United Nations

This post is authored by Lindsay Iversen, associate director for climate and resources at the Council on Foreign Relations' Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies. You can follow her on twitter @lindsayiversen. The latest UN climate summit will click into higher gear this week as senior leaders converge on Bonn, Germany. This year’s summit is not expected to have the fireworks and fanfare of Paris, where a major agreement was reached in 2015. There, 196 signatories offered national pledges outlining how they would reduce emissions and agreed a framework for increasing emissions reductions over time. Many of the specifics, such as the data countries would need to report to demonstrate progress, or what expectations would be for raising ambition, were left for future summits. It is these and other details of the Paris rulebook that negotiators are tackling in Bonn. Since President Donald Trump announced that the United States would leave the Paris accord, world leaders from Beijing to Brussels have gone out of their way to voice their commitment to the deal. But their outspoken support masks a more fragile reality. The Paris deal has barely begun. Already, warning bells are being rung about poor progress toward countries’ initial pledges and the uncomfortable fact that those pledges don’t come anywhere near to fulfilling the Paris agreement’s stated goal of keeping overall warming to 2 degrees Celsius above the historical baseline. Small, developing countries signed up for Paris because they believed major countries’ assurances that they would work hard to achieve the 2 degree limit. For committed signatories, preserving that tenuous trust is essential to the survival of the deal. How the United States behaves at the Bonn summit will be important to the deliberations and to the Paris accord’s future. Despite the fanfare with which Trump announced the U.S. exit, the United States remains a formal member of the accord until 2020. It holds leadership positions in critical working groups at the Bonn talks, and it is still a critical voice in the consensus-based negotiating structure. It will be difficult enough to reach agreement on the Paris rulebook without the United States playing the kind of constructive role it did under the Obama administration. If the United States chooses to play a negative role, it could do serious damage not just to this summit but also to the entire Paris rulemaking enterprise. This is not an idle concern; there is precedent for this sort of outcome. At a meeting of G7 health ministers that wrapped up earlier this month in Milan, the United States was a diffident participant until the last days of the meeting. It then introduced a number of new, hardline demands—striking all references to climate change in the draft communique, for instance, and refusing to endorse a clause supporting the Paris accord. The U.S. posture horrified other ministers. As one European negotiator told BuzzFeed News, “As with the rest of the G7 process, the United States didn’t engage for months. And now, just this week, they have erected a wall and came back with extreme positions.” The tactic was an effective one, however. The final communique uses the phrase climate change only once, and only as part of the proper name of the Bonn summit. Though the links between climate change and public health were ostensibly a core part of the meeting, the final communique said simply, “We acknowledge our discussions on impact of the climate and environmental-related factors on health.” There are some indications the United States will not repeat an obstructionist tone in Bonn. A controversial U.S.-sponsored side event on the benefits of coal and other fossil fuels was led by mid-level officials rather than recognizable administration figures. And, the U.S. negotiating team is led by career diplomats with experience in climate talks. The small delegation has kept a low profile so far, easing the fears of many climate hawks that the U.S. team would seek to undermine the summit, but the final outcome remains to be seen. President Trump returned this week from Asia to a Washington no less chaotic or politically toxic than the one he left. Domestic woes may leave the president anxious for a base-riling gambit. The temptation to be destructive in Bonn could be high. Supporters of the deal should do all they can to avoid that outcome, encouraging the political leadership in Washington to stay out of the fray. The president, even as he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris accord, indicated that he was open to the United States returning if the terms of the deal changed. Though Bonn negotiators seem unlikely to adopt the administration’s fossil fuel-friendly domestic agenda, keeping a low profile and an open door will be beneficial to the administration if it is serious about seeking better terms in the future. That strategy avoids needlessly antagonizing diplomatic partners now and preserves options for the United States should new developments make the Paris agreement more attractive later. And, given that 71% of Americans—including 57% of Republicans—support the accord, remaining at least neutral during the Bonn talks could come in handy during the 2018 mid-term or 2020 Presidential elections. For now, barring a change in policy or a change in U.S. leadership, Paris is a deal for other countries—the signatories that have stood by their commitments and are continuing the work of bringing them to fruition. The Trump administration has repeated its assertion that it has nothing to gain from Paris and has no intention of participating in the accord as constituted. If the United States cannot be a constructive participant in the Bonn discussions, it should have the courage of its convictions and stay out of the way of others interested in doing so. It should heed the timeless medical pledge: First, do no harm.

October 11 is the International Day of the Girl Child. The focus of this year’s internationally recognized day is "EmPOWER girls: Before, during and after crises," aimed at highlighting how conflict and humanitarian emergencies affect girls around the world, particularly the nearly 600 million adolescent girls aged 10 to 19 . Learn more about the status and rights of girls in these six publications from the Women and Foreign Policy program.

At the UN Security Council yesterday, both the UN Secretary-General and a number of UNSC members called for tough pressure on the Myanmar government, as the crisis in Rakhine State—and the exodus of refugees into Bangladesh—continues with little let up. U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Nikki Haley called for all countries to stop providing weapons to the Myanmar military, according to reports in Reuters. She said, “Any country that is currently providing weapons to the Burmese military should suspend these activities until sufficient accountability measures are in place” to ensure that the ethnic cleansing stops and commanders who oversaw the Rakhine operation are removed from their posts. This is a commendable stance, and may be an important step to convincing the Myanmar armed forces that they could pay for their ethnic cleansing operations. Meanwhile, during the discussion on Myanmar, Security Council members repeatedly mentioned commander in chief Min Aung Hlaing, who runs the Myanmar armed forces. He, even more than any other figure in Myanmar, is ultimately responsible for the army’s actions in Rakhine State. Yet his name has been barely mentioned in the international press as the crisis in Rakhine has escalated. (I will hopefully have two more pieces on Min Aung Hlaing next week, in The National and The Atlantic.) Although Aung San Suu Kyi certainly bears a significant part of the blame for the Rakhine crisis, Min Aung Hlaing needs to be front and center in discussions of Myanmar at the United Nations. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also has taken an increasingly tough rhetorical approach toward the Myanmar government. He seems to be getting increasingly frustrated with Myanmar’s stonewalling on letting in UN rights investigators, and Naypyidaw’s refusal to even acknowledge that there are serious rights violations going on in Myanmar. The Secretary-General has forcefully called on Myanmar to allow in UN investigators and to halt the army’s actions in Rakhine State. This week he called the Rohingya crisis “the world’s fastest developing refugee emergency and a humanitarian and human rights nightmare.” But the UN’s actions, though welcome, are more than a bit late. Although the crisis has grown exponentially since August, Rakhine state has been wracked with violence for nearly five years. For five years, the military and vigilantes have laid waste to parts of the state. And for five years there have been massive refugee flights into Bangladesh, as well as large numbers of internally displaced people inside Myanmar. Indeed, multiple reports, including by the BBC, have shown that the UN mostly avoiding taking serious action on the Rakhine crisis over the past five years. The BBC reports that, until the crisis that began this past August, “the head of the United Nations Country Team (UNCT) [for Myanmar], a Canadian: tried to stop human rights activists travelling to Rohingya areas attempted to shut down public advocacy on the subject isolated staff who tried to warn that ethnic cleansing might be on the way.” The United Nations has “strongly disagreed” with the BBC report. Other reports back up the BBC reporting on the UN’s go-slow approach to Rakhine. Last year, Vice obtained leaked documents which showed that “UN officials on the ground [in Myanmar] disregarded multiple recommendations on the rights and security of the [Rohingya].” The Vice documents further showed that an internal UN report had noted that the United Nations was focused mostly on “emphasizing development investment [in Rakhine State and Myanmar generally] as the solution to the problems in Rakhine State.” Although Rakhine certainly could use development, investment and growth is hardly going to stop an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. What’s more, as some of the Vice documents showed, many UN officials accurately recognized that development in Rakhine State actually might be further fueling the conflict. Finally, the Vice documents noted that the United Nations’ coordinator in Myanmar had repeatedly “discarded or simply ignored information that underscored the seriousness of the [human rights] situation” in Rakhine state. So, the United Nations’ actions this week on Myanmar are to be acclaimed. But they should have come much sooner.

The following is a guest post by Megan Roberts, associate director of the International Institutions and Global Governance program at the Council on Foreign Relations. Last Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump took his message of America First to the world stage, as he addressed the United Nations General Assembly for the first time. His invective against Iran and North Korea, the latter which he threatened to totally destroy, understandably garnered the most attention. But Trump also devoted part of his speech to reflecting on the U.S. relationship with the United Nations. He lauded U.S. leadership in providing humanitarian assistance and supporting global health and development, while noting that the United States bears a disproportionate burden in supporting the world body: The United States is one out of 193 countries in the United Nations, and yet we pay 22 percent of the entire budget and more.  In fact, we pay far more than anybody realizes. The United States bears an unfair cost burden, but, to be fair, if it could actually accomplish all of its stated goals, especially the goal of peace, this investment would easily be well worth it. These remarks stood in marked contrast to the proposed federal budget the president unveiled earlier this year. It outlined drastic cuts in U.S. contributions to UN agencies, to be achieved through a combination of slashing the budgets of international organizations, negotiating reduced U.S. assessment rates, or simply not paying the agreed U.S. assessments. Luckily, Congress is likely to keep most UN funding in place, sparing the United States a self-inflicted wound. That Trump acknowledged the value of U.S. contributions to the UN in his UNGA speech—echoing earlier comments where he called the UN budget “peanuts”—suggests that for the moment he may be prepared to tolerate more UN funding than his budget envisions. So, how important is U.S. support to the United Nations? According to new figures prepared by the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States remained the largest donor to the United Nations in 2016, contributing over $10 billion to its work. And while Trump raised eyebrows with his comment that the United States pays “far more than anybody realizes,” he does have a point. The UN budget process is complex. It involves scores of different agencies, some funded by assessments and others by voluntary contributions, making it difficult to comprehensively assess what each country pays to support the UN’s wide-ranging work. For instance, the United States contribution to UN peacekeeping, which amounted to $2.4 billion in 2016, is calculated through a complicated formula that considers gross national income, population, and U.S. permanent membership on the Security Council. In contrast, the $2 billion that the United States provided to the World Food Program in 2016 was a purely voluntary contribution.  Moreover, the various bodies within the United Nations, depend on U.S. support in different degrees: The United States contributed nearly 40 percent of the budget for the UN refugee agency last year, but only 4.5 percent of UN WOMEN’s total revenue. Fortunately, the Council on Foreign Relations has helped to clarify matters with a detailed breakdown of U.S. contributions to the United Nations. While it will not eliminate disagreements over the appropriate scale of U.S. support, it at least provides a common point of departure for lively debates. You can find the analysis at Funding the United Nations: What Impact Do U.S. Contributions Have on UN Agencies and Programs?

Last week, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un released an unprecedented direct statement through KCNA in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s bombastic UN General Assembly speech. It deserves careful analysis as it represents a rare window onto Kim’s thinking about the United States. First, Kim reveals his expectation that Trump’s UN speech would consist of “stereotyped, prepared remarks” not different from prior statements since the U.S. President would be speaking “on the world’s largest official diplomatic stage.” In other words, Kim’s default assumption is that the U.S., at the center of the existing international order, is fundamentally constrained in its ability to respond to North Korea’s nuclear advancement. On the other hand, North Korea, as a guerrilla state existing outside the system, has exploited its independence from normative behavior that restrains other nations. Nevertheless, Kim confesses surprise at the tone of Trump’s remarks, observing that “a frightened dog barks louder.” This expression seems to suggest Kim feels his expanded threats are working and that Trump is on the defensive. Then, Kim provides advice that may mirror the advice of Trump’s advisors: “I would like to advise Trump to exercise prudence in selecting words and to be considerate of whom he speaks to when making a speech in front of the world.” This description of his own reaction to “the mentally deranged behavior of the U.S. president” seems to normalize Kim’s views, since they don’t deviate too far from what one might expect to find in a David Brooks column. Following a rather conventional analysis of global impact of the Trump presidency, Kim states that Trump is “surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire, rather than a politician.” Unfortunately, Kim concludes based on this analysis that he has made the right decision to double-down on acquisition of a nuclear deterrent against the U.S. military threat.  Even more sobering is Kim’s conclusion that Trump’s rhetorical threats and insults leave Kim with no choice but to “consider with seriousness taking a corresponding, highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history,” and that he will make Trump “pay dearly for his rude nonsense calling for totally destroying the DPRK.” North Korea’s foreign minister hinted at one such measure: an above-ground thermonuclear explosion over the Pacific.  Finally, Kim reveals some perplexity at Trump’s comments before vowing an unyielding response: “I am now thinking hard about what response he could have expected from us when he allowed such eccentric words to trip off his tongue. Whatever Trump might have expected, he will face results beyond his expectation.” Thus, Kim and Trump are locked into a war of words, with no apparent exit ramp available. Worse, the U.S.-DPRK conflict has become personalized, and both men feel that their honor and their country’s dignity is at stake. As Sejong Institute North Korea specialist Paik Hak-soon has said, “There is no backing down in the North Korean rule book. It’s the very core of their leadership identity and motive.” North Korea is on the verge of being able to hold the U.S. vulnerable to nuclear weapons, after having nursed grievances over their own vulnerability to U.S. nuclear power and threats for almost 70 years. But Trump’s warnings should give Kim pause, precisely because Trump’s deliberate, over-the-top insults to Kim’s personal and national dignity might bait the North Korean leader into an escalatory spiral that he cannot control for the sake of preserving his and his country’s honor at all costs. That indeed would be suicidal, as Trump asserted. This post originally appeared in Forbes.

The following is a guest post by Megan Roberts, associate director of the International Institutions and Global Governance program at the Council on Foreign Relations. The pace and scale of the violence currently unfolding in Myanmar is difficult to comprehend. Since August 25 this year, 430,000 Rohingya—more than a third of the ethnic minority’s population—have fled the country and an estimated 1,000 have died in a scorched earth campaign that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” In his previous role as head of the UN’s refugee agency, Secretary-General António Guterres would no doubt have been seized with the task of responding this rapidly spiraling crisis. Perhaps this in part informed his decision to appeal directly to the UN Security Council earlier this month, imploring the body to act in the face of a mounting crisis. Guterres’ official letter, the first sent from a secretary-general to the Council in nearly 30 years, amounted to a rare, if implicit, exercise of Article 99 of the UN Charter, which gives the secretary-general the authority to “bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.” The Rohingya, often referred to as the world’s most persecuted minority, have faced decades of oppression and discrimination in Myanmar. The current crisis began when a group of Rakhine State insurgents launched attacks on security forces, killing approximately a dozen people. The attacks came just a day after former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan delivered the final report of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State. Myanmar’s security forces responded with indiscriminate “clearance operations,” razing hundreds of villages. Because the government strictly limits access to Rakhine State, details of the extensive destruction come from the hundreds of thousands streaming over the border into Bangladesh, though satellite images confirm that thousands of homes have been burned. Facing scathing criticism for her failure to take action, Nobel Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi skipped this year’s UN General Assembly high-level meetings, but in a major speech on the crisis, she equivocated on the role of the armed services, saying there had been “allegations and counter-allegations.” The Rohingya crisis has sparked a change of tone from Guterres, who has been criticized for failing to shine a light on human rights abuses and atrocities, relying instead on quiet diplomacy to forge peace. He has spoken several times with Suu Kyi, imploring her to act. He has also made a series of escalating public calls for action, including during a recent press conference, where he highlighted the crisis as an issue at the top of global concerns. When asked whether he thought the violence amounted to ethnic cleansing, Guterres responded, “When one-third of the Rohingya population had to flee the country, can you find a better word to describe it?” Fed up with a lack of action by Myanmar authorities, a frustrated Guterres lamented that the government “has been completely deaf to our requests.” He also drew attention to the crisis in his first General Assembly address as secretary-general. Guterres’ official letter called for the Security Council to send a strong political message both to halt the current crisis and to support a strategy to “help end the vicious cycle in Rakhine.” He warned that it “risks degenerating into a humanitarian catastrophe with implications for peace and security that could continue to expand beyond the borders of Myanmar.” Though the letter did not directly reference Article 99, the secretary-general noted in a later press conference that it was an exercise of exactly these powers. Guterres himself noted that his letter was the first such official appeal to the Council since 1989, when then Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar asked it to meet to discuss Lebanon. The letter was one of the earliest instances that a secretary-general had ever used such powers, either officially or informally, during their tenure. Moreover, as Loraine Sievers and Sam Daws note, Guterres went beyond previous invocations of Article 99 in that he implored the Council to act rather than simply to meet. Appealing directly to the Council is not without risk: Myanmar is a complex agenda item. China has long shielded the country from the Security Council’s spotlight, arguing that its security challenges are internal issues and therefore do not fall within the Council’s purview. By imploring the Council to act on Myanmar, Guterres risks drawing the ire of one of the Security Council’s permanent members early in his tenure. This comes not long after he warned that China would occupy any space the United States created by a global retreat in an “America First” era. In taking this action, the secretary-general is fulfilling commitments that he made in his campaign for the role. In the process to select Ban Ki-moon’s successor, Guterres focused on the importance of prevention, pledging to use all opportunities to bring matters of international peace and security to the Security Council’s attention. The more open selection process revealed that, at least rhetorically, many member states sought a strong leader for an institution that appeared paralyzed in the face of intractable challenges, from the devastating war in Syria to famine risk in the horn of Africa. After carefully cultivating productive working relationships with member states, most notably with the US, since his election, Guterres was hoping to expend this political capital as many of his bosses descended on Turtle Bay for high-level meetings of the General Assembly. Political momentum for action, spurred in part by Guterres’s letter, appears to be building, even if it still pales in comparison to the scale of the crisis. On September 13, after briefings from Guterres and his under-secretary-general for political affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, the Security Council agreed in a closed meeting to release a press statement condemning the violence. Although many observers had hoped for a stronger statement, it was the first time in nine years that the Council had come together to issue one on Myanmar. The crisis also commanded leaders’ attention during the opening week of the General Assembly, including during two high-level events and in a number of member statements seeking to shine a light on this crisis. Seven members of the Security Council have requested a public briefing from Guterres on the crisis, and several council members have also suggested openness to further action if the situation continues to deteriorate. Here, China’s attitude is likely to determine the extent and pace of such progress. None of this activity immediately ameliorates the dire conditions of the Rohingya living in temporary camps in Bangladesh, or those displaced within Myanmar who are not receiving any international support. And observers are right to criticize the UN’s outdated toolbox for responding to such crises. But amidst the tragedy, it is at least encouraging that the secretary-general has dusted off a long-underused instrument for focusing international attention on the plight of the Rohingya. This article originally appeared on the International Peace Institute's Global Observatory.

In an op-ed recently published in U.S. News and World Report, I assess what the president got right and wrong about sovereignty. President Donald Trump's reckless threat to "totally destroy" North Korea overshadowed the core theme of his problematic speech to the United Nations: the centrality of "sovereignty" in world politics. The president mentioned that concept no fewer than 21 times. It's worth considering why he feels so strongly about sovereignty, what he gets right about it, and what he gets wrong. Read the full op-ed here. My book, The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World, will be published by Brookings Institution Press on October 31.

As the Myanmar military attacks the Rohingya minority, the country's female leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has done little to stop the violence. The harsh lesson from it all: women leaders do not always promote peace.

In a preview of President Trump’s message to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly next week, National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster on Friday repeatedly uttered two words: “sovereignty and accountability.” The United States believes in the UN’s mission to promote peace and prosperity, he explained. But the world body will only be successful if it protects the independence of its member states and commits itself to serious reform. President Trump will drive this message home in his much anticipated speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday morning. But the two themes will also be front and center on Monday, when the President hosts more than 120 world leaders that U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has rallied to support the reform agenda of UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres. The defense of sovereignty—and specifically American sovereignty—has been the most consistent refrain in the administration’s often chaotic foreign policy. The president and his surrogates have invoked the need to preserve U.S. independence to justify numerous controversial policy stances. These include leaving the Paris Climate Agreement, renouncing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, criticizing alliances like NATO, threatening to ignore the World Trade Organization, and proposing a moratorium on any new multilateral treaties. As the most important international organization, the United Nations is the fattest target for this “sovereigntist” critique. For Trump’s populist base—as well as conservative nationalist pundits like Breitbart executive chairman, and former White House official, Stephen K. Bannon—the UN is a globalist conspiracy to tie down the United States like Gulliver. In this view, the UN has forgotten its original purpose—namely, to serve as a platform where independent nation states cooperate on matters of common interest. Equally bad, the UN bureaucracy is out of control, no longer beholden to its national governments. The Trump administration intends to change that. “Sovereignty and accountability are the essential foundations of peace and prosperity,” McMaster declared on Friday. “America respects the sovereignty of other countries, expects other nations to do the same.” Beyond insisting that “all governments… be accountable to their citizens,” the United States is determined to bring the United Nations itself to heel. The Trump administration’s panic over sovereignty is overblown. As I write in my new book, The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World, the United States is in no danger of subordinating its hallowed Constitution to the authority of the UN—or any outside body. More fundamentally, the U.S. decision to join any intergovernmental organization is not an abdication of sovereignty, but indeed its expression. In the case of the United States, it reflects the democratic will of the American people, as embodied in their elected leaders—namely, the President and Congress. That said, international organizations do complicate U.S. sovereignty, and they require vigilance on the part of the United States to make sure that they both stick to their purposes and reflect the will of the American people. By overwhelming majorities, Americans share the ideals embodied in the UN Charter and support U.S. membership in the world body. But too often, the UN’s performance falls far short of its noble principles and purposes. When the UN Security Council refuses to act in Syria, or when UN peacekeepers abuse those they are supposed to protect, or when scandals like Oil-for-Food expose corruption and cronyism, or when bodies like the UN Human Rights Council go off the rails, the understandable response is outrage. To understand why the UN so often disappoints—and why Trump is calling for reforms to ensure greater accountability—it helps to consider two phenomena that dilute America’s capacity to realize its sovereign preferences within any international organization. These are the phenomena of delegation and pooling. The concept of delegation is pretty clear. All contractual relationships—think of your sister’s relationship with her broker, or your town’s arrangement with its snowplow service—involve a limited delegation of authority from a principal to an agent empowered to act on the former’s behalf. But, as anybody who’s hired a contractor knows, agents don’t always do what they’re told. They often shirk responsibilities or act contrary to our wishes. The same thing happens within the U.S. government. Executive branch agencies (and their private contractors) sometimes resist accountability to congressional paymasters—to say nothing of their ultimate principals under the U.S. Constitution, the American people. But ensuring accountability is even tougher when it comes to international organizations. In joining any multilateral agency, like the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. government must delegate some authority to its secretariat—in this case, the WHO’s director general. In general, as the chain of delegation gets longer, global agencies are more likely to behave in ways that depart from the wishes of American citizens and their elected representatives in the White House and Congress. As if delegation dilemmas weren’t tough enough, there is the related problem of pooling. Most UN agencies are supervised by an intergovernmental board of member states, which is supposed to provide guidance and oversight. This means that the United States is hardly the only national player seeking to call the shots: it is forced to “pool” its authority with other governments. Even when U.S. power is taken into account (as in the veto the United States enjoys in the UN Security Council or its heavier voting weight on the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund), the United States does not always prevail. The challenge is even tougher in more encompassing, egalitarian bodies like the UN General Assembly or the Human Rights Council, which operate on a one-state-one-vote basis and often give free reign to irresponsible, anti-American nations like Cuba, Iran, and the like. This doesn’t mean that UN reform is impossible. But it does suggest that any successful reform effort will require two things: First, the United States should insist on ramped-up oversight of UN agencies, including independent inspectors general, to compensate for problems of delegation. Second, it should work with like-minded countries on a common reform agenda that mitigates the downside of pooling sovereign authority with multiple member states.