Rice must make the moral case for the UN (updated)
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice will face the House Foreign Affairs committee this morning to discuss reform of the United Nations. In a purely tactical sense, this may be a good moment to make the case for the organization and to face down Congressional Republicans angling to cut funding. The UN recently ...
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice will face the House Foreign Affairs committee this morning to discuss reform of the United Nations. In a purely tactical sense, this may be a good moment to make the case for the organization and to face down Congressional Republicans angling to cut funding. The UN recently suffered losses of personnel in Afghanistan and Congo, and those tragedies may help humanize an organization whose employees are too often caricatured on the Hill as corrupt, inefficient, and anti-American. At the same time, the UN's display of spine in Cote d'Ivoire may help modify the impression that organization is impotent in the face of thugs.
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice will face the House Foreign Affairs committee this morning to discuss reform of the United Nations. In a purely tactical sense, this may be a good moment to make the case for the organization and to face down Congressional Republicans angling to cut funding. The UN recently suffered losses of personnel in Afghanistan and Congo, and those tragedies may help humanize an organization whose employees are too often caricatured on the Hill as corrupt, inefficient, and anti-American. At the same time, the UN’s display of spine in Cote d’Ivoire may help modify the impression that organization is impotent in the face of thugs.
In a series of recent speeches defending the work of the organization, Rice and her colleagues have been advancing the pennysaver argument for the UN: it does things we need done at a fraction of the cost of doing them ourselves. In some cases, State Department officials have gone as far as to argue (implausibly) that absent UN peacekeepers, American troops might need to police Sudan, Congo and other conflict zones. These fiscal arguments have some merit, but I think the pennysaver line tends to miss the critical moral argument: that if UN peacekeepers and personnel weren’t addressing some of these situations, nobody would be. I hope Rice won’t be reluctant to make that moral case for the organization’s work.
Update: A skeptical reader argues that the moral argument isn’t going to cut any ice in this environment:
As a matter of politics, the pennysaver argument might be more apropos–given the immediacy of 1) USG fiscal considerations 2) the climate in congress. Further, the arguments leveled against the UN by its detractors in Congress are that it’s wasteful, mismanaged, and corrupt… and that the US–in their eyes–pays too much. I can’t see how countering this attack with a moral argument could be in any way effective politically at the moment.
More: The fact is that at several points during her testimony yesterday, Rice did make powerful argments that funding the UN is not only the economical thing to do, but also the right thing to do:
The United Nations does extraordinary good around the world—consolidating peace in the broken places of the world, carrying food and medicine to the vulnerable, and bringing development to persistent pockets of need. There is no substitute for the legitimacy the UN can impart or the forum it can provide to mobilize the widest possible coalitions to tackle global challenges, from nonproliferation to global health.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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