United Nations

Trudeau’s pledged UN peacekeeping contributions are an important step toward fulfilling his foreign policy promises, but if he is serious about renewing Canada’s leadership in peacekeeping, it is not enough.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering May 12 to May 18, was compiled with support from Alexandra Bro, Rebecca Hughes and Rebecca Turkington.

In response to the U.S. State Department’s annual report to Congress on member voting practices in various UN venues, Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, has likely set back efforts to improve the U.S.-South African bilateral relationship, not to mention countless others. Ambassador Haley seems to be saying that if a country consistently votes against the United States in the UN, its bilateral U.S. assistance will be in jeopardy.  The report has been prepared annually since 1984. This year, it concludes that other UN member countries voted with the United States an average of 31 percent. This represents a drop of 10 percent since Donald Trump became president, likely reflecting the international unpopularity of the administration’s “America first” foreign policy.  Ambassador Haley is running a transactional riff on the data. She states that the United States pays 22 percent of the UN’s costs and that therefore, the 31 percent of the UN’s membership that votes with the United States “is not an acceptable return on our investment.” After the report’s release, Ambassador Haley said, “President Trump wants to ensure that our foreign assistance dollars always serve American interests, and we look forward to helping him see that he American people are no longer taken for granted.” In December 2017, shortly before the UN General Assembly voted against the United States with respect to the Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Ambassador Haley warned that she would be “taking names” of countries that voted against the administration. The UN Voting Practices report, now published, makes that easy to do.  It identifies those countries that were least likely to vote with the United States. In order, they are: Zimbabwe, Burundi, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Bolivia, and South Africa. Threat’s by Trump and Haley aside, South Africa finds itself in bad company, a reality that should give many South Africans pause. Every other country on the list is to a greater or lesser extent a tyranny, which South Africa (and Bolivia) emphatically is not. Of course, South Africa does not set out deliberately to thwart the United States in its UN votes, even if some South African politicians might wish to. Rather, South Africa’s votes reflect the policies and goals of a democratically elected government in Pretoria at a particular moment in time on a particular issue. South Africa is the only multiracial country in sub-Saharan Africa and it has the continent’s most developed economy. It is a multiparty democracy conducted according to the rule of law and with among the most developed guarantees of human rights in the world—it is the only African country to permit gay marriage, for example.  There are myriad ties between the United States and South Africa involving civil society, academia, and a plethora of other human endeavors, but with respect to the official relationship, spokespersons on both sides are careful. They use words like “cordial,” diplomatic shorthand for “cool,” while insisting with little credibility that the bilateral relationship is good. The reality is that the official, bilateral relationship is not warm or close. This is mostly the result of history, unrealistic expectations on both sides, and the personalities of their past and present leaders. These deeper issues often exacerbate smaller questions, such as South Africa’s eligibility to take part in African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), an arrangement that provides participants with nearly unfettered access to the American market. The foreign policies of South Africa and the United States are also often out of synch because of different goals. For example, the South African government strongly objected to the NATO operation in Libya that led to the demise of tyrant and dictator, Muammar al-Qaddafi.  Nevertheless, the emergence of pro-business Cyril Ramaphosa as chief of state in January 2018 raised the possibility of improving the bilateral relationship. In fact, irrespective of veiled American threats to cut assistance to South Africa, Zuma's ouster alone could very well result in significant change to South Africa’s UN voting behavior. However, Ramaphosa has not reached out to the Trump administration, at least publicly, and Trump has not yet appointed an ambassador in Pretoria.  Altogether, the United States provides less than $500 million in assistance to South Africa, mostly to the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), a few other health programs, and small amounts of assistance to basic education and small enterprises. The amount is not large, and South Africa has been assuming a larger share of the costs of PEPFAR. Despite Ambassador Haley’s saber rattling, it would be difficult for the administration to cut drastically PEPFAR assistance; the American public would not respond well to pictures of South African children dying because they lost access to antiretroviral drugs. Serious cuts to U.S. bilateral assistance to South Africa are therefore unlikely. Nevertheless, South Africans are likely to resent deeply the Trump administration’s rhetoric holding bilateral assistance hostage to votes in the UN. For a government that is a descendant of an anti-apartheid and “anti-colonialism” liberation movement, the Trump administration’s threats have more than a whiff of neo-imperialism about them. If Ramaphosa does want a better official relationship with the United States, which he likely does, Trump’s transactional approach to UN voting makes it more difficult for him to muster public opinion within his party but also among the larger South African public.   

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering March 31 to April 6, was compiled with support from Alexandra Bro, Rebecca Hughes, and Amalia Trigo.

Recent allegations of sexual abuse in Syria illuminate the difficulty of holding aid workers accountable for sexual crimes in war zones. As the humanitarian aid sector faces its own #metoo moment, the United Nations should set a standard in the sector.

In the past, U.S. pundits have raised red flags over a quadrennial ITU conference they fear could lead to a "UN takeover of the internet." The next ITU plenipotentiary conference takes place in the fall of 2018. Here's what to expect. 

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering January 22 to February 6, was compiled with support from Becky Allen, Alexandra Bro, and Anne Connell.

The UN is right to underscore the benefits of broad-based international cooperation on migration, particularly regarding measures that could, over time, reduce migrant flows by improving conditions in source countries. But, to be politically acceptable in virtually any country, such cooperation must respect national sovereignty. MILAN—There are four pillars of globalization and economic interdependence: trade, investment, migration, and the flow of information, whether data or knowledge. But only two—trade and investment—are founded on relatively effective structures, buttressed by domestic consensus and international agreements. The other two—migration and information—are badly in need of similar frameworks. Both amount to pressing challenges, though migration may be the most urgent issue, given the surge in recent years that has overwhelmed existing frameworks. And, indeed, efforts are underway to produce a new shared framework to manage the cross-border flow of people. In September 2016, the United Nations launched a two-year process to produce the Global Compact on Migration by the end of 2018. “This will not be a formal treaty,” says UN Secretary General António Guterres, “nor will it place any binding obligations on states.” What it is, he claims, “is an unprecedented opportunity for leaders to counter the pernicious myths surrounding migrants, and lay out a common vision of how to make migration work for all.” But not everyone was on board with this approach. Last December, President Donald Trump’s administration withdrew the United States from the Global Compact process. According to Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, the declaration’s approach “is simply not compatible with US sovereignty.” Americans, and Americans alone, “will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country.” Europeans, by contrast, don’t have that option. Even if the European Union withdrew from the Global Compact process, its members would still have to grapple with the fact that the free movement of people within the single market—regardless of differences in, say, language or licensing and credentialing—is a fundamental requirement of EU membership. The perceived clash between that rule and national sovereignty was a salient issue in the Brexit vote. The EU’s labor-mobility provisions were not put in place to facilitate migration per se; rather, they were aimed at bolstering the EU economy by supporting integration, expanding the labor market, and strengthening economic adjustment mechanisms. But, if inbound documented migrants can settle anywhere in the EU, some well-defined collective process for deciding on the numbers and portfolios of migrants does presumably need to be established. At present, there are quotas for individual countries, though some, like Italy, have more than exceeded them, as desperate refugees continue to flow across their borders, while others, such as Hungary, have refused to accept refugees at all. In any case, a quota is too blunt a measure by which to characterize a country’s absorptive capacity. The composition of immigrants, together with their likely final destination, also matters. Consider migration from an economic perspective. There is surely always excess demand on the part of workers from lower-income countries to migrate to high-income or dynamic middle-income countries. And while elements of some countries’ immigration policies function like prices (wealth or investment requirements, for example), no country, as far as I know, allows “price” alone to equilibrate supply and demand. This is for good reason: using wealth as the chief criterion for citizenship controverts the values of virtually any society. As a result, immigration is to some extent rationed, based on some combination of time spent waiting, family ties, education and skills, and even lotteries. The problem of excess demand becomes more serious—and ethically challenging—when it involves refugees and grows suddenly, owing to factors ranging from natural disaster to civil war. In particular, if the increase in demand is not accommodated by a supply-side response, illegal and often risky migration will tend to grow. For this and other reasons, the UN is right to underscore the benefits of broad-based international cooperation on migration. It is also right to advocate measures that could, over time, reduce excess demand by improving conditions in leading source countries. These measures will require international cooperation and investment in development, peace keeping, humanitarian assistance, and migration management. But there are limits to the extent of such cooperation—or rather, the extent to which common rules can be enforced. Whatever the merits of the US position on the Global Compact process, the principle of national sovereignty remains critical to any politically feasible migration policy. The best way to build a solid foundation for international cooperation is to urge countries to develop coherent and adaptive policies for migration that ensure the admission of a balanced portfolio of migrants each year. To that end, countries would have to pursue multidimensional assessments of the economic (including fiscal) and social costs and benefits, as well as the domestic distributional impacts, of migration. Without such a foundation, anti-immigrant political headwinds and storms will continue to impede international cooperation. Crucially, each country would need to design its own policies, depending on a host of country-specific factors. These include demographics, fiscal conditions, social policies that affect income distribution, access to public services, the extent of upward mobility, the backlog of past extra-legal immigration, the ethnic composition of the country, and the values that define national identity. There is certainly no one-size-fits-all solution. The excess-demand problem cannot be eliminated fully. Even if a wide range of destination countries each implemented a coherent set of immigration policies, the chances that total supply would rise sufficiently to meet total demand is highly unlikely. The only way to achieve that would be to increase the price of admission or override national sovereignty to increase the total number of slots—both politically untenable options. But the supply side can be much better managed in many countries, without violating national sovereignty. The result would be a more solid basis for international cooperation aimed at reducing abuses and suffering, managing economic migration, protecting refugees, and, eventually, reducing excess demand by fostering development and growth in source countries. This originally appeared on project-syndicate.org.

Votes against Israel at the United Nations over the decades seem to indicate it is a pariah nation, but the country’s expanding bilateral ties tell a different story.