This is an update to the positioning and posturing over the draft UN Summit document I discussed in my earlier defense of John Bolton.
The Guardian's diplomatic editor is reporting that the Foreign Office is supporting the original draft -- and speaks for the EU as well, since the UK holds the Presidency these days. The headline and lede are couched in terms of Bolton and the US dynamiting "UN reform," but most of the complaints noted in the article focus on the Millennium Development Goals and the poverty/development agenda I discussed in the earlier post. The MDGs are just just one piece of a complex agenda proposed by Kofi Annan, but they can generate a lot of quotes from high-profile NGOs, especially in the wake of the Make Poverty History and Live-8 events in July, which received such visible support from Tony Blair.
The Guardian adopts a breathless US-against-the-world frame for the story, with the UK leading the fight against the Bush/Bolton forces of evil.
Britain will join an international alliance to confront George Bush and salvage as much as possible of an ambitious plan to reshape the United Nations and tackle world poverty next week .
The head-to-head in New York on Monday comes after the revelation that the US administration is proposing wholesale changes to crucial parts of the biggest overhaul of the UN since it was founded more than 50 years ago.
[...]
A wide range of organisations, from aid groups to the anti-arms lobby, voiced dismay about Mr Bolton's objections yesterday and expressed concern that the summit may end in failure.
The Make Poverty History campaign said there was a danger that the millennium development goals, the original reason for holding the summit, would be reduced to a footnote.
A source close to the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan said it was too early to declare the UN plan dead. "Bolton wants to knock down the plan and start from scratch," the source said. "He will find that his opinions are not shared by most of the rest of the world."
The president of the UN general assembly, Jean Ping from the Gambia, has been working on the draft, covering issues of poverty, climate change, genocide, small arms, the creation of a permanent UN peacekeeping capability and reform of the UN management structure, for the past year.
A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday that the UK and the European Union, of which Britain holds the presidency, "are broadly content with the summit draft. It reflects the ambitious agenda thrown up by Kofi Annan".
The spokesman said it was "important that we do not row back from previous high-level summits", such as the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in July and the UN millennium summit in 2000.
He stressed that a lot of negotiation on the draft still lay ahead. "There is a long way to go before leaders meet in September." [emph supplied]
I certainly agree that it would be bad form for the UN Summit to "row back from" prior international resolutions, especially at the instigation of the US. But the draft looks to me like another attempt to go over a great deal of old ground where the Bush Administration has refused to budge in the past, including as recently as July. Blair and Gordon Brown did their best in the runup to Gleneagles to armtwist the Bushies on a host of items near and dear to their heart, such as Brown's debt relief mechanism. And the whole world watched the cliffhanger negotiations on the infamous climate change language. I certainly don't agree with the Bush Administration's positions on many of those topics, but it's a bit disingenuous to claim that the US is backtracking.
So what are the Brits up to? After their experience trying to get agreement from the Americans on the Gleneagles agenda, it would seem unlikely that they actually expect the US to change its position on a host of items in the context of the UN Summit. So perhaps a bigger game's afoot.
Tony Blair and Condi Rice both have explicitly embraced a two-pronged global strategy for dealing with the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism: unapologetically going after the "bad guys" while offering a longer-term vision of a hopeful future to the less-developed parts of the world. But where the Bush Administration focuses almost exclusively on political freedoms and "democracy" as the cure for a troubled world, Blair has a much fuller vision of what is required for dealing with global issues and the challenges of interconnectedness. Hence the two centerpieces of his EU Presidency: his major Africa initiative and a commitment to getting a deal on global climate change that goes beyond the Kyoto paralysis. But whereas the Bush approach is determinedly a set of US-led or managed initiatives, Blair has been reemphasizing the importance of multilateral institutions and networks of relationships. Without setting himself up as in opposition to (or as Chirac would have it, balancing) the US' hegemonic ambitions, Blair has been demonstrating an alternative model of global leadership which is more attractive to many countries as well as to interest and advocacy groups which are often vocal opponents of US policies. In this context, helping the US to isolate itself in another high-profile context may suit Blair's agenda.
Annan's original proposal for the UN Summit was to try to strike a "grand bargain" that (1) met the concerns other countries have about US policy (most notably but not exclusively in the security domain), (2) produced concrete reforms in areas where the US, along with many other countries, believes the UN needs a major overhaul, such as the human rights commission and the bureaucracy in New York, (3) gave a more formal leadership role to countries that are major powers and more voice to the South more generally, and (4) provided an impetus for initiatives where there is a general willingness for the UN to take a greater role, such as in peace-building.
The prospects for such a bargain were never very good, if only because the bargain over Security Council membership has become so contentious. And it is unlikely that a grand bargain would be achieved without that issue being resolved. But even on other issues, the shape of any such bargain had been lost in the blizzard of detail in the draft UN Summit document as it stood before Bolton's red pen.
If the approach to negotiating the draft is to continue to bargain over details in a massive document, there are two possible outcomes, which really depend on the other countries, especially the Brits: either the well-known US objections will be accommodated without too much fuss, or the US will be isolated but the actual reasons will be lost in minutiae. In the first case, the summit will be declared a "success" by the politicians (and the NGOs will moan and wring their hands), and in the second, it will be declared a failure. In neither case is it remotely probable that the UK will get the US to sign off on anything close to the current draft. And in neither case are we likely to see anything approaching Kofi's "grand bargain" of reform.
Bolton has proposed scrapping the massive detailed document and going to a short-and-sweet set of principles which could in fact resuscitate the "grand bargain" approach. This would be high-risk because it would highlight potential disagreements that would be hard to paper over with pages on pages of obfuscatory prose. But the US could also be betting that such an approach might keep the US from being isolated because it would highlight potential faultlines among those who are currently signing on to the massive draft -- since the current draft is as much a comprehensive wish list as a set of actions and would not involve significant adjustments to their own policies nearly to the same degree as it would impact US policies.
So what are some of the possible outcomes? Here are the four that seem to me most likely. "Success" that produces a document that doesn't mean much or change much of anything. "Failure" of a mishmash of topics, with the US isolated and blamed for the "failure" on process grounds (i.e. Bolton intransigence). "Failure" of a "grand bargain," with the US isolated and blamed for the "failure." "Failure" of a "grand bargain" but in its place an agreed "agenda for the future" -- with the US not isolated and nobody taking "blame" -- just a consensus that Kofi's ambitions for achieving a "grand bargain" were premature, and by the way, his term is just about completed anyway and he's damaged goods because of oil-for-food, etc etc.
It seems to me that Bolton would like to achieve the fourth outcome, or if that's not doable, the first. What I'm wondering is, which outcome would Tony Blair prefer?
UPDATE And here's the FT's leader on Saturday. The FT passes along the (UK) version of the story I questioned in my earlier post -- that to everyone's surprise and consternation, Bolton threw a fit about the lengthy document upon his arrival in New York. But the FT does acknowledge that US positions on a number of items aren't exactly news, and that it's a bit more complex than strictly the US-against-the-world. The piece is worth reading as a pretty good summary of what some of the fusses are about and what the US would like to see as "UN reform."
Eventually, warned that this would let other states off the hook of the many US-inspired commitments that they dislike, Mr Bolton sat down yesterday with his UN colleagues to haggle over hundreds of US amendments.
They mostly focus on measures and institutions the US has consistently opposed elsewhere, such as the International Criminal Court and the nuclear test ban treaty which the US has either refused or failed to ratify. The US is also opposed to the pledge for rich countries to spend 0.7 per cent of their national wealth on aid; most Americans believe US aid is far higher than this, and the Bush administration does not want to remind them it is actually far lower.
In the same vein the US apparently wants to delete reference to the UN's Millennium Development Goals set in 2000, when the original aim of next month's summit was to review progress towards them. [As I discussed earlier, I have considerable sympathy with the US position now that the MDGs have morphed into a sort of Trojan horse for development initiatives I personally would not support] Astonishingly, given the loud US allegations of recent genocide in Darfur, Washington is fretting at language that would urge permanent Security Council members not to use their vetoes to block action to halt genocide and other war crimes.
On this, however, China is as opposed as the US. Earlier this summer, Beijing joined Washington to thwart more states joining them permanently on the Security Council. Other recent developments also augur ill. The failure of last May's Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference has cast gloom on any further initiatives next month to check the spread of nuclear weapons. By contrast, the Group of Eight summit's relative success at Gleneagles on debt forgiveness has created the equally erroneous opposite impression on aid: that little more needs to be done. [And indeed, further discussion of debt relief, as well as the contentious debate with the US on the impact of debt relief on the balance sheets of the IFIs, is undoubtedly part of the agenda for the IMF/World Bank annual meetings just after the UN Summit, so its reappearance on the UN agenda, other than to indicate that further work is being undertaken, is somewhat mystifying.]
Still on the agenda for the UN summit are many US priorities that deserve support and success. They include reforms to give Kofi Annan's UN secretariat more management responsibility but also to make it more accountable, the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission, reform of the UN's human rights machinery and an international convention to define and outlaw terrorism. But to have a chance of securing these goals, the US and Mr Bolton need to take account of others' concerns. In all negotiations, taking requires some give.
Still, I'm curious whether Blair really expects Bush to "give" something new, and if so, what.
FURTHER UPDATE: The Economist offers the most balanced view I've seen so far. Describing the US reasoning for deleting explicit references to the Millennium Development Goals and how that fits within the "grand bargain":
September’s summit, billed by the UN as the biggest gathering of world leaders in history, was originally to be a five-year review of the 2000 Millennium Summit, the most notable product of which was the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These include worthy aims such as halving abject poverty and achieving universal primary education by 2015. As desirable as these goals are, there seems little hope of achieving the panoply of policy objectives embedded in the MDGs; the UN itself is already complaining about the lack of progress.This explanation -- that the US opposes the implied "inputs" that have become attached to the MDGs, not the goals themselves -- is consistent with my previous analysis. In its explanation of the inputs vs outputs argument, the Economist points solely to the "percentage of GDP" commitment for aid flows, which the US has long rejected. But getting rid of the GDP commitment would be an easy change to make -- simply strike the provision containing the commitment -- and would not require removing references to the MDGs themselves. By contrast, the far more elaborate set of proposals embodied in the Sachs report are tied directly to the MDGs, so I still think those are some of the main "inputs" the US is trying to kill.
The proposed American edits to the document remove nearly all references to the MDGs, referring instead to more vaguely-worded “internationally agreed development goals”. In place of the MDGs, America wants to put more emphasis on the “Monterrey Consensus”, the result of a 2002 summit in Mexico that concluded that developing countries need to take more responsibility for their own growth by fighting corruption, improving the investment climates and otherwise making their countries more hospitable to economic activity.
Such market-friendly ideas have become the vogue not only in America but among the non-governmental organisations fighting desperate poverty around the world. They have belatedly recognised that tens of billions of dollars in aid over the past decades have utterly failed to curb extreme poverty in much of the world, especially Africa. Those countries that have made the greatest strides against poverty, most notably India and China, but also countries like South Korea and Taiwan, have done so largely by making their own economies suitable for investment and growth.
But developing countries, many at the UN and many rich-world governments too believe that substantial aid is required as well. For reasons of geography and history, they argue, Africa is in a “poverty trap” that no amount of internal reforms will solve without aid. Thus the draft summit document included a call for rich countries to aim to give 0.7% of their GDP in assistance.
It is this kind of language that America wants removed. In a slightly defensive letter to other ambassadors sent on Friday, Mr Bolton said that despite its deletion of every reference to the MDGs, America did in fact support them, so long as these were taken to mean outcomes (e.g. halving poverty) and not inputs (such as the aid target, which America never agreed to). The blizzard of negative publicity last week may have put some pressure even on America’s fierce ambassador.
The diplomatic problem is that the countries of the developing world—represented by the “G77” group—see a strong focus on aid and the MDGs as their price for agreeing to the rich world’s—especially America’s—agenda. These priorities include an overhaul of management and oversight within the UN’s own house, to prevent, for example, fraud like the recent and humiliating oil-for-food scandal. The developing countries may only agree to proposed American reforms like this if tempted by a promise of significant and predictable aid flows. If the Americans are going to propose 750 amendments, the G77 might respond in kind.
cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism
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