of how to improve the global governance system. Hosting the Olympics has already been costly for Brazil—in financial terms for sure, at $12 billion, of […]

The United Nations is constantly embroiled in brutal conflicts, but some do it vastly more political harm than others. The organization has never fully recovered from its failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide and Srebrenica massacre in the 1990s. Now it faces simultaneous crises in South Sudan and Syria that may do it equally severe damage. In South Sudan, peacekeepers have been thrown off balance by an outburst of violence for the second time in three years. The U.N. mission (UNMISS) there was unable to stop the country collapsing into civil war in 2013, but managed to protect tens of […]