United They Fall: Why only Bill Clinton can save the U.N.

Parag Khanna 
January 1, 2006
Harper's Magazine
Original Source: http://www.harpers.org/MostRecentCover.html

Indulge me for a moment as I fix the world. First, rich countries must raise their development budgets to 0.7 percent of GDP (five times more than the United States currently gives), pumping at least $50 billion per year into poor countries' economies. At the same time, underdeveloped societies must root out corruption and boost investment in social welfare while adopting environmentally sustainable practices. Then we must strengthen the capacity of international institutions to manage global collective security against the threats of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, organized crime, and failed states. Finally, we must move rapidly toward free and fair global trade, and involve NGOs and the international business community in providing responsible and accountable delivery of public goods around the world. Once we have all these reforms under way, we'll be on track toward reconciling liberalization with the imperatives of development, and in the process define a new global covenant for our rapidly integrating world society.

Here we have, in a nutshell, the roadmap for ending human suffering that has been put forth by the United Nations Millennium Project, the Commission on Global Governance, the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, and countless other reports, studies, and commentaries produced by the United Nations and groups such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, Oxfam, and the Center for Global Development. These are the reports, voluminous and weighty, that I have been collecting for more than a decade, and that I decided to revisit after hearing United Nations secretary-General Kofi Annan declare that the decisions made during last September's General Assembly meeting in New York would determine the whole future of the United Nations. Such language has become so familiar to U.N. observers that it hardly registers as human speech.

There was a time, however, when these rousing declarations might have meant something. And anyone who has either worked at the U.N. or participated in Model United Nations conferences in high school or college has experienced delusionary moments in which the gap between theory and practice in international diplomacy seemed to disappear. In the early 1990s, when I and other Model U.N. geeks felt we were both simulating reality and living it, sharing in the heady optimism of the post-Cold War, we thought, that the sky was the limit for international cooperation. During this period, through the various committees and organs of the U.N. (and Model U.N.), diplomats from around the world hoped to move briskly to implement international norms governing every conceivable sphere of human activity, from children's rights to space exploration. Utopia was a tall stack of declarations-translated into six languages.

But then reality staged a unilateral intervention. One need only mention Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Ambitious hopes for robust peacekeeping deployments were dashed by the failing political will of key members, particularly the United States, and appalling bureaucratic and operational incompetence. Then came AIDS and SARS, 9/11 and the war on terror, Iraq and Darfur. In each case, the United Nations has proved ill-equipped to prevent the world's drift toward anarchy. Instead, with the gap between aspiration and reality widening every day, the U.N. is now struggling merely to save itself. At some point soon, if it has not happened already, people will cease to believe that the U.N. can fulfill its purpose to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Within days of his resignation after only five months of service as the American ambassador to the U.N., John Danforth publicly excoriated the General Assembly's refusal to plainly condemn the ongoing genocide in Sudan's Darfur region. Why have this building? What is it all about? he lamented. His successor, John Bolton, was already infamous for declaring that there's no such thing as the United Nations, and that if the U.N. security Council were ever restructured, it should have only one permanent member, the United States.

Both men had a point. The United Nations is the only organization that holds annual meetings to commemorate the failure of previous meetings. The 60th U.N. General Assembly in September was no exception, and in fact was the largest such gathering ever, demonstrating little more than the fact that the U.N. remains the only institution in the world with universal convening power, even as it was the highest and most accurate reflection of the world's inability to achieve consensus on anything, including how to begin acting on goals set forth five years earlier. Lofty goals were announced and pursued, but national interests, chiefly that of the United States in the person of Ambassador John Bolton, proved intransigent. In the end, some minimal compromise was achieved that permitted everyone to pretend that something worthwhile had come to pass. It all reminded me of Model U.N. conferences, with neophyte diplomats scrambling to find the least offensive language to cater to narrow interests, ultimately serving no greater purpose whatsoever. The watered-down document salvaged by bleary-eyed secretariat staffers after several all-nighters was an embarrassment of underachievement.1

Compounding the U.N.'s crisis of credibility is the following: There is no clear candidate to lead the organization through the most important chapter in its history once the already lame-duck Kofi Annan steps down this year. And if the next secretary-general of the U.N. is yet another compromise figure from a Third World country, the United States will continue to condescend to him or her, and the m uch sought-after grand reconciliation between American exceptionalism and the international community will remain elusive, the relationship bitter and fragile-all as the risk of catastrophic terrorism grows and a U.S.-China rivalry deepens. After a decade in which more conflicts were resolved by diplomacy than in the past two centuries, war may again become the solution to war. Our very collective evolution is therefore at stake.

The United Nations' problems are truly existential-on both structural and cultural levels-but focusing on anything but scandal management has been difficult since 2004, the U.N.'s annus horribilis. Nagging sexual-harassment allegations forced the resignation of Ruud Lubbers, the U.N. refugee chief and former Dutch prime minister. Complacent senior officials were shocked when the U.N.'s staff union threatened a vote of no confidence against the organization's senior management and when an independent staff survey showed that integrity is seen to be lacking the higher one goes up the bureaucratic ladder. Then came sex trafficking by peacekeepers, an underground railroad of female slavery across the former Yugoslavia and beyond. Sadly, this was not an isolated incident. Allegations of widespread sexual abuse came to light in a U.N. refugee camp in Bunia, Congo. Blue-helmets were paying girls as young as thirteen or fourteen with bread, milk, or a little cash. As a trio of former U.N. employees exposed in a stunningly candid memoir of peacekeeping operations from Cambodia to Liberia to Haiti titled Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth, U.N. personnel often have responded to their role in confronting warlordism with kickback deals and have eased the burden they bear in fighting poverty with fermented marijuana cocktails along the banks of the Mekong River.

In any other organization-or by any measure of common sense-the offending countries would be blacklisted from sending peacekeepers on U.N. missions, denying them the lucrative incomes that come with U.N. soldiering. Under the present arrangement, soldiers guilty of using their jobs for sex tourism are supposed to return home to face trial, but such trials rarely occur. The U.N.'s peacekeeping forces are already stretched thin around the world, which means that blacklisting countries from providing peacekeepers would only undermine the U.N.'s peace-and-security mandate. (Rich countries, by the way, rarely offer up their own soldiers, preferring to staff them in NATO operations, for example.) Despite new zero tolerance and self-monitoring strategies, the U.N. was not only slow to respond to allegations of staff misconduct around the world but frequently blocked the administration of justice. The U.N. building itself may be the best metaphor for the organization's culture: full of asbestos and lacking any fire-fighting capability.

And then there was the oil-for-Food scandal. A $64 billion program designed to alleviate the crushing impact of sanctions on the Iraqi populace, oil-for-Food actually succeeded in feeding the Iraqi population well enough that the United States voted for the U.N. to continue the program six months after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But in a classic dictatorial patronage maneuver, Saddam Hussein handed out oil vouchers from the program to buy loyalty, and cashed in by overcharging the program for imports and levying illegal surcharges on oil sales. In all, he siphoned about $1.8 billion from oil-for-Food, and the program's own executive director, Benon Sevan, a dozen French and Russian officials, hundreds of international companies, Texas oil magnate Oscar Wyatt Jr., and even Kofi Annan's son Kojo were all implicated in the subsequent investigation. It was never going to be easy to prevent the limited amount of oil smuggling and profiteering that did take place, but what oil-for-Food actually revealed was the sorry state of the U.N.'s public relations apparatus, which employs 750 staffers yet was unable to make its case to the American public. In the mainstream media, only James Dobbins of the RAND Corporation pointed out that it was Iraqi money, not American or U.N. money, that was actually diverted. The U.N.'s crime was thus that it was unable to prevent a rogue regime from stealing its own money.2

I first got involved with the United Nations just before its fiftieth birthday. In 1995, at age seventeen, I was likely the youngest intern wandering the corridors of the two glass towers and the crescent-roofed General Assembly and steely blue secretariat buildings crowded around the intersection of Forty-Fourth Street and First Avenue in Manhattan. My job was to develop an agenda for the World Youth Forum, a series of at least three global conferences aimed at increasing the visibility of youth priorities such as health and employment. I quickly became part of what a newly acquired mentor called the circuit: an endless series of conferences, summits, conventions, dialogues, and other junkets frequented by a global quasi-diplomatic caste of officials, activists, and lobbyists. Around the circuit I went, building web platforms, drafting aides-mémoire, and mastering the art of organizing costly events with uncertain outcomes. One week the Youth Unit had exceeded its quota of printing paper, so we simply were not allowed to make photocopies until our stock was replenished. I started to wonder: If the unit, or even the whole Division for Social Policy and Development, ceased to exist, would anyone miss it? Bolton's offhand remark now echoes in my mind: If the U.N. secretariat building in New York lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.

In March of last year Kofi Annan took the somewhat bold step of addressing the very meaning of the United Nations itself by presenting a comprehensive strategy to the General Assembly. Annan's In Larger Freedom declared, This hall has heard enough high-sounding declarations to last us for some decades to come. . . . What is needed now is not more declarations but action to fulfill the promises already made. Although Annan cleverly pushed for a broad, interconnected package, and annexed a laundry list of specific measures leaders should have taken when they convened in September, the international community clearly fell short when it came to political will. In fact, the call for greater political will itself may be the single most common and deeply unsatisfying phrase yet concocted by policy scribes seeking eloquent conclusions for their speeches and reports. Political will was demanded alongside placards reading Never again! as the Rwandan genocide was commemorated in 2004-at the same time as a similar catastrophe unfolded in the Sudan. (Both Colin Powell and Kofi Annan refused to call the Sudan crisis genocide at first.) Even the otherwise rousing Brazilian president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva can do little more than implore that the world has enough resources to satisfy the needs of a population twice as big as the present one, but it lacks the political will to overcome this inequality. But based on the number of international conferences producing statements of solidarity and shared goals, the global community should be drowning in its own political will by now. Sadly, as the World Economic Forum's annual Global Governance Initiative reports, no more than one third of the necessary resources-human, technical, financial, or otherwise-are being committed by the international community to achieve the Millennium Declaration's goals. In other words, political will is an oxymoron: it is a euphemism for the U.N.'s powerlessness.

Surveys conducted worldwide, however, show a near universal desire for the U.N. to have greater authority and power. But what passes for strong leadership in reform is the art of holding consultations, the more the better. Annan likes to say that reform is a process, not an event. I would rephrase this. Reform is an industry that feeds on itself to no end, for its goal is an impossible one: to turn the U.N. into the world's only seamless diplomatic apparatus. First, in 1997, came Renewing the United Nations: A Program for Reform, and in 2002, Strengthening the United Nations: An Agenda for Further Change. Some of the more prominent reports dealt with security issues, such as the 2000 Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, which broached the idea of more robust peacekeeping forces, and the late 2004 publication of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change titled A More secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.

To anatomize such a report process is to uncover the most serious internal apathy and inertia of any international organization today. First, the stock justification for such an exercise, deemed necessary to get maximum global representation and buy-in. Then the selection of eminent persons, usually involving a blitz of phone calls among former heads of state and foreign ministers. Next comes a year of five-star consultations in rich and poor cities alike, costing several million dollars. Finally, the outcome: a bromide-rich report reaffirming the critical importance of an issue-health, collective security, civil society, take your pick-and of course the centrality of the United Nations in coordinating a global response to the issue. The maneuvering to chair sessions and panels, and the posturing to frame and release studies is a routine so stale that one may quickly forget that people are dying. Perhaps predictably, even the report of the eminently staffed High-Level Panel wound up getting significantly watered down, its apolitical vision of an expanded security Council sunk by the gamesmanship of African states that stood to gain the most from real representation at the high table. And the recommendations of a blue-ribbon task force chaired by Newt Gingrich and George Mitchell were simply tossed on the pile. The Economist derided the sham of summitry by declaring: Let them eat reports.

Such reports, however well-intentioned, are better at highlighting U.N. failures than correcting them. The philosophy behind the most recent reports is simple: create three equally weighted councils for three institutional priorities: security, human rights, and development. Yet every successive reformulation of priorities exposes the U.N.'s mounting crisis of ineffectiveness in doing anything beyond pontification. Calling upon world leaders to do what they need to do is no longer constructive, since member states will continuously cherry-pick. No report-past, present, or future-stands a chance of overcoming the North-South cleavage within the U.N., a division that poisons both the organization's geopolitical efficacy and its internal politics.3 Although the mere existence of the U.N. proves that the world's states have common interests, within the organization such interests are hard to find. As Australia's former foreign minister and High-Level Panel member Gareth Evans recently remarked, It is still the piranha pool of diplomats enjoying tearing flesh off each other, to the total exclusion of any enthusiasm for high principle or effectiveness of the organisation.

Any large decentralized organization will be prone to waste and fraud, particularly one with weak leadership, byzantine rules, and a culture of entitlement, but we can no longer separate the U.N.'s plumbing from its reliability as a global forum. The U.N. has come to exist in its own bureaucratic bubble and no longer inspires its own ranks, even when its good work saves lives. Like any prestigious organization, the U.N. has its fair share of brilliant people and some highly dedicated true believers, but at the top level, management skill and substantive expertise have almost always been secondary to political connections. Even Kofi Annan has minimal room to maneuver: in 2004 the General Assembly gave him the authority to eliminate only 50 superfluous positions out of 37,598. It is widely agreed that a golden parachute is needed for many of the senior staff, but a mass dismissal could itself actually backfire, with good people in other departments preemptively departing to pursue better opportunities elsewhere. The threat of such drastic measures is reportedly imbuing the U.N.'s thirty-eighth floor with an air reminiscent of the Kremlin in the waning days of the Soviet Union.

Launching a cultural revolution amid such an atmosphere of ossified recalcitrance and existential desperation will require an extraordinary political genius. A superficial changing of the guard will not suffice, for despite its supranational pretensions, implementing a merit-based system at the U.N. would unmask the grotesque geopolitical horse-trading among nationalities for senior appointments. Indeed, the manner in which leaders of international organizations are chosen is disgraceful, a parochial indignity utterly contrary to the pious norms of globalism. A carefully crafted yet unlegislated system of backroom dealings, this process makes choosing the pope seem meritocratic by comparison.

In trying to please dozens of countries with the choice for a single secretary-general, geography has historically been more important than competence, with the ability to avoid a veto of one's nomination as the highest qualification. The unwritten rule that no citizen of the veto-wielding permanent five security Council members should be secretary-general dates back to a 1981 gentlemen's agreement by which the post rotates around the world's regions. At that time it was given to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who was described as someone who wouldn't make a splash if he fell out of a boat. This lowest-common-denominator, compromise approach led to Kofi Annan being selected a decade ago, when it was Africa's turn. Annan was the first career U.N. bureaucrat to be secretary-general and thus not a diplomatic heavyweight. It is now Asia's turn to nominate, and the region's likely current candidate is former Thai foreign minister and current deputy prime minister Surakiart Sathirathai. Although he is undoubtedly qualified, many view his campaign as marked by an odious vanity, and he has received at best perfunctory support from his own ASEAN regional group. Former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani has also been mentioned, since the Asia group stretches as far as the Middle East. Other names thrown around include Poland's outgoing president, Aleksander Kwasniewski (since Eastern Europe has never had a turn), but Russia would likely veto him. Even imprisoned Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is supported by some, as she makes up for in moral courage what she lacks in experience. Malaysia's former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim has also been mentioned; since his release from prison he has become a leading voice of reformist Islam and could be a force for modernization and development.

The September U.N. declaration preserved the call to strengthen the secretary-general's role as an honest broker of peace accords, but who will actually do this? Nelson Mandela and Václav Havel are both too frail, and yet ironically are viewed by some as threatening, for they might actually decide to lift the organization out of its stasis. The secretary-general's job is simply too important for the world to slavishly defer to a rigid rotational system, writes Hillel Neuer of U.N. Watch. Thomas Pickering, a former U.S ambassador to the U.N., bluntly agrees: Every region has now had their turn. What then is to be done?

Proposals to make this large, flawed institution even bigger will simply make it bigger and more flawed. And because there simply was no real reform in 2005, who should be the next secretary-general has become the question of reform itself. For better or worse, there is only one solution to enhancing the utility and image of the U.N. in America while simultaneously revitalizing the organization for the twenty-first century: Embed a super-American at the highest level. That man, at this moment, is Bill Clinton.

To prove his or her worth, a secretary-general needs to be seen dashing around in dangerous places, practicing deft diplomacy, defusing crises, and doing things that our own diplomats seemingly no longer know how to do. Who better to play this role than Bill Clinton? While the U.N. summit was going on in September, across town at the Clinton Global Initiative the former president launched his most visible effort to sort out both the world and the rest of his life. Davos it was not. Each year at the World Economic Forum's annual five-day retreat in the Alpine hamlet, free-flowing conversations, serendipitous encounters, and save-the-world recipes are offered, even as they, too, prove far too difficult to implement. By contrast, much of Clintonpalooza was staged-from Coldplay and Moby musical intros to big-ticket philanthropic announcements-causing many participants to wonder if the event was his launchpad for higher office. Clinton himself proved beyond any doubt that he is the most widely schooled and topically informed individual on earth. He waxed poetic about the depth of topsoil in Brazil, the use of solar cells to decrease energy consumption at his presidential library, pooled terrorisminsurance schemes for investors in Palestine, and reducing the cost of drugs in Africa.

The U.N. is already learning that it cannot do anything successfully alone. Partnerships with NGOs and companies to develop vaccines, deliver supplies, and lobby governments are not exceptions to the rule; they are the reality of problem-solving in the world today. Clinton understands this, and he made the one demand of his audience that I have always wished Davos would: he gave everyone homework assignments, challenging the world's privileged to make and honor tangible commitments together. One by one they came on stage and signed giant letters of commitment and checks-and got bear hugs from Bill. Scottish entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter pledged to pump $100 million of carefully monitored aid into two African villages, a complete package of education, health, infrastructure, and agricultural support. Where unfair global-trade regimes limit growth, Hunter stepped into the vanguard of individuals such as Bill Gates and Mohammed Yunus-who are giving the poor a chance to climb the first rung out of hell. Rather than engage in the development economists' debates du jour-big increases in official aid versus the scaling up of piecemeal success stories-Clinton aims to transcend them. Over $1 billion worth of commitments were made in two days, ranging from American foundations boosting higher education in Africa to interfaith groups that pledged to offset the emissions from their houses of prayer by investing in forestry projects. The Clinton initiative itself teamed with Deutsche Bank to launch a $75 million micro-finance fund. Even the biggest advocate of boosting aid, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, concedes the point: Lead by action, and the government will follow along.

Clinton has both considerable diplomatic talent and genuine global clout. The Clinton Global Initiative made clear that the former president already sees himself as the informal, leader of the amorphous group of NGOs collectively referred to nowadays as civil society. As secretary-general he could use his encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East conflict to pick up the slack in Western diplomacy-and be trusted by all sides simultaneously. Toward the end of his presidential term, Clinton was prepared to visit North Korea to defuse what continues to be-alongside Iran-the world's tensest nuclear standoff. As secretary-general he is certain to do this, using his credibility to make himself the trip wire between resolution and war.

Clinton would have no need to ingratiate himself with world leaders but would serve as a mentor to them. Around the world, Clinton is viewed as a peacemaker and someone so great that he has outgrown the United States. Clinton's appeal in the Third World is massive, and poor-country leaders know that he could get them the water they need better than they could themselves. Indeed, how many African or Asian countries would still back Sathirathai or any other candidate if Clinton threw his hat in the ring? The one attribute he has that few other Americans have is that beyond our borders he is considered fair. Clinton's activities since leaving the White House at age fifty-four have only reinforced his commitment to building new rules for a globalized world from the ground up, a sort of global Third Way. His foundation is more an institute than a memorial to his presidency, and it administers ever larger development projects and works with pharmaceutical companies to provide generic drugs for AIDS victims in Africa, India, China, and the Caribbean. Kofi Annan has already appointed Clinton as his Special Envoy to sustain support for tsunami relief, and Clinton (along with George H. W. Bush) now serves a similar function under the current President Bush to rally Americans after Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans.

It may seem ironic to suggest Clinton as a manager, given that he ran one of the fastest and loosest White Houses in American history. No shortage of Clinton-haters would point to his personal indiscretions and ask why he is any better than Ruud Lubbers. Furthermore, it was under Clinton's watch-and Kofi Annan's as head of peacekeeping-that the United States balked in Somalia, waffled on the Balkans, and prevaricated on Rwanda. Yet not only has Clinton been forgiven; he continues to be seen as a source of hope. Simply watching any video clip of the man in action overseas will demonstrate that America today has not one single citizen even remotely approaching his ability to develop a rapport with foreign leaders-and there is no replacement in sight. The choice for President Bush, therefore, is not between any American and a non-American but between Bill Clinton and a non-American. Given Bush's patriotic instincts, this should be no choice at all. President Bush must be made to realize that changing the secretary-general is intimately linked to changing the U.N.'s culture and to reconciling the world body with the U.S.4 Certainly Clinton would use the bully pulpit to try to force the Bush Administration to respect international norms, but Bush would still be doing his party a big favor, particularly if Hillary runs for the White House in 2008. As she seeks to build a political dynasty in Washington to counter the Bushes', having Bill Clinton at the U.N. would eliminate Republicans' concerns about having him back in the White House, even as First Man to Hillary. Democrats are desperate for some kind of influence on foreign policy, and Republicans are obsessed with a U.N. cleanup. There is no credible competition for the job from Asia or any other region, and many countries are seeking a candidate who could counter Bolton's wrath. With the U.N. itself so desperate to find a comprehensive mandate for the future, the combination of so many colliding interests yields only one compromise greater than another lowest common denominator-and he already lives in New York.

Although the United Nations must eventually graduate from its dependency on individual leaders, it needs Clinton as a bridge to create a lasting sense of its relevance to Americans. Given what it accomplishes daily, the U.N. is actually a good bargain for both America and the world. Only the U.N., with all its flaws, has the necessary legitimacy to monitor elections, deploy peacekeeping troops, and deliver vaccines around the world, in addition to providing emergency food supplies in famine-stricken areas and caring for millions of refugees. This is a fact, as Paul Volcker recognized even as he put forth his criticisms of the oil-for-Food scandal. Amid the internal crises of the past two years, flashes of what the U.N. could become have also been visible. From Congo to Haiti, peacekeepers have been fighting back against bandits and disarming militias, taking casualties and saving lives, while delivering vital humanitarian assistance. (A decade ago they were bullied by Serbs, chained up, and robbed of their weapons.) In addition to organizing the Bonn Agreement and overseeing the subsequent Afghan elections, the U.N. now provides water pumps that line Kabul's streets. For whatever personnel flaws have been present in U.N. peace-keeping operations, the RAND Corporation points out in a recent study that the U.N. has a lower cost structure, higher success rate, greater legitimacy, and is far better at learning lessons from previous operations than the U.S. military.

The American strategy of unilaterally cleaning up a messy world has only made it messier. And the notion of accountability at the global level-a true globalism-remains a thin figment, no more advanced than a child's super-ego. What Clinton-and only Clinton-could do in this situation is deploy the single most powerful force in diplomacy: shame. Transnational problems will become manageable only when people become empowered to take responsibility for their own circumstances out of a sense of obligation and pressure from a global agora. Only Clinton can lead this organic evolution with credibility, for he, unlike Bush, has shamed himself and shown remorse. Who besides Bill Clinton could rise above the twin hurdles of power politics and poor management that curse the U.N. while simultaneously overcoming American apathy? Who would ; stand up to the Russians and Chinese in their self-interested blocking of action to stop the genocide in Darfur? And who could not only remind Americans that they give far less to international development than they think they do but implore them to give more?

Institutions are judged by the ideals they set for themselves. Our expectations of the military and medical professions are based on their own vaunted ethical codes. Clinton himself knows that presidents are held to a different standard for their conduct. The goal that the U.N. has set for itself-to end war on earth-is high indeed. Although it was President Franklin Roosevelt's dying dream to serve as secretary-general of the U.N., it has been at best rare for American political leaders since to aspire to political life beyond Washington. Yet it was Ralph Bunche, the American who was the first U.N. official to win the Nobel Peace Prize, who said that the U.N. exists not merely to preserve the peace but also to make change-even radical change-possible without violent up-heaval. The United Nations has no vested interest in the status quo.

In such moments of crisis and opportunity, world order doesn't fall from the sky. If the United Nations is ever to insert itself into the centuries-old cycle of great power rivalries and world wars that plague mankind every fifty years or so, it needs a man like Clinton as secretary-general, a man who can demand invitations into the back rooms of world power and cast multilateralism in the cadence of self-help. Only Clinton can change the current course of rearranging deck chairs on the geopolitical Titanic. Indeed, it was power politics that inspired the United States to create the U.N., and it ultimately will be power politics that brings the U.S. back. In an increasingly non-American world, if America wishes to prevent the next great power, China, from acting like a rogue nation, it will need international support for a return to the Clinton Administration's globalization approach over the present policies of containment.

It is a pity that the U.N., which was meant to rise above the nationalist whims of individuals, is so endangered that it requires a single mortal personality to save itself. But without the right leader, we should genuinely fear whether the U.N. will live up to any mission-let alone the ultimate one-no matter how many reforms are proposed on paper.

WHO BESIDES BILL CLINTON COULD OVERCOME THE U.N.'S BAD MANAGEMENT AND THE APATHY OF THE UNITED STATES?

Copyright Harper's Magazine Foundation Jan 2006 | 1 Almost six months after secretary-General Kofi Annan's In Larger Freedom report (a comprehensive package of reforms bridging North-South priorities), the international community's diplomats could only agree to pursue a minor subset of its provisions, such as a review of old mandates, a Peace/wilding Commission, a Human Rights Council, and a Democracy Fund. The document didn't give the secretary-general broad bowers to hire and fire staff, nor did it create an independent oversight board, even though the United States publicly claimed to back these measures. | 2 Rarely has anyone commented on the irony of the dozen U.S. congressional investigations into the oil-for-Food scandal while roughly half the U.N.'s annual operating budget could be paid out of Halliburton graft alone. | 3 The G-77, a Third World coalition created to articulate poor-country economic interests, and the vestiges of the Non-Aligned Movement have always resisted institutional reform, either fearing cuts in programs that they control or to block what they see as covert racism in high-level appointments. The High-Level Panel on Threats was a Northern priority, with the U.S. seeking to shape the collective security agenda, particularly on terrorism and nuclear proliferation. The Millennium Project was a Southern priority, focusing on the needs of the world's poorest, who don't care about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The Brahimi report on peacekeeping, meant to help end largely poor-country conflicts, was resisted by Southern countries, which fear that peacekeeping could become a form of neo-colonization. Internally, both senior officials and national bureaucrats continue to block Annan's reform proposals every step of the way. The General Assembly's powerful Fifth Committee has been particularly stubborn in its maniacal micromanagement of the core budget. | 4 The White House apparently favors the idea of pairing the next secretary-general with a deputy who would have insider knowledge of the organization and dear responsibilities as the chief operating officer. To avoid a veto, perhaps this deputy could be Chinese. | Parag Khanna is the Global Governance Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of The second World, forthcoming from Random House.