Siege mentality: Ros-Lehtinen and the United Nations
As Josh Rogin reports here, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen formally introduced today her bill on United Nations reform. It’s a dreadful bill–more screed than proposed legislation (I made my way through almost the whole draft). It includes lengthy collections of controversial things said by various UN and UN-affiliated folks, mostly about Israel. At her press conference, ...
As Josh Rogin reports here, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen formally introduced today her bill on United Nations reform. It's a dreadful bill--more screed than proposed legislation (I made my way through almost the whole draft). It includes lengthy collections of controversial things said by various UN and UN-affiliated folks, mostly about Israel.
As Josh Rogin reports here, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen formally introduced today her bill on United Nations reform. It’s a dreadful bill–more screed than proposed legislation (I made my way through almost the whole draft). It includes lengthy collections of controversial things said by various UN and UN-affiliated folks, mostly about Israel.
At her press conference, the congresswoman pitched the bill as being all about reform. "This bill is about reforming the U.N.; it’s not about bashing the U.N.; it’s not about taking the U.S. out of the U.N," she insisted. In fact, the draft legislation has relatively little detail on UN management practices but includes plenty of attempts to dictate political outcomes at the UN. In essence, it threatens to pull U.S. funding if the rest of the world doesn’t accede to U.S. political preferences on several critical issues.
Fortunately, the bill has almost no chance of passing and is more interesting as a window into the worldview of professional UN-skeptics than as a legislative project. It’s worth noting how bizarre a bill like this must appear to much of the world. The United States has vast influence in New York. It has a permament Security Council seat with the veto power. It effectively dictates who the organization’s secretaries-general are. Because of consensus practices, Washington has enormous say in how the UN’s budget is shaped. And yet to read the bill you would think that the U.S. is powerless, overmatched, and under siege.
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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