It's been a little over a week since my last post on the crazed reaction to a mundane executive order issued by President Obama regarding certain diplomatic privileges that will be extended to the International Criminal Police Organization--Interpol.
Last week, the Obama Administration issued an executive order that extended certain diplomatic privileges to Interpol--the International Criminal Police Organization. This was a pretty innocuous bureaucratic move, but it has apparently sparked some serious concerns among a certain cadre of blogger. For example, you have Steve Shippert and Clyde Middleton of ThreatsWatch worrying that this "could conceivably include...Americans arrested on our soil by
Among the many benefits the United Nations confers upon its members is something that international relations scholars call "lowering transaction costs." In other words, international institutions like the UN streamline international cooperation by offering standard procedures by which individuals and countries can interact. For example, the fact that we have a World Health Organization makes it easier to coordinate a global response to the H1N1 outbreak than if the WHO did not exist.
Guest post from Peter Yeo, executive director of the Better World Campaign and vice-president for public policy at the UN Foundation
Credit where credit is due, John Bolton sounds fairly reasonable in this interview with the Springfield, Missouri News-Leader:
Question: Should the U.S. engage in long-term nation-building in Afghanistan?
Bolton: "It's not within our power to create a stable country there. Hopefully, the people will do that for themselves. There are probably ways we can help out. But that's not the same as saying it's a strategic interest of the United States. And I say that because on the one hand, you've got people who already think we ought to withdraw from Afghanistan -- in the Democratic Party on the left side. People who think that, I think is a mistake. On the other side, you've got people who say we may be there for a long, long time, doing nation- building. I think that's a mistake, too.
It's a fair point, though I do disagree with Bolton's framing of this along a typical left-right axis. Supporters of our current engagement in Afghanistan include both the Obama administration and a coalition of neoconservatives. On the other side, left liberals like Russ Feingold are joining conservatives drawn from the realist tradition, like George Will, to question the wisdom and utility of a drawn out commitment in Afghanistan
Also, earlier in the interview, Bolton frames American strategic interests in Afghanistan in a way that I *gulp* would largely agree.
"The U.S. has an important strategic interest in Afghanistan, and that's making sure that neither the Taliban or a l-Qaida can use it as a base for terrorist operations against the United States, No. 1, and No. 2, that their combined efforts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan don't result in the overthrow of the Pakistani government."
</Cognitive dissonance>
Hugo Chavez was so 2006. This year, expect Libyan president Col. Muammar Gaddafi to suck up media attention during the UN summit later this month.
This will be the first time that Gaddafi has attended the annual UN summit since taking over in a coup forty years ago. But before even setting foot in Turtle Bay, he's already generated a ton of controversy.
Last month, he gave a hero's welcome to a convicted Lockerbie bomber who was repatriated to Libya, something which Susan Rice said "offended virtually every American." Then, he planned on pitching a Bedouin style tent on property owned by the Libyan government in Englewood, New Jersey. This was met with widespread condemnation from municipal leaders, who found a pretext to revoke a permit for the tent site.
There are also rumors afoot that Gaddafi will take his longstanding fued with Switzerland to the floor of the General Assembly and call for a nonsensical resolution to abolish the country. (Swiss authorities arrested his son and daughter in-law last year for apparently beating up two servants in a Geneva hotel. Tripoli retaliated in a number of ways, including preventing two Swiss businessmen from leaving Libya until the Swiss apologized.)
So what do to about this? Noted international relations scholar Ted Nugent thinks that the United States should simply bar Gaddafi from setting foot in the country. I'm not quite sure what good that would do. There is no real danger the United States in letting Gaddafi attend the UN summit. Also, revoking his visa would set an unfortunate precedent that attending a UN summit is a reward to be bestowed or revoked by one head of state to another.
There are, in fact, perfectly legitimate reasons for the Libyan head of state to attend the New York summit. Libya happens to be on the Security Council at the moment. This means that there is a good chance that Gaddafi will attend a Council meeting on non-proliferation chaired by President Obama. Before you scoff, consider that despite his other flaws, Gaddafi really is a de-proliferator. Libya once had a nuclear program, but gave it up in 2003 amidst international pressure. This kind of behavior should be encouraged if the international community is to coax Iran back from the nuclear brink.
While Gadafi's antics in the run up to the summit may offend, it's arguably more harmful to American interests to prevent him from attending the meeting than letting him inside the proverbial tent.
Whatever one thinks of Ban Ki-moon's diplomatic style as Secretary-General, to describe his policy of meeting with rather unsavory foreign leaders as "jetting off for tete-a-tetes" or having "discreet chats" with autocrats, as Colum Lynch does in his WaPo piece today, certainly shifts the tenor of the argument in a derisive direction. I imagine that much of the subtle rhetorical slant in Lynch's article has to do with finding an appealing hook for an old story: that there are plenty of foreign policy crises that are not going very well, and that the strategy and performance and of Secretary-General in dealing with these issues has been controversial.
But what's frustrating is that Lynch takes the very easy way out of this jam, reducing complex issues of diplomacy, political causality, and the place of rhetoric in effecting change into a depiction of "We can talk" seances with dictators. There's nothing wrong with criticizing the approach of meeting with foreign leaders; after all, Ban is surely aware that, lamentably, much of what comes out of these meetings are photo-ops, such as the one that adorns the Post article, of the S-G shaking hands with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. But this is, as Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch clarifies, as quoted by Lynch, only the image that people have of Ban. This distorted image, of a carefree, amoral, and ineffective shaker-of-hands, comes partially from these photo-ops and people's own rash interpretations; but it also comes, in a major way, from articles like Colum Lynch's.
It may seem an insufficient response to criticism to argue that Ban Ki-moon's job is perhaps the hardest in the world, but, well, Ban Ki-moon's job is perhaps the hardest in the world. Lynch touches on this, quoting U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice deflecting Lynch's agenda by offering up this exact argument, but one could easily read the article and resentfully surmise that Sri Lanka's military slaughtered civilians because Ban Ki-moon didn't mount a loud enough protest.
The S-G's only weapon is the podium, and it is one whose power many seem to overestimate. Might fewer Sri Lankans have died if Ban had issued harsher words? Might Burma's ruling junta have allowed Aung San Suu Kyi to participate in next year's elections, rather than extend her interminable house arrest once again, if Ban had "demanded" as much? Might Omar al-Bashir have committed to a robust peace deal in Sudan if Ban had refused to meet with him? All are extremely unlikely, and all of which is to say that if these are the expectations for a Secretary-General, then we might as well resign ourselves for ineffectiveness.