Date published: 2005/08/27
The Financial Times says (subscription service):
Making a deal encompassing the whole world is unlikely to be easy. But next month's special United Nations summit had seemed a propitious moment for a North-South grand bargain on development and security and on how to pursue these priorities through a reformed UN. It would, essentially, involve rich countries doing more to remove the poverty and disease that poor countries see as the main threat to their existence, while the latter would help counter the terrorism and weapons proliferation that most worry the former.
Yet, as of today, there is nothing in the way of an agreed text for the 170 world leaders gathering in New York in three weeks' time to sign.
The chief, although not the only, culprit is the US in the person of John Bolton, its UN ambassador. Blocked by Democrats in the Senate from being confirmed in the usual way, Mr Bolton only got his job this month on a special appointment after Congress went into summer recess. But no sooner had he arrived in New York than he threw a fit about the preliminary 39-page summit text that had been drafted, with US officials involved, over several months. Mr Bolton railed that he had to have something far shorter. Eventually, warned that this would let other states off the hook of the many US-inspired commitments that they dislike, Mr Bolton sat down yesterday with his UN colleagues to haggle over hundreds of US amendments.
They mostly focus on measures and institutions the US has consistently opposed elsewhere, such as the International Criminal Court and the nuclear test ban treaty which the US has either refused or failed to ratify. The US is also opposed to the pledge for rich countries to spend 0.7 per cent of their national wealth on aid; most Americans believe US aid is far higher than this, and the Bush administration does not want to remind them it is actually far lower.
In the same vein the US apparently wants to delete reference to the UN's Millennium Development Goals set in 2000, when the original aim of next month's summit was to review progress towards them. Astonishingly, given the loud US allegations of recent genocide in Darfur, Washington is fretting at language that would urge permanent Security Council members not to use their vetoes to block action to halt genocide and other war crimes.
On this, however, China is as opposed as the US. Earlier this summer, Beijing joined Washington to thwart more states joining them permanently on the Security Council. Other recent developments also augur ill. The failure of last May's Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference has cast gloom on any further initiatives next month to check the spread of nuclear weapons. By contrast, the Group of Eight summit's relative success at Gleneagles on debt forgiveness has created the equally erroneous opposite impression on aid: that little more needs to be done.
Still on the agenda for the UN summit are many US priorities that deserve support and success. They include reforms to give Kofi Annan's UN secretariat more management responsibility but also to make it more accountable, the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission, reform of the UN's human rights machinery and an international convention to define and outlaw terrorism. But to have a chance of securing these goals, the US and Mr Bolton need to take account of others' concerns. In all negotiations, taking requires some give.
All very fine words from the Financial Times, but they, like most of the European ruling elite, make a fundamental mistake. Bush and his band of thugs such as Bolton have no interest in being reasonable and will never be reasonable. They are the football hooligans of the international community. The rest of the world should therefore not try to reason with them but instead just treat the US as a rogue state (unfortunately a rogue state with far too many bombs for comfort).
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