United Nations Archive

Busy and serious people know only two types of working lunch. There are pleasant but time-consuming lunches they would prefer to skip, and then there are tedious ones they desperately wish to avoid. Today, ambassadors serving on the U.N. Security Council will endure a third category of business luncheon: One that will at best be eventful but nerve-rattling, and at worst could hasten the collapse of international diplomacy. The council is visiting Washington, where it will lunch with U.S. President Donald Trump. What could possibly go wrong? The U.S. has held the rotating presidency of the Security Council in April, […]

In picking a topic for this week’s column, I decided to write about an institution that is deeply embedded in the structure of daily life as we know it. Yet it is deeply flawed, in ways that many observers from across the political spectrum have acknowledged for quite some time: It is bloated, sclerotic, overly bureaucratic and inadequately representative of society’s less privileged. Worse still, it is detached from the everyday life of those under its watch and paralyzed by seemingly insurmountable political divisions. Similarly, there is a general consensus on the necessary reforms that would make this institution more […]

Napoleon allegedly said that he liked his generals to be lucky. If he were around today to apply the same logic to secretaries-general of the United Nations, he might have some concerns about Antonio Guterres. The new U.N. chief, who has now been in office for 100 days, is clearly an energetic and dedicated leader. But he has had a run of very bad luck indeed. The number and variety of crises that have sprung up around the U.N. since the start of the year is remarkable. Famine is looming in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen. The new U.S. […]

U.S. President Donald Trump has punctured the tired but persistent myth that the United Nations Security Council can manage the Syrian civil war. Last night, he ordered cruise missile strikes against Syria without looking for authorization from the United Nations. He did not even wait for Russia and China to veto a U.N. resolution on this week’s chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which would have offered the U.S. an excuse for pursuing unilateral action. This is both refreshing and dangerous. Since 2011, Security Council diplomacy over Syria has frequently been a grotesque farce. The U.S. and its […]

Is it possible that I am a minor source of moral inspiration to the Trump administration? This may sound like a belated April Fool’s joke. The Trump team, with its emphasis on transactional politics, is not exactly a conclave of moralists. And as a liberal internationalist of European origin, I am not entirely in tune with the “America First” crowd. As I have noted, Trump supporters on right-wing websites have cheerfully dismissed me as a “hysterical” globalist or worse. They are unlikely to look to me for inspiration. Yet, tracking recent debates about American proposals to make severe cuts to […]