Deputy SG Malloch on US leadership at the UN.

Deputy Secretary General of the UN, Mark Malloch, in a bold move for a civil servant, recently delivered an emphatic rebuke of US exceptionalism, as part of a speech entitled Power and Superpower, about US leadership and reform, in light of the imminent budget crisis. Despite a couple of quibbles you might make, the speech is pretty much spot on the money, and definitely jells nicely with the constructivist narrative of post-WWII US interests - whereby, contra the neo-conservative view, the US sees itself as having a concrete stake in positing a sustainable system of international law, backed by the globalisation of liberal values, universalist norms and strong institutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Multilateral compromise has always been difficult to justify in the American political debate: too many speeches, too many constraints, too few results. Yet it was not meant to be so.

The all-moral-idealism-no-power institution was the League of Nations. The UN was explicitly designed through US leadership and the ultimate coalition of the willing, its World War II allies, as a very different creature, an antidote to the League’s failure. At the UN’s core was to be an enforceable concept of collective security protected by the victors of that war, combined with much more practical efforts to promote global values such as human rights and democracy.

Underpinning this new approach was a judgement that no President since Truman has felt able to repeat: that for the world’s one super-Power -- arguably more super in 1946 than 2006 -- managing global security and development issues through the network of a United Nations was worth the effort. Yes it meant the give and take of multilateral bargaining, but any dilution of American positions was more than made up for by the added clout of action that enjoyed global support.

To take just one example, 10 years ago UN peacekeeping seemed almost moribund in the aftermath of tragic mistakes in Rwanda, Somalia and Yugoslavia. Today, the UN fields 18 peacekeeping operations around the world, from the Congo to Haiti, Sudan to Sierra Leone, Southern Lebanon to Liberia, with an annual cost that is at a bargain bin price compared to other US-led operations. And the US pays roughly one quarter of those UN peacekeeping costs -- just over $1 billion this year.

That figure should be seen in the context of estimates by both the GAO and RAND Corporation that UN peacekeeping, while lacking heavy armament enforcement capacity, helps to maintain peace -- when there is a peace to keep -- more effectively for a lot less than comparable US operations. Multilateral peacekeeping is effective cost-sharing on a much lower cost business model and it works.

That is as it should be and is true for many other areas the UN system works in, too, from humanitarian relief to health to education. Yet for many policymakers and opinion leaders in Washington, let alone the general public, the roles I have described are hardly believed or, where they are, remain discreetly underplayed. To acknowledge an America reliant on international institutions is not perceived to be good politics at home.

Take the issue of human rights.

When Eleanor Roosevelt took the podium at the UN to argue passionately for the elaboration of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the world responded. Today, when the human rights machinery was renewed with the formation of a Human Rights Council to replace the discredited Commission on Human Rights, and the US chose to stay on the sidelines, the loss was everybody’s.

I hope and believe the new Council will prove itself to be a stronger and more effective body than its predecessor. But there is no question that the US decision to call for a vote in order to oppose it in the General Assembly, and then to not run for a seat after it was approved by 170 votes to 4, makes the challenge more difficult.

More broadly, Americans complain about the UN’s bureaucracy, weak decision-making, the lack of accountable modern management structures and the political divisions of the General Assembly here in New York. And my response is, “guilty on all counts”.

But why?

In significant part because the US has not stuck with its project -- its professed wish to have a strong, effective United Nations -- in a systematic way. Secretary Albright and others here today have played extraordinary leadership roles in US-UN relations, for which I salute them. But in the eyes of the rest of the world, US commitment tends to ebb much more than it flows. And in recent years, the enormously divisive issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have come to define an unhappy marriage.

As someone who deals with Washington almost daily, I know this is unfair to the very real effort all three Secretaries of State I have worked with –- Secretary Albright, Secretary Powell and Secretary Rice -– put into UN issues. And today, on a very wide number of areas, from Lebanon and Afghanistan to Syria, Iran and the Palestinian issue, the US is constructively engaged with the UN. But that is not well known or understood, in part because much of the public discourse that reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. That is what I mean by “stealth” diplomacy: the UN’s role is in effect a secret in Middle America even as it is highlighted in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

One day soon we must address the massive gap between the scale of world issues and the limits of the institutions we have built to address them. However, today even relatively modest proposals that in any other organization would be seen as uncontroversial, such as providing more authority and flexibility for the Secretary-General to shift posts and resources to organizational priorities without having to get direct approval from Member States, have been fiercely resisted by the G-77, the main group of developing countries, on the grounds that this weakens accountability. Hence the current deadlock.

What lies behind this?

It is not because most developing countries don’t want reform. To be sure, a few spoilers do seem to be opposed to reform for its own sake, and there is no question that some countries are seeking to manipulate the process for their own ends with very damaging consequences. But in practice, the vast majority is fully supportive of the principle of a better run, more effective UN; indeed they know they would be the primary beneficiaries, through more peace, and more development.

So why has it not so far been possible to isolate the radicals and build a strong alliance of reform-minded nations to push through this agenda?

I would argue that the answer lies in questions about motives and power.

Motives, in that, very unfortunately, there is currently a perception among many otherwise quite moderate countries that anything the US supports must have a secret agenda aimed at either subordinating multilateral processes to Washington’s ends or weakening the institutions, and therefore, put crudely, should be opposed without any real discussion of whether they make sense or not.

The UN is not without its faults, but the neo-conservative campaign of UN marginalisation, based on appeals to jingoism, US exceptionalism and superficial talking points, which somehow finds traction in the News Ltd echo-chamber, arguably constitutes one of the most mendacious and incoherent manifestations of modern sloganeering politics ever. Constructive criticism is fine, but the blatant UN-bashing we've seen is anything but that. Such deeply hostile attitudes towards the UN, inevitably rest on a complete misunderstanding of the UN system, international law, the supreme danger of multi-year global conflict, the benefits of multilateralism, the empirical record of peace, and the vision of the Atlantic Charter consensus.

Anyway, Bolton has a predictably puerile and red-meat response to all this, which manages to show considerable outrage, without actually addressing anything of substance. Typical.

I said I've known you since 1989, and I'm telling you this is the worst mistake by a senior UN official that I have seen in that entire time. That's why the only hope I think is that the Secretary General comes to the rescue of the organization and repudiates the speech.

This particular quote sticks out to me as a good exemplar of the kind of hyper-militancy these hardliners love to decry in left-wing populists like Michael Moore. I mean, how ridiculously stupid is it to rate Malloch's harsh tone, toward the Bush administration and Fox News, as the greatest failure of the Secretariate since 1989? I mean, hello - what about corruption, genocide, and real humanitarian failures? You know, anything that might actually register on a normative scale of any significance?

Sorry, but Mr Bolton's umbrage is about as convincing as the idea that he's actually committed to UN reform, and making the system work. He speaks with an awful lot of pith and self-righteousness for someone who's completely missed the most important lessons in IR theory for the last hundred years, and whose very unsuitability for the job required a recess appointment to remedy. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner Bolton stops playing spoiler to the UN process, and gets back in the AIPAC lunchbox he came from, the better.