Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Episode Summary
The United Nations General Assembly puts the most powerful leaders on the planet in one room. But, what do they really end up accomplishing during their time together? Critics say it is little more than a lot of grandstanding wrapped around a thin layer of grandiose ambitions that seldom produce much impact. We took the question to ambassadors and other senior officials. Is this expensive event effective for the people they represent and if so how? You will not want to miss their take on what is (and mostly what is not) working. We then look at what reform might involve for the body and its biggest global gathering with our resident analyst Sir Richard Dearlove, who formerly led the British intelligence agency MI6.
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Lockwood: You're listening to a special episode of One Decision. The United Nations is the most recognizable international organization in the world. It was founded in 1945 in the aftermath of the Second World War with the stated aim of maintaining world peace and preventing war. It largely replaced a previous existing intergovernmental global organization called the League of Nations, which was also established after the First World War with similar aims. Aims that, as we all know, failed to prevent the global catastrophe that impacted nearly every country on earth. So if the United Nations, established seventy seven years ago, has failed to maintain peace and prevent many wars, well, what is it for? I asked my regular cohost, the former chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove.
Dearlove: It's a really tough question. It's a big question. But if you look at, as it were, the two attempts globally that there have been to regulate the international security situation, they're both the product of war. So you have the League of Nations and that attempt to modulate and run international relations that followed World War I after the Treaty of Versailles. And then after World War you have the UN that emerges from the ruins of World War II. And for a period of time, let's say that the UN has been, not necessarily an effective regulator of the international security situation, but it has been the forum through which most of the deals that have been done have eventually been done. The UN has played an important role. UN resolutions have been a key part of decision making in international affairs.
Lockwood: In this episode, we'll hear from ambassadors, former presidents, and experts on what their views are on this hugely important institution at perhaps its most critical juncture in recent years. First, to the middle of the Pacific and a tiny island nation fighting for its life. Here's the UN ambassador from Kiribati.
KIRIBATI AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Tito: The sad thing I must say is there's too much talk about it. That is my disappointment. Not me and the one. And we keep talking about it and keep talking and then another year of talking about it and then maybe this time again, we'll be talking again this high level. The people be talking about it and just saying, you know, the poor guys there. Oh, they're having trouble. But you don't see action. That is my disappointment. I think we are it become just a talking shop.
Lockwood: That's ambassador Tebororo Tito, the former president of Kiribati. He's referring to his frustration over the lack of coordinated international action to tackle climate change that is proving an existential threat to his homeland, a tiny low lying archipelago in the middle of the Pacific. Rising sea levels due to rising temperatures means that his country in just a few decades is likely to be underwater and uninhabitable.
Tito: We go to meetings and talking, but the problem, you know, confronting the people were affected. Yeah. And I can I can even identify the people, who they are now, but there's no point doing that because I think there is no funding available to go down that level? But there's a lot of funding to be spent on the talking, on the reporting, on the researching, on the data collection, on more meetings to talk about it, but there's not money to go down to the ground. You see? Yeah. So that is my disappointment.
Lockwood: No higher than two meters above sea levels in some parts, Kiribati is one of the most vulnerable places on earth to climate change, if not the most. And some projections estimate that if global warming continues, most of its islands are likely to be almost completely submerged. We'll hear more about the story of Kiribati in an upcoming special on climate change. But today, ambassador Tito took us through what is an increasingly regular refrain in his experience as a UN ambassador. It's all talk, but very little action.
Tito: And now we're talking about it, and we have international experience talking about this sort of arrangement. They I don't have the answer, but I I raised it to many of these international lawyers, and I said, what do you do? We need to think. Maybe another meeting, more meetings of the UN, especially the the legal brains of the of the United Nations, those who are now in the in, you know, International Law Commission. These are the legal brains of the world, the best of them. They come together and talk keep talking and then produce another law to accommodate a problem that hasn't happened yet. And so this is a problem. And I put it to them. They say we don't have the answer.
FINLAND AND THE SECURITY COUNCIL
Kalku: I think above all, at the UN, it is a unique organization because of their membership.
Lockwood: Ambassador Elina Kalku is Finland's representative to the UN. In the recent General Assembly in New York in late September, gridlock at its Security Council was high on the agenda. As Putin continues his invasion of Ukraine, Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, has regularly used its veto to block resolutions, something that US President Joe Biden said that he has had enough of and called for reform of the council going forward.
Kalku: Nearly to a 100 member countries. It is the global forum which is supposed to build common views on how to solve big global problems. And the ability of nations to agree and the ability of the UN to help in this, I think is a fundamental test. And if ever the desire to move forward and solve the problems, it is needed now. The challenges are so big and they are interlinked and too many things happen at the same time. There was a precedent for United Nations, which was the League of Nations. And it was at the time when the Soviet Union attacked Finland. The Soviet Union was expelled or it left. There was a decision to expel the Soviet Union from League of Nations, and the League of Nations didn't exist anymore.
Lockwood: You characterize the United Nations as a forum, which I think is interesting. When it comes to Russia's war in Ukraine, critics of the UN say the UN is good for nothing but talking. Is there a diplomatic resolution to the war in Ukraine, or has the time for talking gone and passed?
Kalku: Well, I think at the moment, it looks like there would be no chance for peace negotiations right now. But over time, of course, the war needs to end, the attack needs to end. And we hope there will be a peaceful settlement in the end, which would maintain the sovereignty and integrity, territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Lockwood: The UN General Assembly, which is held every year in New York and involves delegations from all of the 193 member states, remains the most effective way for world leaders, ambassadors, and foreign ministers to regularly touch base face to face and broaden conversations about their different priorities with other member states. Vladimir Putin did not show up to the seventy seventh General Assembly this year, but his longtime foreign minister Sergei Lavrov did. And while he had to sit through a barrage of condemnations on behalf of his absent boss, he did hit back on the global stage, blasting the international community of Russophobia, which he described as grotesque. NEWS CLIP [8:22] Let us speak plainly. A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council invaded its neighbor, attempted to erase the sovereign state from the map.
Lockwood: President Biden, when it came to his turn to talk, put the UN on notice. NEWS CLIP [8:39] I also believe the time has come for this institution to become more inclusive so that it can better respond to the needs of today's world. Members of the UN Security Council, including The United States, should consistently uphold and defend the UN Charter and refrain from the use of the veto, except in rare extraordinary situations to ensure that the council remains credible and effective. That is also why The United States supports increasing the number of both permanent and non permanent representatives of the council. This includes permanent seats for those nations we've long supported and permanent seats for countries in Africa, Latin America, The Caribbean.
INTERVIEW WITH DAVID SHEFFER
Lockwood: Listening to Biden's speech was David Sheffer, lawyer and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who was also The United States' first ambassador at large for war crimes issues, and he advised the UN secretary general on the Khmer Rouge trials.
Sheffer: Well, Julia, the United Nations is definitely on a precipice right now. But I think both, leaders, secretary general Guterres and president Biden, are on to something very fundamental, which is what I have described as the era now of survival governance. In other words, the challenges are so existential, and the United Nations is actually the international organization that has to deal with these problems. It's not a question of, you know, trying to build individual coalitions of nations that are outside of the United Nations and somehow can attack problems as, you know, little coalitions of the West or of the East or whatever. Yes, we've done that in the past, but now the problems are so existential, so serious, so global in their sweep that the coalition is the coalition of the world as it is represented in the United Nations. It has to be dealt with from that vantage point. So I think getting back to President Biden, I mean, he clearly described how when you combine after this tumultuous year, the realities of food insecurity, of humanitarian catastrophes, of war, of climate change and environmental catastrophes, it really does bring us to a precipice of some character, and president Biden definitely got specific today about expanding the Security Council, and that is so significant. And I'll just say that, you know, when I was working very closely at the United Nations as council and adviser to ambassador Albright at the time, the idea that any of the permanent members would argue for expansion of the permanent membership of the Security Council was just not going to happen, but now it has happened.
Lockwood: I'm glad you brought that up because that was something that puzzled me. Now with the United States Security Council, the use of veto power, which was he specifically mentioned countries, members of the Security Council abusing the veto. He said we need to refrain from using it apart from in the most important circumstances because we want it to remain a functioning effective body. And then he made the call for adding new permanent and non permanent members. Now that confused me because if you add more permanent and non member countries to the Security Council, you're still not going to fix the problem of Russia and China are always just gonna veto anything that goes against their own interests without, you know, without being more willing to, you know, to to seed on things. That problem doesn't go away. What do you make of that?
Sheffer: What I make of it is that if you do expand the permanent membership by, let's say, three, five members, depending on how you wanna strategize it, You probably will increase the pressure within the council enormously on Russia and China because, yes, they're outliers when they veto now, like the vetoes on Syria, for example, which were extremely unfortunate, but it does definitely increase the pressure on them because, you know, China prides itself on thinking that it represents the viewpoint of a lot of countries in the developing world, but I think once you put a South Africa, for example, on the Security Council or a Latin American state on the Security Council, then they actually represent the interests of their region on that council sometimes, not all the times, but sometimes, and I think the gamble is that they would actually be more conducive to supporting resolutions before the Security Council on almost all of the issues brought to the Security Council and thus put that kind of pressure on Russia and China. I think the gamble is that major developing countries like South Africa, perhaps Brazil I mean, I wouldn't say they're developing. Obviously, it's a developed country. It'll be more likely that The United States, The United Kingdom, France can build support among countries of that nature for Security Council issues than can Russia and China.
Lockwood: I I mean, I I understand the logic of making the Security Council less of a western liberal, you know, top table with all of the developing nations underneath them. The optics of that are not great. They never have been great. The gamble if we're to take what you're saying, the gamble of adding more nation states representing other regions of the world, the gamble is that that Russia or China might feel more pressure in order to not do flagrant misuses of the veto. That may be true in the future, but at the moment, we are dealing with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. I don't know that you could say that either of them are vulnerable to peer pressure when it comes to the United Nations. The other question I have is that the rest of the world does not necessarily want to always sing from the same hymn sheet as the West. And we may be having more consensus among the UN General Assembly this year in this meeting, the seventy seventh General Assembly. But in the emergency convening earlier this year in response to the invasion of Ukraine back in February when the UN General Assembly convened when Biden was trying to lead the world in condemning Russia, in applying punitive measures, in sanctioning Russia, he could not bring the world with him. He managed to bring the majority of European nations with him, but actually, the vast majority of member states did not vote. They abstained.
Sheffer: Right. You're absolutely correct. On the sanctions resolution, that is what happened, and one can provide a lot of explanations for that. But, you know, it didn't mean that those governments were supportive of the invasion of Ukraine, the aggressive action against Ukraine. Rather, it was very much, rather understandably a self interest decision by those governments. And, frankly, at the end of the day, I would not hold that so much against those countries, if I were representing The United States because the global economy does have to continue and survive this Ukrainian war. We can't shut down the global economy, and some of that economy is dependent upon trade with Russia, particularly with food, and agricultural goods. But I think on the balance, more often than not, and frankly, it simply has reached a stage where we need to have a reasonable interpretation now of provisions of the UN Charter, particularly the organizational provisions set forth in the UN Charter. The time has arrived for some revision of the UN Charter to reflect the realities of the world.
Lockwood: Right. You mentioned climate change and the need for the United Nations to remain a vehicle of cooperation in such a global challenge as climate change. We spoke while we were in New York to the former president of Kiribati who belongs to a country which is predicted by many to be the first nation on earth that will eventually be wiped out due to rising sea levels and perhaps as soon as 2050. Now, he told us that he goes to the UN, he makes his case, he begs for action, and while he receives plenty of favorable words of support and encouragement, the best thing that the UN does is to talk. Do you agree with that assessment? Do you think that's a fair thing to say?
Sheffer: You know, there is some fairness in it, but it's also sort of a common cynical response. I mean, the United Nations system enormously over, you know, it's a very extensive system. It's a complex system. It is an effort to try to bring the nations of the world together, sovereign nations, in order to make multilateral decisions. So it's not easy, and there's an enormous amount of work at the United Nations on climate change, not only as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals, but in the annual meetings that are held. The last one was in Scotland. The next one will be in Egypt, where, yes, there's a tremendous amount of talk. Guess what? Welcome to the United Nations and reality.
Lockwood: You get a lot of governments together, and there has to be a lot of talk. I think your point about the fact that it it's not down to the United Nations to act in itself. It has to be down to the sovereign nations. They're the ones who have to take responsibility for their actions. They are the ones that with whom the buck stops. Can I put it to you that in that case, what we should do is retune our understanding of what the United Nations is, which today is more of a forum for international discussion and diplomacy and not perhaps an international league of nations as it was in its original conception? And perhaps partly that is down to the emergence of NATO becoming a military alliance and taking out perhaps some of what the UN's capabilities were previously. It having strong peacekeeping forces. For example, I mean, the Cambodian civil war, that was brought to an end after the United Nations as part of the peace plan that was negotiated by various other governments at the time. It was the United Nations that came in and took control of the administration until a new government could be formed. The United Nations of today does not have the capabilities to do something like that nor does it have the clout that it did back then. So should we accept perhaps that the UN now is a forum for discussion and not a league of nations as it once was conceived to be?
Sheffer: Well, Julia, let me claw back a little bit on what you're saying. There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but I think it's important to realize that international peacekeeping forces are huge in number, and they're stretched all over the world. And they play vital roles in maintaining relative peace in the societies in which they are deployed. Now that doesn't mean they're combat forces, but they're fulfilling the original purpose.
Lockwood: I take your point on that. Is the UN now merely a forum for diplomatic exchange?
Sheffer: No. I would say no, it's not, because there's a tremendous operational side to The United Nations, is mostly represented in its affiliated and specialized agencies and programs? For example, the UN Development Programme is a huge operational component of the United Nations.
Lockwood: Yeah. No. No. No. Absolutely. I think maybe, I mean, like, in terms of spurring international action, in terms of, you know, brokering, you know, negotiations, peace deal, in terms of taking an active role in leadership. I think that's what I'm getting at. I absolutely, are millions of Palestinians who depend on UNRWA, the World Food Programme feeds millions of people around the world. I am not disregarding the important work that the UN does. I mean, in terms of being a vehicle for action, for leadership over its constituent parts, the UN no longer serves that purpose.
Sheffer: Well, there may be truth to that in many respects. I wouldn't want to completely accept your premise. I think the secretary general can make a difference at times. Individual UN negotiators do go out in the field and make differences, in terms of brokering ceasefires, etcetera. I mean, my own experience with the UN between 2012 and 2018, I was the UN Secretary General's special expert on United Nations' assistance to the Khmer Rouge trials, and I think I was able to make a difference in that capacity dealing with the Cambodian government and dealing with other governments that were providing assistance to the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia to prosecute the Pol Pot leadership for the 1970s atrocities. That, you know, one can make a difference in that capacity, but sometimes it's not very you know, it's not publicized. It's more or less behind the scenes.
ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE
Lockwood: While many criticisms are made of the UN as facilitating too much talking and not enough action, sometimes it's the talking that can make a difference on the global stage. Russia's traditional allies, China and India, used their platforms at the UN to call for a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. They carefully avoided issuing support to Russia, and they both abstained in the Security Council votes condemning sham referendums in areas of occupied Ukraine. What that meant was Putin has now no longer been able to claim he has international support for his war back home in Russia. And the truth of that has been appearing in Russian state TV where the cracks are finally beginning to show. But president Biden's ideas of Security Council reform are not new. Calls for changes to the Security Council have been more or less an annual occurrence at the UN. While the current permanent members of the P5 will be reluctant to dilute the influence that they have, a change of heart will still require the General Assembly to amend and then ratify the UN Charter in order to make changes to the Council. And even if reform succeeds, the ability of the Security Council to manage the conflicts of the last few decades has proven to be rather limited.
Dearlove: Sir Richard Dearlove again. I think what's striking today is not that the UN is impotent, it can still achieve interesting things and interesting successes like negotiating the cargoes of grain coming out of Odessa and keeping the world price of grain down as a consequence of that, which is enormously important. But on the other hand, in terms of taking big international initiatives, it seems to have run out of road. I mean, obviously, you've got China with its veto on the Security Council, you've got Russia with its veto on the Security Council, and with those two nations there to veto anything, the sort of big decisions are not going to get past a veto or the big international initiatives if they're proposed through the Security Council. So the Security Council, to an extent, is sort of disemboweled in terms of its forcefulness. So, are we on the cusp of a new international security situation, which inevitably, in my opinion, is going to have to be a balance of interest between China and The United States. A new set of considerations, which at the moment are not mature, you know, because there are so many uncertainties.
Lockwood: As David Sheffer points out, our geopolitical crises are getting more multifaceted and in some cases, existential. The UN may still allow nations the most high profile stage to air their grievances or call for action. But as long as they remain calls with little action, the UN might find itself facing an existential threat of its own. This has been a special episode of One Decision from New York City. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. We drop new shows every Thursday. From me and the team, thanks for listening, and see you next time.
