True intentions

Just as it seemed the US was reaching out for allies it pulls the rug from under the international community, writes El-Sayed Amin Shalabi*

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Just as the UN emerged from the embers of WWII, its stated purpose as enshrined in its charter to serve the international community as the primary instrument for arbitrating disputes and protecting security and peace, so it was the victim of the Cold War when rivalry between the American and Soviet superpowers deepened. This competition was so fierce that it polarised the entirety of international life, and especially the handling of crucial global issues and crises. Increasingly, UN channels were circumvented, weakening the organisation's purpose and prestige. Likewise the UN was victim, again, of the sweeping changes that took place with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascendancy of its adversary, the US, to the position of sole and unrivalled superpower. Hopes that "the moment" had arrived in which the UN would regain its standing, filling the post-Cold War vacuum, were scotched through the 1990s as the uncontested victor of that previous era demonstrated its determination to assert itself as the sole agent capable of assuming the helm of the new global order; a task, moreover, that it regarded as "a burden", but one both its right and duty to bear.

The UN entered an even direr phase with the advent, in 2000, of the administration of George W Bush, with its undisguised contempt for UN multilateralism and international law. To the neoconservative clique that came into power with this administration the UN, and all it stood for, was "irrelevant". If the international body refused to give sanction to what the US wanted to do then the US would have to go it alone. Once again, war shaped the fate of the UN, this time the American-led war against Iraq.

Some observers believed the Bush administration would be sobered by the consequences of aggressive unilateralism during its first term and would revise its thinking. Indeed, as it moved into its second term it gave faint signal that it was heading in this direction. Washington asked the UN to supervise the elections in Iraq and NATO to train Iraqi security forces, and, more explicitly, during their recent visits to Europe, Bush and Condoleezza Rice issued statements to the effect that Washington needed its European allies, and that it realised the world's problems could not be solved by force alone.

Unfortunately, such signals were reversed by Washington's appointment of John Bolton as its permanent representative to the UN. Prime exponent of neoconservative thinking, participant in the design of the movement's ideological foundation, signatory to the documents that have come to be regarded as its manifesto, Bolton has little patience for multilateral collaboration. Announcing his appointment, Condoleezza Rice described him as "tough-minded"; a quality, she said, which was crucial in the negotiations that led to Libya's relinquishment of its nuclear arms programme and those that gave rise to the Treaty of Moscow, where the US and Russia agreed to mutual reductions in nuclear warheads. It is difficult to square this vindication of acumen with the same diplomat who two years ago denounced North Korea's leader as a "tyrannical dictator", describing life under the ruler as a "hellish nightmare", provoking Kim Jong Il to fire back that "such human scum", such a "bloodsucker", would be closed out of negotiations over his country's nuclear weapons programme. Nor could observers, when hearing news of Bolton's appointment, help but to recall that in 2002 he called for North Korea's destruction, and that in 2003 he told Ma'arev that after Iraq the US should deal with Syria, Iran and Kim Jong Il.

This, too, was the person who played an instrumental role in rescinding the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, a resolution that he described as a black mark on the reputation of the UN. More importantly, Bolton is on record as saying, "There is no such thing as the United Nations," that if 10 floors were lost from the UN building "it wouldn't make a bit of difference", and "If I were redoing the Security Council today I'd have one permanent member [the United States] because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world."

Opinion in the US was sharply divided over the Bolton appointment. While many feared that it reflected the true intentions of an administration firmly under the control of the neoconservatives, the American right roundly supported it. Siding with the latter, The Wall Street Journal recently lashed out against the UN and what it described as its dismal record in Somalia, Rwanda and with the Food for Oil programme in Iraq. The appointment of Bolton, it continued, revived the tradition of such figures as Jean Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who stood up for American interests in the UN.

Given that such traditions led to the US's withdrawal from UNESCO and its refusal to pay its debts to the UN we can only presume that hard days lay ahead for the international organisation.

* The writer is executive director of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs.