Robert C. Johansen, Kroc Institute Professor of Political Science and Peace Studies

1 MORE OR LESS GLOBAL GOVERNANCE?
Does the United States need the United Nations? If we are satisfied with a world that has no international laws to discourage terrorism and war, a world where people intent on ethnic cleansing may brutally kill others without effective international efforts to stop them, then we may not need the UN. If we are content with a world in which the weak suffer what they must and the strong get away with what they can, then the United States may not need the UN.

But if we want a world with rules that specify when using military force is legitimate and when it is not, a world with laws to stop terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, then we need the United Nations. If we want to prevent pandemics and help the one-half of the world's people who now lack food and safe water to rise out of poverty, then the UN is a necessity. We can no longer ignore the need for some global governance if we want to succeed in addressing our most pressing international problems. If the UN did not exist, something like it would need to be created.

Of course the real world is more complicated than is reflected in these two alternatives, but we need to choose which of these two directions in which we want the world to move. "But," you might say, "the United Nations seems ineffective sometimes, and recently it has been criticized for poor management of the oil-for-food program in Iraq." That's true. Like all political institutions, the UN needs to be overseen carefully to prevent corruption and to make it more effective. Yet, despite its flaws, the UN enables us to do much more than we could do without it. And if the United States will consistently support constructive UN practices and reforms, its weaknesses can be replaced with new strengths.

Because the United Nations is the only organization able to provide a rule of law for all of humanity, we should make it more effective by supporting the creation of international targets for development and for more effective enforcement of international laws mandating peace and prohibiting gross violations of human rights. We need the benefits that the United Nations could provide to U.S. citizens.

Yet as the world approached the largest summit meeting in history in September 2005, the United States stood harshly against a broad agreement that had been hammered out previously over several months of work. Very late in this process the United States pressed for 400 changes, even though 125 other governments, including all members of the European Union, supported the existing draft agreement. The United States even demanded that all occurrences of the phrase "millennium development goals" be deleted from the text (although after a lot of negotiating damage had been done this surprising demand was then inexplicably dropped). U.S. officials objected to international targets to be achieved by 2015 for addressing poverty, hunger, needs for primary education, and AIDS.

As a result of U.S. refusal to accept goals already agreed upon by many countries, other governments in turn withdrew their previous assurances. Without U.S. support for a serious development agenda, other countries diluted their support for cooperative work on human rights, terrorism, intervention to stop genocide and war crimes, and UN institutional reforms. As a result, many significant initiatives were taken off the table. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special adviser to Secretary General Kofi Annan on the millennium goals said "Their [U.S. officials] purpose is clear: to try to eliminate the momentum behind the millennium development goals and to wriggle free of the commitments they have made." After the last minute compromises on the text, Max Lawson, an adviser to Oxfam International, said "we are really depressed. We are left clawing our way back to commitments made three years ago. When we start defining success as simply standing still, that's a terrible situation to be in." Malloch Brown, chief of staff for Secretary General Annan said people were "emptying [the agreement] of . . . content."

2 THE BENEFITS OF MULTILATERALISM
Reflecting on the UN summit of 2005, and studies of U.S. policy toward the United Nations over its 60 year history leads to this thesis: If we want to achieve a world in which humanitarian values can flourish and U.S. and global security can be assured, worldwide multilateralism needs to be a cornerstone of U.S. policy, exercised through the United Nation, an essential multilateral instrument, which needs to be reformed as it is strengthened. (By multilateralism, I mean activities taken together by many states in accordance with shared general principles and norms.) The logic behind this thesis grows out of a hard-headed appraisal of security needs, not out of starry-eyed idealism. Consider what needs to be done in the field of national security and human security, then identify the most effective means for doing it. Invariably, global problems require global solutions. Consider three benefits of working multilaterally through the United Nations.

First, the UN gets other countries to share the burdens of fighting disease, building schools, and enforcing international laws against terrorism, war, and gross violations of human rights. Many people seem to forget that burden sharing generally expands by at least twenty fold what the United States could do alone in international assistance. The United States is a superpower only in the domain of using military power to destroy the armies of other countries -- nowhere else. The United States cannot achieve even many security goals by itself. In Iraq, for example, the United States no sooner defeated the military forces of Saddam Hussein than it asked other countries, through the United Nations, to come to the aid of the Iraqi people with financial, technical, and security assistance. The response was lukewarm because of earlier U.S. disdain for the UN and for the opinions of others about the Bush administration's rush to war, but the logical place to which the United States turns for burden sharing is the UN.

UN peacekeeping, which has generally worked well despite occasional and well-publicized difficulties, is highly cost effective, both because peacekeeping is less costly than war and because the costs incurred are widely shared. The UN spends less per year on its peacekeeping operations than New York City spends on its police and fire departments. The cost of just ten days of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq would have paid for all UN peace operations for an entire year. And more than two-thirds of UN peacekeeping costs are paid by other countries. Unilateralism is far more expensive than its multilateral alternative.

Global campaigns to eliminate hunger, illiteracy, and dire poverty are necessary but will be adequately funded and effectively executed only by enhancing representative political processes for which the UN is an essential part. The gap between the current trend-line on child mortality and the one that leaders had committed themselves to in millennium goals before they were diluted at U.S. request amounts to 41 mission children dying before their fifth birthday over the next decade. If the millennium development goals had been fully implemented, the international community would have lifted more than one billion people out of extreme poverty by 2015.

Second, the UN establishes legitimacy for policies that protect our security. Many policies would be doomed to failure in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia if they were seen as an effort by the United States to impose its will on others, rather than as the product of a UN process that establishes worldwide legitimacy. For example, to mount the most effective and least costly humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide in places like the Darfur region of Sudan requires legitimation by the UN.

Although the UN does not always do what the United States wants, there is a "silver rule-of-law lining" to that reality. When the Security Council refused to authorize a United States attack on Iraq, U.S. officials claimed this refusal made the UN "irrelevant." But in fact, because the UN did not rubber stamp U.S. policies, it will have even more credibility in the future when it endorses forceful UN enforcement. If the United States values the legitimacy of UN authority to determine the legitimate use of force, we should appreciate that its endorsement means more if it never automatically gives its endorsement, as it refused to do in Iraq. If Security Council reform were widely supported to make it more fairly representative of the world's people, its decisions would carry even greater legitimacy.

Third, some global law-making is necessary for a peaceful world. Security Council decisions to enforce peace are legally binding on every country in the world, whereas unilateral actions by the United States are binding on no one. To stop the spread of nuclear weapons will require establishing worldwide limits on those weapons and worldwide inspection to ensure that obligations are kept. This would need to be done by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is a part of the UN system.

The three U.N. contributions to U.S. security -- burden-sharing, legitimizing law enforcement, and global rule-making -- all come together in efforts to counter terrorism effectively. For that we need cooperation from every society on earth, especially to obtain good intelligence and effective police work. The test of success is not whether America's familiar friends cooperate; it is whether those countries that are least likely to cooperate decide to help because they see terrorism as something that the entire world community is better off by curtailing. These hard-to-engage countries would not be able politically to arrange cooperation because of a U.S. request, but they could do so because of a UN request.

When the United States approaches the UN skillfully, the result often is to advance legitimate U.S. interests under the appropriate mantle of international law. For example, after the tragic attacks of 9/11, the Security Council authorized U.S. force against the Al Qaeda and Taliban perpetrators, but not against Iraq. UN resolution 1373 also required all countries in the world to interdict arms flows and financial transfers to suspected terrorists, to report on terrorist activities, and to implement national legislation to stop terrorists. The United States simply could not have obtained such speedy and far-reaching cooperation from 191 separate countries throughout the world without the legal authority of a binding Security Council resolution. Separate negotiations on treaties and difficult treaty ratification processes would have taken many years to conclude, and even then the results probably would not have been able to impose the same standards on all countries concerned. The Council achieved this worldwide result by passing a single resolution.

In sum, the United States needs the United Nations. The UN helps every U.S. citizen by getting other countries to share the costs and burdens of many U.S.-supported policies, by providing the world's only authoritative voice on what constitutes the legitimate use of military force, and by upholding international laws that are absolutely necessary for maintaining peace and human rights around the world.

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