UNreformable?

Foreign Policy: How confident are you that the U.N. General Assembly meeting will implement the proposed reforms?

Mark Malloch Brown: External political events — the current difficulties within Europe, the level of tension between China and Japan, nuclear problems in countries such as Iran and North Korea — provide a highly confrontational, difficult environment in which to restructure the institution. And if it is compounded by a lot of internal U.N. difficulty — the Oil-for-Food problem that won’t go away and continued questioning of the U.N.’s leadership — then of course, the summit may flop.

FP: When you became Annan’s chief of staff, you said that the first thing the United Nations needed was senior management accountability. Is that accountability now in place?

MMB: On the way. You don’t fix a system overnight [that] has settled into ruts that have been dug over 60 years.

FP: How much do you think Oil-for-Food has damaged the United Nations?

MMB: A lot, and the days when it could be shrugged off as a politically motivated story out of Washington are long gone.

FP: The House of Representatives recently voted to halve U.S. dues to the United Nations. Why do you think there’s such hostility toward the United Nations in the United States?

MMB: This is a country that has shown erratic swings of the pendulum in terms of its attitude toward the organization. In a way, America designed it and expected the most from it, and has therefore given in to the angriest disappointment when it [is] thought not to have delivered. But… [there’s also] a reluctance to engage in any system in which America is bending its knee to the diktat of others… [Oil-for-Food] began as an investigation that would never have gotten the attention — the limelight — it did if it hadn’t been for the [United States’] punitive urge to pay back the United Nations for the position it [took] on Iraq.

FP: When you came into your job, you said that you thought the United Nations was in crisis. Do you think it’s still in crisis now?

MMB: Yes I do, and the opportunity is there because member states are up in arms at the shortcomings that have been exposed. Entrenched interests inside the organization are in retreat but are not defeated. But it’s also a very dangerous moment. There is a tremendous, seething resistance in the organization, a wish that all this would go away and that it could settle back into comfortable mediocrity again.