It’s becoming a familiar story. The United States, the nation that lovingly fathered the United Nations in the closing days of World War II, now sees it as a prodigal son, and a rather hopeless one at that. The U.N. rap sheet, in Washington’s eyes, includes peacekeeping disasters in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia (U.N. officials equally blame the Clinton administration) and a dysfunctional Security Council that is increasingly used by second-rate powers like Russia and France to stymie U.S. wishes (especially in Iraq, where Moscow, Beijing and Paris virtually allied with Saddam Hussein as he cast out U.N. weapons inspectors last year). The upshot: Washington didn’t want to give the Kosovo peacekeeping job to the U.N. at all, but the Russians insisted. U.S.-U.N. tensions have “never been worse,” says William vanden Heuvel, who had Holbrooke’s job in the Carter administration. “Now that the U.S. is ‘sole superpower,’ it has essentially abandoned the United Nations.”
Actually, things aren’t quite that bad. U.S. officials still need the cover of U.N. Security Council resolutions–the chief source of international law–to take collective action worldwide. And Holbrooke, a first-rank negotiator thought of as a future secretary of State, is eager to patch up relations; he says his “top, sustained priority” is U.N. reform. But U.N. officials fear the cards are stacked against them in Kosovo. A hellish policing problem may soon get bloodier if the Kosovo Liberation Army, which wants to run the province, continues to sniff at U.N. authority. And now NATO and top U.S. officials are openly criticizing the U.N. for its slowness in installing police and civilian administrators. As of last week, a month and a half after the war, only 758 out of a projected 3,150 police and 100 of some 350 administrators were in place. Says a NATO commander: “It’ll be a miracle if they can pull this off.”
U.N. officials plead poverty–and mainly at the hands of Washington. They have a good case. Deprived of more than $1 billion in U.S. back dues–the result of a still-festering fight between Clinton and Congress over U.N. abortion funding–the world body’s finances are in dire shape. U.N. finance chief Joseph Connor says he keeps the lights on in New York only by withholding payment to nations around the world for peacekeepers and equipment. Some U.N. members may be exacting revenge: none of the $125 million assessed for Kosovo has been received yet, Connor says, and last Friday the U.N. technically ran out of cash in its overall budget. The United Nations also maintains it has already “reformed,” having slashed 12 percent of its staff. “We are cut to the bone,” says Shashi Tharoor, a senior aide to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “We have no resources to find and train policemen ourselves.”
The real test comes next month. The Republican Congress will take up the dues issue again, and the Security Council will debate the formation of a new inspection team in Iraq. In the middle of it all will be Holbrooke. Resolving all these tensions will require “an almost Dayton-like piece of shuttle diplomacy,” says a senior U.N. official. “He’s the last, best hope,” adds Connor. Better get to work, Mr. Ambassador.
