Stephen John Stedman

UN transformation in an era
of soft balancing
STEPHEN JOHN STEDMAN *

From 2003 to 2006 Secretary General Ko Annan pursued the most ambitious
overhaul of the United Nations since its inception. This article is written from
the perspective of the team working with Ko Annan on the reform agenda and
reects on the issues faced and choices made. In reviewing this experience, the
article seeks to inform future choices on substance, politics, management and
process that must be addressed in future reform efforts.
The Ko Annan agenda included:
a redenition of collective security to bridge the securitydevelopment
divide;
policy recommendations to strengthen existing security regimes (e.g. non-proliferation and disarmament) and to explore new regimes (e.g. on biotechnology);
the creation of new intergovernmental organs on peacebuilding and human
rights;
expansion and reform of the Security Council;
new norms to govern the use of force by member states and the Security
Council;
a new norm, the responsibility to protect, to legalize humanitarian intervention;
a denition of terrorism and the rst UN strategy for counterterrorism;
new Secretariat offices for peacebuilding, conict mediation and counterterrorism;
new member state commitments of resources to ght poverty and deadly infectious diseases;
a new policy committee for the Secretary General to improve the quality of
executive decision-making;
a thorough overhaul of UN budgeting, management and personnel rules.1
*
1
This article is a revised text of a public lecture given at the London School of Economics and Political Science,
London, on 1 March 2007. The author thanks Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual for their comments.
The agenda was shaped by the Report of the Secretary Generals High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and
Change, A more secure world: our shared responsibility (New York: United Nations, 2003) and revised in Ko A.
Annan, In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all (New York: United Nations, 2005).
International Affairs 83: 5 (2007) 933944

2007 The Author(s). Journal Compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Affairs
Stephen John Stedman

Some UN watchers, especially in New York, have criticized this effort as too
ambitious, too divisive and fundamentally unnecessary.2 They argue that the time
for such an effort was not propitious; that some of the recommendations, especially
regarding Security Council expansion, were misguided; and that the Secretary
General was incorrect to take the lead in such a campaign, as prior experience
shows that change at the UN usually comes when it is driven by member states.
To be sure, the effort was ambitious; the politics were divisive; and the membership was and still is polarized. Two intertwined crises, however, made it imperative
to try. First, the Secretary General feared that in the aftermath of the Security
Councils refusal to authorize the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and in
the shadow of the Bush administrations National Security Strategy that embraced
preventive war and American primacy, the United States would walk away from
the United Nations.3 This is as close to an existential crisis as one gets in an international organization, as without US leadership, engagement and support, the UN is
a hollow shell. Second, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 revealed that the basic precepts
of traditional collective security were out of touch with the threats and challenges
of the twenty-rst century. Either the UN would change itself fundamentally to
address new threats and challenges, or it would be irrelevant.
The Secretary General felt that in order to persuade the United States to
re-engage with the UN, a credible case had to be made to build UN capacity to
address real and pressing global threats. As for whether the Secretary General erred
in leading the charge, the question was whether there was an alternative. The most
powerful member state was alienated and would not lead. The other member states
were divided; no state or coalition sought to lead. The presidents of the General
Assembly during that time, Jean Ping and Jan Eliasson, drove the negotiations at
key points, yet they were not in a position to lead the international community.
Meanwhile, as late as the autumn of 2003 there was a sense of urgency among
member states that some kind of reckoning was due. When Ko Annan created
the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (HLP), the rst reaction
of many member states was relief and support. Twenty-nine countries, from every
continent, contributed nancially to underwrite the Panels work.
Globalization and collective security
Globalization both necessitates and complicates creating a new vision of collective
security to underpin UN reform. On the one hand globalization creates interdependencies, some powerfully obvious, others of which we are only dimly aware.
At the same time, globalization heightens our consciousness of inequalities, double
2
See e.g. Edward C. Luck, How not to reform the United Nations, Global Governance 11: 4, Oct.Dec. 2005,
pp. 40714; Thomas Weiss, The UN post-Ko, paper presented at the annual meeting of the International
Studies Association, San Diego, California, 22 March 2006; Mats Berdal, The UNs unnecessary crisis, Survival
47: 3, Autumn 2005, pp. 732.
For a discussion of the background to the Secretary Generals decision to initiate the transformation effort, see
James Traub, Best intentions: Ko Annan and the UN in the era of American world power (New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 2006).
934
International Affairs 83: 5, 2007
UN transformation in an era of soft balancing

standards and different ways of life. For all of our interdependence, globalization
can also make us aware that in fundamental ways we live on different planets.
One must address this paradox to breathe life into a traditional concept like
collective security. The idea itself is premised on a shared threat perception. In
1945, states forged the UN in response to the common threat of international
aggression by other states and to the conditions which underpinned this threat:
economic insecurity, beggar-thy-neighbour trading policies, ultra-nationalism and
human rights violations. To update perceptions of shared threats, the High-Level
Panel began its work in 2003 by asking a simple question in every part of the globe,
of governments and civil society organizations alike: What are the most salient
threats to your security? Depending on power, privilege and region, people articulated a world of very different threats: HIV/AIDS, malaria and deadly poverty
in Africa; crime, economic crisis and lack of condence in democracy in Latin
America; catastrophic terrorism in the United States; and so on.
For any UN reform effort, one of the rst critical choices will be how to act
on these threats and the differing worlds they reect. Do we prioritize among
the threats? Do we simply say that some threats may be economic or social, but
not threats to security? Do we acknowledge a world with differential threats, and
seek to accommodate such diversity? The High-Level Panel chose this last option,
and dened threats to security as events or processes that lead to large-scale death
or diminishment of life chances, and that undermine states as the basic unit in
the international system.4 It identied the following as threats to international
security: poverty, deadly infectious disease, environmental degradation; civil war
and violence within states; conict and violence between states; nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons; terrorism; and transnational organized crime.
The transnational nature of these threats underpins the case for a new understanding on collective security. First, all of these threats defy unilateral solutions
and no state can defend against them without sustained, international cooperation.
Second, these threats are probably more interconnected than many governments
and people believe; and if this is so, what threatens humans in faraway countries
and regions also threatens us. Third, even if one does not believe that these threats
are interconnected (and with some, the empirical jury is still out), nations should
still cooperate with others on their threats in order to gain their cooperation in
addressing what threatens them.
Security Council reform
The Secretary General was criticized widely by UN watchers for including
Security Council expansion in the agenda for change. Had the High-Level Panel
and the Secretary General ignored the issue, they would have felt the wrath of
some important member states, such as India, Germany, Japan and Brazil (the G4).
Including Security Council expansion as part of the transformation programme,
however, made it highly likely that those same countries would focus on that issue
4
High-Level Panel, A more secure world, p. 23.
935

to the detriment of other reforms. Complicating matters further, a coalition of
mid-level powers arose against the G4, holding the whole reform agenda hostage
to this single issue.
The arguments for and against Council expansion are straightforward.
Supporters argue that the Council should accommodate the new rising power
of India, an economically vibrant democracy of over a billion people; Germany
and Japan, global economic powers that make great nancial contributions to the
functioning of the United Nations; and Brazil and South Africa, rising powers
from regions not represented on the Council. An expanded Council with these
states playing a greater role would bring more resources to the organization and
provide greater legitimacy to the Council and therefore prompt greater compliance with its decisions. Opponents point out that it is extremely difficult to get
the Council to take decisions under current circumstances, and that expanding the
membership from 15 to 21 or 24 members would more likely produce paralysis
than prompt and effective actionthe Councils mandate under the Charter.
The opponents of Councils expansion ignore the possibility that excluding
these powerful countries would produce a different kind of paralysis. These
countries are almost always consulted on key issues, but at present they do not have
the responsibility that comes with power. Moreover, the single most important
determinant of the Councils effectiveness is not its size, but the sustained attention,
investment and leadership of the United States in the diplomacy necessary to make
the Council work. Given a commitment by the United States to make the Council
work better, the addition of Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and South Africaall
democraciescould increase US leverage in getting the Council to act.
Regardless of the pros and cons, the attempt at Security Council expansion
failed. Japan, Germany, India and Brazil aspired to permanent membership, and
expansion of the permanent membership of the Council is a zero-sum game. For
each country that gains, another loses (Germany v. Italy, Japan v. Korea, Brazil v.
Mexico, South Africa v. Nigeria and Egypt, India v. Pakistan). Moreover, China
let it be known that it had serious problems with Japan becoming a permanent
member, just as it privately let it be known that it would not countenance India as a
permanent member. German aspirations split the EU, as many European countries
would prefer an EU seat eventually. The UK and France supported German aspirations, perhaps as a way of putting off future demands that they give up their seats
for a united EU seat. The Bush administration was never going to accept a German
seat, as its memories of Germanys tenure in 20022004 were not fond ones. The
Bush administration did want Japan to have a permanent seat, but had no policy
that could make that happen.
The High-Level Panel proposed a new kind of seat: longer-term, renewable
through re-election, and open to a small set of states which had to be among their
regions top contributors to the UN nancially or militarily. As Ko Annans
special adviser on follow-up to the HLP, I argued with the G4 ( Japan, Germany,
India and Brazil) that they did not have the votes to achieve permanent membership, and that this new kind of seat would at a minimum give them greater inu936

ence and continuity on the Council, and might even provide them with de facto
permanent membership. Moreover, these new seats would have greater legitimacy
than that enjoyed by the P5, because they were earned through contributions to
the organization and through election.
But as long as the G4 believed that they could attain their top preference, they
were not willing to consider a second-best that was attainable and much better
than the status quo. On this they blundered terribly, for they could have achieved
this option on extremely favourable terms. The problem was that in the bargaining
between the G4 and the Uniting for Consensus Group (those who opposed expansion in the permanent members, led by Italy and Pakistan), there was only one
moment of possible compromisewhen the G4s prospects for getting permanent
seats, through a two-thirds election in the General Assembly, looked promising in
March 2005. The Uniting for Consensus Group proposed in writing a willingness
to negotiate over the length of tenure of renewable seats, and the proper qualications for candidacy to such seats. This made the G4 overcondent that they had the
votes for permanent membership; in their estimation, the Uniting for Consensus
Group was running scared.
But G4 overcondence was out of order. The United States had no policy on
expansion and the Secretary General did not take a stand. Only a few in the Secretariat were advising the G4 to negotiate. They did not, and when it dawned on
Beijing that Japan might actually get permanent membership, China panicked and
mobilized a heavy-handed public campaign against a Japanese seat. One can trace
the decline in G4 fortunes to that moment. It took several months for the G4 to
realize that they did not have the votes, at which point Uniting for Consensus had
no interest in reviving its earlier offer.
Results, 20032006
What was accomplished in trying to bring the United Nations up to date? More
than is commonly realized, yet far less than could actually have been attained. Here
is the agenda described above. Text in italic denotes where decisions were actually
taken, denitions endorsed and institutions created:5
a redenition of collective security that attempted to bridge the securitydevelopment
divide;
policy recommendations to strengthen existing security regimes, for example
in non-proliferation and disarmament, and recommendations to explore new regimes,
for example to address safety of biotechnology;
the creation of new intergovernmental organs to address peacebuilding and human rights;
expansion of the Security Council;
new norms to govern the use of force by member states and the Security
Council;
5
Most of the decisions are captured in what was known as the summit outcome document: General Assembly
Resolution 60/1, 2005 World Summit Outcome.
937

a new norm to legalize humanitarian intervention;
a denition of terrorism and, for the rst time, a United Nations strategy for counterterrorism;
new Secretariat offices to address peacebuilding, mediation support and counterterrorism;
new member state commitments of resources to ght poverty and deadly infectious diseases;
a new policy committee for the Secretary General, to improve the quality of executive
decision-making;
a thorough overhaul of UN budgeting, management and personnel rules.
The shortfalls reect paralysis among the members on key issues. There is not a
single word in the 2005 summit outcome document on disarmament and nonproliferation; member states refused even to reaffirm existing obligations under
international treaties. Security Council expansion stalled because of the continuing
conict between those countries that seek permanent membership and those that
oppose expansion of the numbers of permanent members in the Council. Although
member states endorsed the need for a common UN strategy of counterterrorism
(and subsequently adopted one in September 2006),6 they once again could not
agree on a denition of terrorism. Although member states agreed on the need for
budget and management reform, their attempt to negotiate it grew increasingly
polarized in 2006, and ultimately failed.
Member states created new intergovernmental organsthe Peace Building
Commission and Human Rights Councilbut compromises in the negotiation
process diluted these bodies potential efficacy. If there were a modicum of trust
and good faith among the member states, such dilutions might not handicap the
institutions. But both institutions continue to feel the after-effects of the polarization of 2006 and, to put it charitably, are underachieving.
Finally, the General Assembly endorsed what is known as the responsibility to
protect, the rst time it has acknowledged that sovereignty is not sacrosanct and
that how a nation treats its own population is not simply an internal matter. At
the same time, continued inaction on Darfur breeds international cynicism as the
organization does not live up to its norms, indeed patently lacks the capacity to
do so.
And what of showing the relevance of the organization to the United States?
The work of the Secretary Generals High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges
and Change was instrumental in setting the agenda and shaping the conclusions of
the GingrichMitchell Panel on USUN reform.7 That bipartisan panels message
that the UN was a useful tool for American foreign policy, and that it needed to be
strengthened, helped to turn back a rising tide in Congress and in the right-wing
media that sought to delegitimize the UN as an institution in the wake of the oil
for food scandal.
Given how quickly the scandal sank in the media once the Volcker commission
published its nal conclusions, it may be difficult to remember the atmosphere in
6
7
General Assembly Resolution 60/288, The United Nations Counterterrorism Strategy.

Report of the Task Force on the United Nations, American interests and UN reform (Washington DC: United
States Institute of Peace, 2005).
938

the autumn of 2004, when the High-Level Panel issued its report. At the beginning
of December there were calls by several US newspapers and members of Congress
for Ko Annan to resign. For the next two weeks, the Bush administration made
no statement in support of the Secretary General. When the Secretary General
visited Washington that month to give a speech on the HLP report, he asked for a
meeting with President Bush and was refused. Instead, the Secretary General met
with Condoleezza Rice, who was both Secretary of State designate and National
Security Advisor.
Perhaps the strongest case for the importance of the UN to the US came in that
meeting between Ko Annan and Condoleezza Rice. The UN Secretariat crafted
the agenda of the meeting to highlight the areas where the UN was playing a
useful role in furthering US foreign policy goals. The meeting focused on:
Afghanistan, where the UN had mediated the Bonn process and created the
framework under which Hamid Karzai was able to create a government that
unied disparate anti-Taleban factions; where the UN had played an instrumental role in helping to produce the constitution and a popular consultative
process to legitimize the constitution, and had organized the national elections;
and where the UN continued to shepherd political negotiations through two of
their best mediators, Lakhdar Brahimi and Jean Arnault;
Iraq, where the UN was preparing to carry out the 2005 national elections,
and where Brahimi had, at the request of the Bush administration, generated
support for the elections with Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali al-Sestani, and had
quietly tried to bring various insurgents into political negotiations;
Lebanon, where the UN was responsible for implementation of Security
Council Resolution 1559, charged with getting Syria to withdraw from the
country;
the Middle East peace process, at that time paralysed, but in which the UN
was one of the Quartet, with one of its most respected diplomats, Terje RoedLarsen, stepping down as the UNs special representative;
Sudan, where the UN was to put in more than 12,000 peacekeepers to implement the northsouth peace agreement, mediated in part by Republican Senator
John Danforth, and much supported by the Bush administration;
Darfur, where Ko Annan had been a vocal proponent of a robust reaction to
stop the killings and atrocities;
Liberia, a country in Africa with important cultural and historical ties to the
United States, where the UN had 17,000 peacekeepers and was preparing the
country for new elections to replace Charles Taylor;
Haiti, where the UN had more than 6,000 peacekeepers, once again trying to
bring some stability to that troubled island close to the United States.
That meeting helped restart the Bush administrations engagement in UN affairs.

Parts of the bureaucracy proved very supportive, but there was still a void in
939

top-level political engagement. The administrations ambassador to the UN, John
Danforth, resigned in early 2005. John Bolton was nominated in March, but his
conrmation process was long and bruising, and he was nally appointed without
conrmation in August 2005, in the last four weeks of negotiation before the
World Summit in September.
In Boltons absence, the US mission was led by Anne Patterson, who worked hard
on the reforms. The State Department engaged on recommendations concerning
counterterrorism and peacebuilding, but not on issues of non-proliferation and
disarmament. Discussions on recommendations concerning rules governing the
use of force revealed a set of American red lines that could not be crossed. Recommendations on the responsibility to protect garnered support at the State Department, the National Security Council and Capitol Hill, but not at the Department
of Defense.
When Bolton arrived, all of this work was shoved aside and previous understandings were off the table. The reform package still had supporters in the State
Department and the NSC, but they had to cede much of the negotiation to Bolton,
who pursued a strategy of harm minimization. Viewing conference diplomacy as
a threat to US bargaining positions in a host of different fora, he set out to reach a
short, vague, non-committal, anodyne outcome that would not constrain or put
obligations on the United States in any way.
There is much to criticize about how Bolton did his job. One of the unfair
criticisms was that he forced a line-by-line negotiation of the outcome document
(a draft that ran to over 40 pages). At some point, such a negotiation was going to
have to take place; there was too much that was controversial and consequential
in the document. It is true that many of his early brackets (for example, deleting
every single reference to the Millennium Development Goals and global governance; walking back from language on rights of peoples to self-determination that
the US government had accepted in other fora; and deleting every reference to
disarmament) seemed designed to iname the negotiations and raised doubts about
US sincerity at a time when the administration professed to want a constructive
outcome. It is also true that in the negotiations he seemed unaware that the US
government had publicly supported a peace building Commission, and certainly
ignored advice on details that would make the PBC a stronger or weaker body.
Bolton also refused to work with allies and members of the Secretariat who had
engaged in a two-year process of developing the reform recommendations, with
cooperation from some of the United Statess closest allies, and with the Secretariat.
His three weeks of negotiating the summit were punctuated with frequent asides
about the illegitimacy of the Secretariat having a voice in any of the proceedings. This would not have been too harmful to the process had Bolton had a good
working relationship with the ambassadors of those countries and groups that were
active in the reform (the UK, France, the EU, the Nordic countries, and many of
the African and Latin American countries). But they too found that Bolton had
little interest in crafting common strategy for the negotiations, and many understandings worked out with the US mission over the course of 2005 fell apart.
940

That in the end there was a summit outcome document at all was a small miracle.
The story has now been told and can be recapitulated briey. The World Summit
was to begin on the morning of 14 September, with more than 175 heads of state
in attendance. By the evening of Monday, 12 September, the negotiations had run
their course and the outcome document still had over 160 brackets in the text.
With permission from Jean Ping, then General Assembly president in his last two
days in office, and with strong encouragement from Ko Annan, a small group
from the Secretariat worked throughout the night playing Solomonin essence
removing brackets or making compromises on proposed languagein order to
give Jean Ping a clean document that he could propose to the membership on a
take it or leave it basis. On the morning of 13 September, Bolton learned what was
happening and tried to stop it, only to be overruled by Secretary of State Rice,
who had been briefed by the Secretary General on the text. At 1 p.m. the text
was presented to the General Assembly, with overwhelming support from the
membership. At 4 p.m. it was accepted by acclamation and consensus. In the end
there was a deal in spite of John Bolton.
Left to their own devices, the member states would not have reached an agreement in September 2005. The Secretariat, well placed to see possible compromises,
was backed into a process of circumventing member states. This produced more
hostility and suspicion than gratitude, as ambassadors and their staff pored over
the outcome document looking for signs of imbalance, partiality and favouritism.
This bred distrust among many member states and between the members and the
Secretariat. The job of picking up the pieces in this poisoned environment and
implementing the pledges and commitments in the outcome document fell largely
on the shoulders of Jan Eliasson, Jean Pings successor.
Evaluating mixed results
In the end, the three-year effort fell short of what was proposed and what was
expected. On the other hand, it achieved much more than the media reported,
because they were primed for total failure and were unaware of the last-minute
rescue.
To the question why the effort did not yield greater results, the best answer is
Johnsons comment to Boswell about a dogs walking on his hinder legs: It is
not done well; but you are surprised to nd it done at all. This was an effort led
by the Secretary General and a small part of the Secretariat. Key states dened
the effort solely as one of Security Council reform and tried to hijack the whole
effort to achieve or forestall that goal. The United States, the single most important member state, was at times feckless, antagonistic and schizophrenic, and often
clumsy and episodic, in its engagement. The reform effort coincided with the oil
for food scandal, which cost the UN and Ko Annan dearly in terms of their
reputation within the United States. The US never led; it never devoted sustained
energy, attention and purpose to the effort. Its permanent representative, John
Bolton, had his own agenda which was only partly related to the agenda of his
941

nominal bosses. These are all parts of the answer.
Another part of the answer is that the process to achieve the outcome document
placed real brakes on what was accomplished in the following year in terms of
implementation of the outcomes decisions. The G77 and Non-Aligned Movement
became hyper-vigilant about the prospect of losing clout in the post-summit
negotiations. Combined with their suspicion towards the Bush administration and
especially John Bolton, and their belief that the Secretary General had gone too
far towards mollifying the United States, many countries began to oppose reforms
because of the possibility that they might further American interests.
Faced with the choice between having a more effective UN that furthered
American interests and continuing with an ineffective UN, many countries chose
an ineffective UN. In the parlance of international relations theory, faced with a
sole superpower that holds a strategy of primacy, and whose actions on the international stage have been unpopular, some countries chose soft balancing to deny
American policies legitimacy and legality, and undermine American attempts to
forge cooperation on its terms. Translating this to the UN, many countries voted
for the UN to be a great global encounter session rather than an effective problemsolver, especially if it is the United States that chooses the problems.
Finally, a part of the answer of why the glass was half full was that the Secretariat itself did not have the right strategy to ll it furtheror to put it more
accurately, that it had the right strategy and did not implement it with full force.
The Secretary Generals inclination was that if far-reaching, transformative
decisions were to be taken, heads of state would have to be the key decisionmakers. He based this assessment on two considerations. First, numerous expert
and ambassador-driven venues had produced protracted stalemate across a wide set
of issue areas: counterterrorism, disarmament and non-proliferation, and Security
Council reform. If new initiatives were to be set in motion, if bold decisions were
to be taken, if deadlocks were to be smashed, it would have to be heads of state
taking the decisions. Second, the transformation effort was produced as a package.
Single issues may produce winners or losers, but compromises across issues could
provide winwin solutions. Cherry-picking had to be discouraged, trading across
issues encouraged. To do this required leaders to be engaged with the big-picture
vision and command established across parts of the bureaucracy to enable a
securitydevelopmenthuman rights package to go forward.
All of this meant stepping on the toes of Secretariat officials tied to the issue
venues and of New York-based mission staff and ambassadors, and preventing
collusion between them. To get attention from the top, capitals had to be engaged
and heads of state had to direct staff to get results.
This was the strategy, but it was pursued only intermittently and half-heartedly
by the Secretary General and his staff. In the absence of a concerted global effort to
persuade world leaders to engage and lead on this issue, the reform fell captive to
New York-based politics and dynamics. As many with experience of the UN can
attest, there is often a serious principalagent problem in the relationships between
capitals and their permanent representatives to the UN, with UN ambassadors
942

often given large degrees of freedom to pursue their preferences. This is not just a
problem for small countries in lands far away from Turtle Bay. It was at the heart
of American diplomacy at the UN from August 2005 until December 2006.
Final thoughts
Is the UN transformable, or are we stuck in an equilibrium that ensures that it
underachieves? To ask the question somewhat differently, what would it take for
most member states to prefer a UN and international order in which international institutions were effective and could provide the kind of collective security
envisioned in the High-Level Panel Report?
Key variables will be the language and deeds of the next administration in
Washington DC. In 2009 the next American president will have the opportunity to repudiate the failed strategy of primacy and acknowledge that American
security is dependent on global security. He or she can commit to putting effective
multilateralism and international institutions at the front and centre of how the
United States gets things done. The new president can also take some early actions
to regain international credibility, and there is no better place to start than in the
area of disarmament.
Will he or she do so? Possibly not; on the Democratic side there are pundits
who suggest that the whole international architecture is broken and speak blithely
of alternatives such as a concert of democracies, a classic version of American
escapism that underestimates the low regard that much of the democratic world has
for American foreign policy and assumes that the United States need not negotiate
with countries that hold different values and political systems.
At some point there must be a reckoning of Americas foreign policy leadership
with a few basic facts: that it is the strongest military power on earth, but unable to
translate that power into achieving any major foreign policy goal; that the United
Nations has never been more important to its security goals; that Americas reputation as a democracy and as an international power is at its lowest. Only a president
willing to acknowledge these facts will have a chance of re-establishing American
leadership.
And what, then, of the rest of the world? Were a new American president to put
forward a new vision of multilateral engagement, would others respond? Some
believe that after eight years of the Bush administration, the world will embrace a
new American president and follow his or her lead. I, for one, am sceptical. There
is too much distrust of American leadership, and too much potential for countries
to hedge their bets. If a shared commitment to rebuilding multilateralism and the
United Nations is to come about, it will be a lengthy, incremental process.
A new American president should not assume that the world is holding its
breath waiting for American leadership to create a new world order. One must
avoid setting up multilateralism to fail. It is all t0o easy to imagine a new president,
believing that Americas good intentions can be taken at face value, rushing
headlong into reforming the international architecture, only to nd few takers,
943

arduous negotiations and intermittent cooperation. Aggrieved, the new president
turns again to unilateralism, labouring under the delusion that he or she tried hard
and failed because no one else wants effective multilateralism.
944

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UN transformation in an era