A year ago, I was worrying about the implications of the Euro crisis for UN operations:
Despite the financial crisis, the UN’s peacekeeping budget — running at between $7 billion and $8 billion a year — has not yet faced drastic cuts. The Obama Administration has made a point of paying its dues (now 27% of the total) on time, compensating for Bush-era arrears.
However, other big financial contributors — especially members of the European Union, who cover 40% of the costs combined — are looking for cuts as part of broader spending reductions.
In June [2010], Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador to the UN, told the Security Council that “in the context of budgetary austerity, the cost of peacekeeping was increasingly difficult to manage.”
You can find a longer version of this argument in a paper I wrote for ZIF, the German peacekeeping center, in August 2010. Fourteen months later, my gloomy predictions are being vindicated. Colum Lynch published a lengthy piece yesterday on the FP website headlined “U.S. and Europe fight over cuts in peacekeeping”:
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, fended off a push last month by European governments to press to consider cuts next year in U.N.-backed peacekeeping mission in Liberia, which costs upwards of $525 million a year, more than Liberia’s $459 million annual national budget. Rice has also resisted calls from other European governments, like Britain and France, to consider deeper cuts in U.N. peacekeeping missions in Haiti and in Sudan.
France and Britain are required to pay, respectively, 7.5 percent and 8.16 percent of all U.N. peacekeeping costs.
U.S. officials say that peacekeeping missions must be adequately funded to ensure their success, and that European governments, who each pay a far smaller share of the U.N. peacekeeping budget, are in some instances motivated by a desire to shift funding to their own “pet” missions, not the commitment to fiscal discipline that they claim.
“There is no country that has a greater interest in the economies, effectiveness, and efficiencies of U.N. peacekeeping missions [than the United States]. We pay 27 percent of the bill while the Europeans pay a smaller percentage,” Rice said in an interview with Turtle Bay. “For them to be holier than thou is a bit rich, to say the least.”
I’d like to say “I told you so”, though that’s not super-helpful…
