Cato Policy Report, January/February 1997
The United Nations & Global Intervention
On October 22nd the Cato Institute hosted a conference on "The United Nations & Global Intervention" in the F. A. Hayek Auditorium. Speakers debated whether the UN should be reformed to play a constructive role in the world or be abandoned. Five topics were addressed: "The UN in Perspective"; "Funding, Bureaucracy, and Corruption"; "The UN as Peacemaker and Peacekeeper"; "The UN's Social and Environmental Agenda"; and The UN's Role in Economic Development." Speakers included Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies; syndicated columnist Stefan Halper; Alan Tonelson, senior fellow with the U.S. Business and Industrial Council Educational Foundation; Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation; and author Michael Maren. Excerpts follow.
Ted Galen Carpenter: The United Nations was created a half century ago with the pervasive expectation that it would be an effective organization for preserving world peace. Indeed, proponents of collective security hailed their new creation as mankind's "last best hope" for peace. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the United Nations has been an acute disappointment on that score and many others.
Despite the widespread belief that the Cold War's end would finally enable the United Nations to function effectively, its record in the post-Cold War period has been singularly unimpressive. The UN nation-building project in Somalia produced a bloody fiasco. The UN mission in Bosnia, essentially an attempt to manage a civil war, fared little better, merely prolonging the agony by preventing a decisive battlefield verdict.
Even on nonmilitary matters, the UN's performance has been uninspiring. As the United Nations enters its sixth decade, the organization is plagued by problems of mismanagement and corruption. Much of the UN's energy and funds has been devoted to pushing such pernicious measures as the Law of the Sea Treaty and holding pretentious summits on the environment, world population, and other issues. Delegates to those boondoggles invariably embrace the discredited notion that more government intervention and regulation are the solution to any problem. Given the manifest abuses at the United Nations, it is hardly surprising that hostility to the world body is rising among the American people. Perhaps more relevant to the organization's future, anger is rising rapidly in the U.S. Congress.
A dose of realism about the United Nations is long overdue. The UN has limited but important utility as an international forum for the airing of grievances and a mediation service to resolve quarrels. It also can play, and indeed has played, a useful role in coordinating humanitarian relief efforts. But the goal of the United Nations as a powerful global security body is unrealizable and undesirable.
Washington should drastically reduce its financial support for the United Nations and insist, not ask, that the organization trim its bloated, corrupt bureaucracy. Not only should there be a comprehensive audit of the UN's finances and management, but the UN's missions themselves need to be carefully examined to eliminate those that are unrealistic or of dubious value.
The United States should also use its veto on the Security Council to block efforts to have the United Nations undertake overly ambitious missions. "Peacekeeping" ought to be a term confined to classic UN peacekeeping missions--a small number of personnel policing a cease-fire that has the widespread support of the erstwhile belligerents. There must be no more misnamed peacekeeping ventures like the Somalia or Bosnia nation-building enterprises.
Finally, and most important, Washington needs to reexamine its enthusiasm for the entire concept of collective security. It is dubious wisdom to attempt to "globalize" civil wars and minor cross-border conflicts. Yet that will be the inevitable outcome if the United Nations is strengthened and attempts to play the role that its founders envisaged.
The belief that the United Nations was mankind's last best hope for peace was nonsense when the organization was established in 1945, and it is nonsense today. The United Nations is not an independent actor in the international system, nor is it the institutional conscience of humanity. If the United Nations is to play a truly constructive role in international affairs, we need to dispense with such overblown notions.
The United Nations is merely an association of the world's governments, not, it should be emphasized, the world's peoples. As such, it is, and should be, only a marginal player on the global geopolitical stage. Once that limitation is fully accepted, the UN can perform some modestly useful functions, provided that it is properly focused on its core missions and is able to overcome its serious management problems.
Stefan Halper: Imagine an organization beset by inefficiency, regulations, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and misconceived programs. Add to that a miasma of corruption and a leader determined to be reelected. No imagination is necessary--it's the United Nations.
The bottom line is that the UN will either be fundamentally reorganized or, in short order, cease to exist. The data on reform or lack thereof are available for all to see, and they do not paint a pretty picture. In its broader sense, corruption includes the familiar "unholy trinity" of waste, fraud, and abuse, and there is abundant evidence that all three exist within the UN system.
It is illustrative to begin with the distorted salaries the UN pays its employees. Incredibly lucrative salaries are paid at the New York offices, where the average salary of a midlevel accountant is $84,000; the comparable salary for non-UN accountants is $41,964. A UN computer analyst could expect to receive $111,500, compared with $56,835 outside the UN bureaucracy.
Those raw figures don't reflect the full disparity, however, since salaries for UN diplomats are tax-free, and most salaries for administrative staff include an "assessment" used to offset tax liability. In addition, UN employees receive monthly rent subsidies of up to $3,800 and annual education grants of up to $12,675 per child. Yet, in a stunning report by the Washington Post, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, secretary general of the UN, was quoted as saying that "perhaps half of the UN work force does nothing useful."
Nearly $4 million in cash was stolen outright from UN offices in Mogadishu, Somalia, and the New York Times reported, "Nearly $457,000 earmarked for a two-week conference on the sustainable development of small island states included $15,000 to fly representatives of a national liberation movement recognized by the Organization of African Unity. In fact, the movement was the Polisario from the Western Sahara, a desert region conspicuously short of small islands."
Small wonder the U.S. Congress is reluctant to pay the $1 billion in dues still owed. Congress has concluded, and it is correct, that no other avenue is available for forcing the UN bureaucracy and the hallucinogenic salon that passes for the General Assembly to reexamine their practices.
The administration should state that it is prepared to put the UN into bankruptcy, if necessary, to achieve reforms. With management and mission in continuing disarray, the UN must initiate a zero-sum audit taking nothing for granted and placing all of its programs and agencies on the block.
In summary, humanitarian and assistance programs should be retained and military operations, except the monitoring of tense borders, should be abandoned. That change of focus, if joined with a Herculean effort to finish cleaning the Augean stables, would provide the foundation for a return to productive internationalism.
Alan Tonelson: One feature of American politics that has been almost completely unaffected by the Cold War's passing is the imperial presidency. The term refers to the unprecedented expansion of the power, claimed overtly and often seized covertly throughout the Cold War, of the executive branch to conduct American foreign policy and deal with its domestic repercussions. Examples range from infringements on civil liberties during the McCarthy era and the Johnson and Nixon administrations to the growth of government secrecy. But no feature of the imperial presidency has been more important than the expansion of presidential power to use military force in foreign policy--whether in covert, paramilitary operations, security assistance for foreign insurgents, or large conflicts such as the Vietnam War.
No decision facing a nation is more important than the decision to use military force. Consequently, one of the hallmarks of American democracy has been the Constitution's delegation of effective warmaking powers to Congress, save for situations involving sudden attacks or other emergencies in which Congress simply cannot be consulted in time to permit American military success. The express aim was to prevent that momentous decision from being made by one individual and to ensure that those leaders closest and most immediately accountable to the public would have the decisive influence on any decision to call on U.S. blood and treasure.
During the Cold War that principle was frequently compromised, but not in a cavalier manner. But since the fall of the Berlin Wall, American presidents have taken numerous foreign policy actions that have flouted or ignored public or congressional opinion, including the implementation of the Mexican peso bailout and military interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia.
The interventions, revealingly, all began as or became connected with UN peacekeeping or peace-enforcement operations. More than coincidence is involved, for participation in such operations is becoming an integral part of an unfolding effort to preserve a highly activist, interventionist U.S. foreign policy despite clear public opposition.
Given that domestic political climate, and given Congress's refusal to play its constitutional warmaking role, UN peacekeeping missions offer many potential advantages to internationalists. First, those missions can add to the number of possible missions for U.S. forces, attracting attention simply by virtue of their intrinsically dramatic qualities. Second, the availability of the UN option can convey the impression that those missions can be carried out relatively cheaply and safely, with much of the burden being shouldered by other countries or by unspecified "UN forces." Third, peacekeeping operations can set traps for American military forces by sending troops from other lands into situations they cannot handle, under command structures practically designed to fail. Consequently, they can present American leaders--and a public with vestigial emotional attachments to notions like "world leadership"--with the difficult choice between recklessness and seeming national impotence.
So far, presidents have been testing the UN back door gingerly but increasingly actively. President Bush believed, at bottom, that UN Security Council resolutions gave him all the authority he needed to launch Operation Desert Storm. In 1993 President Clinton cited another Security Council resolution as reason to send 350 American troops to bolster the UN Protection Force aimed at deterring Serbian aggression against Macedonia. Since 1994 he has cited the need to assist UN missions or enforce UN resolutions, in Bosnia itself and most recently Iraq, to justify the use of military force. In one instance, Somalia, UN resolutions led to a significant and ill-considered expansion of a mission originally undertaken by a U.S.-led non-UN international coalition.
American internationalists, facing a public instinctively aware of the country's power and potential, have been working overtime with instruments such as UN peacekeeping to keep the public out of foreign policy decisionmaking. The internationalists' record indicates that it is very likely that future American success depends on bringing the public into such decisionmaking.
Sheldon Richman: The United Nations Population Fund, known as the UNFPA, was established in 1969, shortly after the contemporary hysteria about overpopulation was launched with Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb. Since that time, the UNFPA has propagandized the world with the fallacies that the world is becoming overburdened with people, that the developed world's population is depleting natural resources, and that the developing world is doomed to poverty unless it can curtail its population growth. Accordingly, the fund has spent almost $2.5 billion on its various activities, which range from collecting data to sponsoring family-planning programs.
But are those programs really necessary, let alone ethical? Are there too many people? Famine, deepening poverty, disease, environmental degradation, and resource depletion are adduced as the symptoms of overpopulation. Yet on no count does the evidence support the anti-population lobby's case. On the contrary, the long-term trend for each factor is positive and points to an even better future.
Television pictures of starving, emaciated Africans are heartbreaking, but they are not evidence of overpopulation. Since 1985 we have witnessed famines in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and elsewhere. Those nations have one thing in common: they are among the least densely populated areas on earth. Although their populations are growing, the people are not hungry because the world can't produce enough food. They are hungry because civil war and primitive economies keep food from getting to them. In the 20th century there has been no famine that has not been caused by civil war, irrational economic policies, deliberate retribution, or natural disasters. Moreover, the number of people affected by famine compared to the number affected during the late 19th century has fallen--not just as a percentage of the world's population but in absolute numbers.
Food is abundant. Output has more than doubled in the last 30 years. Per capita food supplies have increased 25 percent in the developing world, where the world's population growth is occurring. The real cost has declined. And what's true of food is also true of other resources.
The claim that "uncontrolled" population growth depletes resources has no more foundation than the catastrophists' other arguments. For centuries, resources of every kind, including energy, have been growing more plentiful and less expensive. Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute, reports that the cost of resources relative to wages is today half what it was in 1980. Resources are three times cheaper than they were 50 years ago and eight times cheaper than they were in 1900.
Moreover, the world's population has been heading toward stabilization for more than 30 years. Worldwide, women today have an average of 3 children compared to 3.2 in 1990, 3.7 in 1980, and 5 in 1950. In the developing world, total fertility rates dropped by 40 percent, from 6.2 in 1950-55 to 3.5 in 1990-95. The population controllers credit their efforts, while still complaining that not enough is being done. But the fall in those rates preceded their campaign. Moreover, there is a simpler explanation: as economies develop and become richer, people tend to have fewer children. In preindustrial, agricultural economies, children produce wealth as farm workers, and later they provide retirement security for their parents. Children are assets. A large number of children correlates with wealth. In developed economies, children consume wealth, for education and the like. They are an expense. Thus people tend to have fewer kids. A low fertility rate is an effect, not a cause, of development.
Human advancement is not automatic and cannot withstand complacency. Liberty--specifically, the individual's right to think, to produce, to trade, and to keep the resulting profits--is a necessary precondition. In institutional terms, liberty means free markets, the rule of law protecting property and contracts, and strict limits on government power. Without those things, the doomsayers' predictions may indeed come true, but for far different reasons than those specified. Unfortunately, the planners at the United Nations Population Fund have yet to learn the main lesson of the 20th century.
Michael Maren: For the past 4 years I have been working as a journalist in Somalia, and for 10 years before that I was in and out of the country observing aid agencies and governmental forces at work. I was most recently in Somalia for four weeks in August and September 1996. I arrived a year and a half after the last UN troops had departed and a year after most UN development agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had left. Here are a few of my observations.
The markets are full of goods. A large number of young men who once made their living with guns are now in business--transporting, importing, exporting. Currency markets operate efficiently. Exchange rates between the Somali shilling and a dozen foreign currencies are published daily. Private schools and hospitals are opening up throughout Mogadishu. Teachers and medical practitioners are being paid by parents and patients.
There are now two competing phone systems in the city. Residents have a choice between AT&T and a Scandinavian carrier for their long-distance calls. In northern Somalia, calls are made via Sprint. From Mogadishu you can call anywhere in the world for $2 a minute, a fraction of the price of a call from most African countries, and in some cases cheaper than I can call from New York. It's common to see people standing on bombed-out street corners with cellular phones in their hands.
Western Union is doing business in Mogadishu, allowing a free flow of funds. DHL operates there now, and negotiations are under way with FedEx. The guys who own one of the Somali phone systems have a plan to bring the Internet to the country within a year.
And the real news is that Somalia has just had its best harvest in years. It’s definitely the best since the civil war started in 1990 and probably better than in the final years of the regime of former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
The people of Somalia are now engaged in a process of organic development--development that is rooted in Somali culture and Somali needs, not based on the political priorities of international development bureaucracies and the fiscal needs of NGOs. The development that is taking place in Somalia today is what foreign organizations might call "sustainable development." And while sustainable development is often cited as a goal of international organizations and NGOs, it is their very involvement, ironically, that guarantees that the development that takes place under their auspices is not sustainable.
During the UN's heyday in Mogadishu (1993-95) businessmen weren't investing in the city; they were starting NGOs. Nearly 1,000 NGOs had registered with the UN and were seeking funding. NGO shingles decorated the walls of buildings all over town. They had names like "Feed the Starving Children" and "Help the Children." Today all of them are gone. When the UN was in charge, people made rational decisions about how they were going to invest their time. The amount of money being poured into aid was greater than the amount being directed through commercial channels. NGOs were the biggest businesses in town. It was a far cry from the real progress that has been made in the year and a half since the UN left Somalia.
This article originally appeared in the January/February 1997 edition of Cato Policy Report.