Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File

AT: U.N. Credibility

1. UN credibility can’t solve global problems—it’s too much of a bureaucracy and it prevents US leadership

When the United Nations was created 59 years ago, statesmen hoped it would enhance the projection of American power by enlisting international support for Washington's policies. But time and again, the reality has been far different. Too often, the United Nations acts as if it sees its function as preventing the United States from playing a leadership role in the world — particularly when it comes to using military force against rogue states that support terrorism. Unfortunately, that seems to be the approach taken by a high-level panel appointed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to put forward a new vision of collective security for the world. The group, chaired by the former prime minister of Thailand, includes 16 distinguished statesmen, among them former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, former Chinese Vice Prime Minister Qian Qichen and Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League and former foreign minister of Egypt. Unquestionably, they put a great deal of thought into the 95-page report. But unfortunately they have produced more or less what one would expect from a panel dominated by Western balance-of-power advocates and former Third World autocrats: a flawed series of policy recommendations that will empower U.N. bureaucracies while hampering America's efforts to circumvent the United Nations when it proves incapable of responding to actual threats. The group discussed some of the major threats facing the world today, including failed states, civil wars, poverty, organized crime, AIDS and nuclear weapons proliferation. But too often, its policy prescriptions appear to be so bland as to be useless or more of the same: negotiations to invest added authority in dysfunctional bureaucracies like the International Atomic Energy Agency; expanding the size of the Security Council; and breaking "the link between poverty and civil war." We would have liked to see more in the way of substantive guidance on what current bureaucracies deserve to be eliminated. The report gives short shrift to initiatives such as the effort — supported by the Heritage Foundation on the right and and former Clinton U.N. representative Nancy Soderberg on the left — to build a U.N. democracy caucus.

But in recent years, critics have focused with some justification on financial profligacy, hypocrisy on human rights, a tolerance for terrorism and, finally, what the Bush administration especially came to see as the world body's impotence in responding, for example, to Iraqi intransigence on weapons inspections. Most recently alleged corruption in administering an oil-for-food program with Iraq and sexual misconduct by U.N. peacekeepers deepened the quagmire. The sweeping changes proposed this week by Secretary General Kofi Annan might hold promise of muting if not eliminating some of that criticism. Anan called his proposals, the outgrowth of an independent panel's report last fall, "the most far-reaching reforms in the history of the United Nations." Some proposals should be especially attractive to the agency's critics. The reforms would put the United Nations unequivocally against terrorism, replace the current Human Rights Commission with a new body whose members would "abide by the highest human rights standards" and would streamline governance of the institution. The United Nation's -- and Anan's -- credibility is so suspect in some quarters that these proposals may do little to improve the agency's standing. And proposals to call on developed countries to shoulder yet more obligations for assistance to developing nations, while they may be the right prescription, are sure to stir opposition.

Christoph von Marschall concluded in centrist Der Tagesspiegel of Berlin (3/21): "At issue is the UN's survival. The UN will not be abolished if Kofi Annan's reform plans fail, but who would then pin his hopes on the future relevance of the UN?... Kofi Annan is vigorously fighting for reforms, because criticism of his opponents also threatens his survival as secretary-general. The UN will either be made fit for the 21st century or it will lose authority. Annan's proposals for a definition of terror may be uncomfortable but necessary...and the restructuring of the Security Council is overdue. The UN only has the power that is granted to it by benevolent states. Without America's dollars and soldiers, and this is something people in Germany do not like to hear, the UN would be a crazy horse for despots."

Thomas Franck 2006, Murray and Ida Becker Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, January. “The Power of Legitimacy and the Legitimacy of Power,” American Journal of International Law, Lexis.

It seems apparent to me that the normative system established by the UN Charter is not eroding. On the contrary, its legitimacy is rather consistently upheld in the rhetoric of all states and the behavior of most. The unlawful conduct of the scofflaws may be a great political problem because of the scale of the suffering it inflicts on the innocent and because of its great capacity to destabilize world order. But such aberrant behavior has not been a serious challenge to the law, because only the most extreme of its apologists openly attack the normative order or seek to replace it with any alternative set of rules. President George W. Bush's desire to make clear that the United States would act preemptively, more or less at will, whenever it thought its security threatened, 41 was not taken seriously as a legal proposition, since it was not remotely advanced as a new reciprocal right, one tenable by any nation, but, rather, in the unilateralist spirit of Thucydides' characterization of the law governing relations between Athens and little Melos during the Peloponnesian Wars: that the powerful do as they will, while the weak do as they must. 42 Oddly, almost nothing proposed by the United States since it thus proclaimed itself the world's sole superpower has taken the form of new norms meant to govern state recourse to force, even though this is an era with complex new problems for which new rules might even be desirable. Indeed, it is remarkable that the United States, in what Andy Warhol might have called its fifteen minutes as sole superpower, has not sought to shape new rules, willfully abdicating one of the prerogatives, one would think, of superpower-dom. Instead, it has tried, even risibly, to show sometimes that it still adheres to the old rules, and at other times that it does not believe rules apply to it at all.