Transcript
MARK MALLOCH BROWN: When Brookings started to look into this issue of the legitimate uses of force, it was at the same time that a high-level panel set up by Kofi Annan was asking itself the same questions at the United Nations, all of this in 2003 in the aftermath of the Iraq War.
If I look back to 2003, my own suspicion about our high-level panel is that it asked the wrong question but got the right answer. Let me say what I mean by that, which is that in the immediate aftermath of Iraq, the real casualty appeared to be the U.N. Security Council. I think what preoccupied all of us was that it had failed to contain the United States within a strategy of dealing with Saddam Hussein that the U.S. could live with. The U.S. impatience, the presumption of the imminence of the threat, the assumption that there were weapons of mass destruction, all combined to mean that the U.S. was not willing ultimately to operate within the strictures of the Council or at the pace that the Security Council wanted to deal with the problem. Therefore, the casualty seemed to be the Security Council.
Three years later, I suspect we draw a rather different conclusion from it, that in some ways 2003 was the "High Noon" of acting outside the context of the Security Council, the difficulties in an era of asymmetric conflict even for a country as powerful as the United States, the difficulties of intervention which lacks that broader international legitimacy that comes from the Council meant that it has left the U.S. wary of taking on other similar challenges through a narrow coalition of the willing or acting alone. And it has driven the U.S. back to the Security Council in a way which would have been seen as utterly implausible only 3 short years ago. So that today we see North Korea, Iran, Darfur, Lebanon and the Middle East very much on the docket of the Council and, indeed, Myanmar, an issue where Washington has been hugely ahead of the rest of the world in trying to get resolute action, that too has been brought through U.S. diplomacy to the Security Council.
But I do not think we should take any comfort as multilateralists from this swing of the pendulum back to the United Nations because unless the U.N. is able to live up to the renewed expectations of it to be able to deal robustly with these crises, one can only assume that the pendulum will keep on swinging or swing in a new direction, but it is impossible to imagine, whatever the setbacks in terms of Iraq policy, that the U.S. would invest its foreign policy in an institution such as the Security Council that did not deliver results. Therefore, of course, that list of crises that I have observed that are on our docket at the moment are a huge challenge to the effectiveness of the Council and it would need an utterly rosy-eyed U.N. optimist to believe that we are going to quickly and rapidly come up with smart, quick, effective solutions on that range of issues. That drives us to say: what is it that we should or can do to strengthen the United Nations to make it a better multilateral partner for a U.S. seeking again to solve global problems through the U.N.?
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