Madeleine Albright: Who Broke the U.N.?
Madeleine Albright: Who Broke the U.N.?
The amount of time that has been spent in think tanks and inside the U.S. State Department trying to figure out whether and how to reform the United Nations would be impossible to calculate. The refrain of “U.N. reform” is heard over and over, yet infighting and gridlock continue to block bolder U.N. action, as the latest situation in Syria makes clear.
Like any organization, the U.N. does need to be reformed — from the structure and procedures of the Security Council, which 28 percent of Foreign Policy’s survey respondents identify as the part of the U.N. most in need of rethinking, to the body’s staffing, leadership, and budget. But reform is not an event; it is a process. Although people tend to blame “the U.N.,” fundamentally it is a collection of nation-states, often with competing interests. No wonder more than 40 percent of the respondents consider this fact the greatest internal obstacle preventing the institution from being more effective.
Although two-thirds of respondents endorse the idea of enlarging the Security Council, the reality is that finding a way to do so is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. For example, when I served at the U.N., European Union states often voted together. The logical move would have been to give the EU one permanent seat on the Security Council, but it’s hard to visualize the British or the French giving up their individual seats. At that time, the United States supported Germany and Japan as additions to the Security Council’s permanent members; respondents to The FP Survey list Japan and Germany as candidates for Security Council seats today. Their top choice by far, however, is India, which U.S. President Barack Obama has now also endorsed for a permanent seat. So the Rubik’s cube continues to shift — and yet the council’s membership is unchanged.