by Richard Gowan | Sep 23, 2011 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Middle East and North Africa, UK
Yesterday, I posted a preview of Thursday’s Security Council debate on preventive diplomacy, and predicted that it would be boring. The meeting certainly generated a fair bit of blather, but it wasn’t all diplomatic consensus-building:
“When conflict looms, the world looks to the U.N. for a decisive response,” said British Foreign Minister William Hague. “In Libya… our swift action prevented a human catastrophe and saved the lives of thousands of civilians.”
Hague went on to say that the British government viewed U.N. Security Council action as “long overdue” on Syria. “The consequences of inaction would weigh heavily upon us if we turn a blind eye to murder and oppression,” he said.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle called on the Security Council to “send a strong message to the government in Damascus to stop the killing of its people.”
Not all Security Council members were on the same page when it came to international intervention, however. The representatives from India, Brazil, and South Africa criticized what they saw as overreaching by the United Nations in Libya. South African President Jacob Zuma was particularly critical of the United Nations for ignoring the peacemaking efforts of the African Union.
“Such blatant acts of disregard of regional initiatives have the potential to undermine the confidence regional organizations have in the U.N. as an impartial and respected mediator in conflicts,” he said.
Indian Minister for External Affairs S.M. Krishna said that the international community needs to let peaceful processes play out longer before resorting to the use of force.
“The use of force also leads to collateral damage,” he said. “In many places, the use of force has prolonged conflicts and the cure has turned out to be worse that the disease itself.”
Ouch. It’s a sign of the ill-temper engendered Libya and Palestine at the UN that a debate on the motherhood-and-apple-pie issue of prevention got so tetchy…
by Richard Gowan | Sep 23, 2011 | Europe and Central Asia, Off topic
EU President Herman Van Rompuy has managed to pull off a nice little joke by giving Henry Kissinger his phone number. Get it?
by Richard Gowan | Sep 22, 2011 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Middle East and North Africa
This afternoon, taking the briefest of breaks from arguing over Palestine, leaders are gathering in the Security Council to talk about preventive diplomacy. Josh Rogin of FP’s Cable blog will be there. He’s excited by the turnout:
The meeting will be chaired by the President of Lebanon Michel Sleiman. Other heads of state in attendance will be Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Colombia, Gabon, Nigeria and South Africa. Portugal will be represented by its prime minister, while the remaining council members will be represented at the level of foreign minister.
Oddly enough, I haven’t been invited. But my colleague Emily O’Brien and I have published a brief preview of the event over at World Politics Review. We’re not convinced it’s going to be a thriller:
The Security Council session is unlikely to generate anything more than well-aged truisms: Prevention is better than reaction; diplomacy is better than force, and so on.
That may sound cynical, but last month I somehow guessed that a similar (if lower-level) Security Council debate on peacekeeping would be stunningly dull, and I was right. But, just like peacekeeping, preventive diplomacy matters:
Officials at the U.N. have been working hard to frame a clearer picture of how and why preventive diplomacy succeeds and fails. The current thinking on the issue is summarized in a report from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with the pithy title, “Preventive Diplomacy: Delivering Results,” which will serve as the backgrounder for Thursday’s debate.
As the report states at the outset, Ban has been interested in boosting the U.N.’s role in preventive diplomacy ever since he took office in 2007 following a long career in South Korea’s foreign service. Ban felt that the U.N. was too heavily invested in large-scale, high-cost military peace operations and had given too little attention to diplomacy.
This was a huge oversimplification, one that failed to capture the stabilizing if imperfect role of hefty U.N. peace operations in places like Haiti and Liberia. But it contained a kernel of truth. So it is welcome that Ban and his undersecretary-general for political affairs, American diplomat B. Lynn Pascoe, set about retooling the U.N. secretariat’s preventive capacities.
Over the past four years, U.N. officials have scored some noteworthy successes, as the new report describes. These include helping resolve the crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008 that forced more than 200,000 civilians into flight; assisting Guinea emerge from a long political crisis in 2009-2010 to hold credible elections; and working with European diplomats to contain the horrific violence in Kyrgyzstan.
These successes have underlined the value of the U.N. Secretariat’s roster of experienced mediators, facilitators and diplomats. Still, Ban’s report emphasizes the need to boost the caliber of U.N. officials further and make their work easier by overcoming the phalanx of budgetary and staffing rules that can delay the U.N.’s efforts interminably.
These budgetary constraints and unwieldy hiring processes might seem irrelevant to anyone not immersed in the minutiae of the U.N.’s bureaucracy. But they matter. The organization’s attempts to engage meaningfully with the Arab Spring were held up by a lack of financial resources and a lack of experts in the region. The new report outlines options for increasing the U.N.’s readiness for future crises, like expanding its small network of regional political offices.
To be honest, I think that the UN report could have been a bit bolder in its proposals for boosting conflict prevention, but at least it will get some high-level attention this afternoon. Hopefully some UN members will be motivated to follow up with related policy initiatives. Nonetheless, Emily and I aren’t convinced that all the big powers on the Security Council are 100% committed to preventive diplomacy…
The actors most likely to stop an escalating crisis in its tracks remain the world’s great powers. But after the crises of the past year, it is hard to argue that these powers have a coherent grasp of this responsibility. Take the example of Syria. China and Russia have opposed even mild condemnations of the Syrian regime, while other emerging powers on the Security Council — notably Brazil, India and South Africa — have only been marginally more flexible. The U.S. and its European partners have also struggled to find a mix of economic, diplomatic and moral pressure to affect decisions in Damascus. The confusion reflects the many political, security and economic interests all the powers have in Syria.
So it’s nice that the Council’s talking about the importance of prevention. But treat its pronouncements on the topic with caution. I look forward to Josh Rogin’s take.
by Alex Evans | Sep 20, 2011 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks
Earlier today, I was reading the transcript of an interview that my brother (GD contributor Jules Evans) conducted earlier this year with Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. En route back from the moon, Mitchell recounted to Jules, he had the following experience:
“Every two minutes, a picture of the Earth, Moon and Sun, and a 360 degree panorama of the heavens, appeared in the spacecraft window as I looked. And from my training in astronomy at Harvard and MIT, I realized that the matter in our universe was created in star systems, and thus the molecules in my body, and in the spacecraft, and in my partners’ bodies were prototyped or manufacted in some ancient generation of stars. And I had the recognition that we’re all part of the same stuff, we’re all one. Now in modern quantum physics you’d call that interconnectedness. It triggered this experience of saying wow, those are my stars, my body is connected to those stars. And it was accompanied by a deep ecstatic experience, which continued every time I looked out of the window, all the way home.”
Nor was he the only astronaut to have an experience of this kind:
Other astronauts have had comparable experiences – a ‘wow’ at seeing Earth in the larger scheme of things. We have talked about it over the years, and there’s even been a book written about it by Frank White, called The Overview Effect, which describes all our experiences. We have all said over the years, if we could get our political leaders to have a summit meeting in space, life on Earth would be markedly different, because you can’t continue living that way once you have seen the bigger picture.
I read this during a break in an all-day meeting of senior policymakers at the United Nations, on the subject of ‘global sustainability’. Know what? The room had no windows.
by Alex Evans | Sep 18, 2011 | Off topic
To: H. R. Haldeman
From: Bill Safire
In the event of moon disaster
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.
Prior to the President’s Statement:
The president should telephone each of the widows-to-be.
After the President’s Statement, at the point when NASA ends communications with the men:
A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to “the deepest of the deep,” concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.
An extract from an actual memo from William Safire, then one of Richard Nixon’s speechwriters, setting out remarks to be read by the President if the Apollo 11 astronauts got stuck on the moon. Via the excellent Lapham’s Quarterly.
