Transcript: Why we need the UN

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Why we need the UN’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about the future of the United Nations. As conflicts rage in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and other global trouble spots, the UN often seems helpless. My guest is Mark Malloch-Brown, a former deputy secretary-general of the UN. So is the United Nations in terminal decline?

António Guterres in audio clip
Ladies and gentlemen of the press, Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.

Gideon Rachman
That was António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, speaking two months ago about the situation in Gaza.

António Guterres in audio clip
I salute all those who continue their life-saving work despite the overwhelming challenges and risks. And the unfolding catastrophe makes the need for a humanitarian ceasefire more urgent with every passing hour.

Gideon Rachman
The secretary-general’s pleas have had little effect on the ground. However, it was the International Court of Justice, which is part of the UN, which recently heard the case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The ICJ ordered Israel to increase the flow of aid into the territory.

But a couple of days later, several western countries suspended funding for UNWRA, the UN organisation that provides aid and services for Palestinians in Gaza, following accusations that some of its employees were members of Hamas who participated in the October the 7th attack on Israel.

And Gaza is just the most high-profile crisis facing the UN. Peacekeeping operations, perhaps the UN’s most high-profile activity, are on the decline, and the UN Security Council is deadlocked over Ukraine. But the variety of problems facing the UN also points to the huge variety of its activities, from health to economics to peacekeeping, climate, diplomacy and many other crucial parts of the global system. So I began my conversation with Mark Malloch-Brown by asking him how deep is the crisis facing the UN.

Mark Malloch-Brown
Well, yeah, it is the case that actually the UN has spent many more years battling geopolitical divisions than it has in any kind of bright, sunlit highlands enjoying global co-operation. And in many ways, there’s quite a lot of cold war aspects to the world the UN operates in today because ultimately, the UN struggles to be better than its collective member states. And, you know, at the moment, those member states are tussling with each other.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And Israel has always been a very difficult issue for the UN. Of course, it was a UN resolution that set up the state of Israel. But it’s always excited controversy in the United States. And now you have this very acute situation with UNWRA accused of having had members of Hamas. Indeed, people even took part in the October the 7th attacks on its payroll, the US and others suspending payments to UNWRA. Before we get to the UN aspects of this, I mean, it’s an extraordinary decision, isn’t it, because the humanitarian situation in Gaza is bad enough already. What do you think the implications are?

Mark Malloch-Brown
They’re huge. And, you know, it was very interesting reporting in the New York Times about how actually, there were divisions within the Israeli security and military establishment about the wisdom of leaking these allegations, because there was a recognition that if you sideline UNWRA, there’s not really an alternative in terms of delivering assistance. And, you know, I suspect some slightly too fast-moving political types in the foreign ministry keen to counter the ICJ ruling — the International Court of Justice ruling calling for more humanitarian assistance to Gaza — quickly leaked this as a way of turning the story in a negative direction and blocking that demand.

But actually, it’s not an easy win-win even for Israel because really, and this, I think, will surprise your listeners, the only other organisation with the field capability in Gaza to deliver assistance other than Hamas, which I don’t think is gonna be selected, is the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces. So we may get to a completely perverse position where Israel is forced to directly try and keep the same population alive that it has been busy squeezing and bombarding, because, you know, there is under international law a clear obligation on an occupying power to tend to the basic humanitarian needs of the civilians in that area. So, you know, this is a very difficult situation — desperate for the people of Gaza, but politically fraught for Israel as well.

Gideon Rachman
Were you surprised by the speed with which the US, Germany and others reacted? Because obviously, they completely understand how serious the situation inside Gaza is. Did they have any option other than to do what they’ve done?

Mark Malloch-Brown
Well, I think a lot of people will point to the extraordinary, in a way, double standard of it, because more than 100 UNWRA workers have been killed during the Israeli attacks on Gaza. And these were not combatants. These were people either in their homes with their families or people going about the business of humanitarian delivery, provision of services like health and education. We didn’t see the sort of same protests about protecting these UNWRA workers despite the fact that, you know, it’s a basic rule of humanitarian law that you should try to protect humanitarian workers.

But you saw this instant reaching for a suspension of aid when these allegations have been made against these 12. And, you know, it is extraordinarily high-cost. And from my conversations with diplomats in New York over the last few days, you know, it’s pretty clear that people are trying to look for a way out of this because they recognise the impending humanitarian catastrophe.

Now, not everybody agrees with that picture. Privately, some Israeli officials are saying, no, no, no, we are showing you pictures of busy markets in Gaza. The Gaza economy and food security system can take care of itself. But I think the humanitarian community is quite clear. This is a disaster. We’re about to go off the cliff. Something needs to be done.

Gideon Rachman
How quickly do you think things need to be done? Or how long can this situation drag on?

Mark Malloch-Brown
Well, I think it’s got to be days, maybe short weeks, but not longer. And there’s all sorts of suggestions of NGOs or other UN agencies who could step in. It’s just not realistic. I mean, it’s a brutal choice. It’s UNWRA, IDF or really massive potential loss of life.

Gideon Rachman
Does the UNWRA case illustrate a broader point, though, that UN institutions are often flawed, but they’re also very, very hard to replace? They often do work that is indispensable. I mean, it’s not just UNWRA, but on a different scale the World Health Organization, the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, etc, etc. The UN is perhaps much more deeply embedded in running the world than people realise.

Mark Malloch-Brown
I think that’s right. I mean, UNWRA is a very exceptional institution. It’s 13,000 people in Gaza, 30,000-plus across the region as a whole. It’s kind of like a welfare agency in these areas, tasked with delivery of basic services at a scale relative to the area it’s operating in which the UN doesn’t replicate anywhere else in the world. And it’s grown up in the particular circumstances of indigenous national institutions not being possible, given the lack of statehood for these areas and the lack of full self-government even. And so it’s filled that gap, and it reflects its region. An awful lot of its staff are Gazans first, UNers second, if you like. They’re national staff. There’s only a very small number of international staff at the head of it. So I think we do have to understand the idiosyncratic but relevant nature for the situation of UNWRA.

But if you look more globally, you’re right. Whether it is the critical early warnings about health pandemics and the collection of data in response to health outbreaks and trends that WHO does, extraordinary standard-setting around everything from labour standards at its neighbour, the ILO in Geneva, to a ton of work on issues like climate or attempts to find collective solutions to illegal migration, etc. You know, a lot of the UN work is unsung or often unnoticed, and often its authorship or ownership is not really reflected because at the final stages, what will turn a UN proposal into policy in law is its adoption by states who then quickly put their own name and brand on it. So there is a sort of public utility infrastructure dimension to the UN, which deserves more notice.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And I mean, another thing obviously that the UN does is refugees. Refugee camps all over the world and numbers of refugees seem to be increasing; overwhelmingly end up sort of with the UN, yeah?

Mark Malloch-Brown
You know, that’s right. Both refugees and illegal migrants are increasing. And there is both the UNHCR refugee agency, which I worked for for many years very proudly as a young man in the camps of south-east Asia and south Asia and Central America and the Horn of Africa as during that cold war period we cleaned up or sought to clean up the humanitarian chaos that followed the sort of proxy wars of those days, the 1970s and ’80s.

And today, UNHCR and its sister in Geneva, the IOM, which deals with migration, are critical because you have migration emerging as a massive political problem, both for President Biden across his southern border, but also for Prime Minister Sunak in the UK, with Channel crossings for many other European leaders with Mediterranean crossings of illegal migrants.

And yet the momentum to break these trends can’t be dealt with at a single country level. They need to be dealt with countries at source and they need to respond to both the breakdown of conditions in those countries, but also begin to understand that there are massive demographic demands in many northern countries for younger extra labour, which these flows are responding to.

So putting together global solutions to this, legal pathways to entry at the same time that the illegal ones are contained and stopped, is not something countries can do alone. And, you know, I think we will see a lot of multilateral leadership on this as we struggle to find fair solutions.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I mean, you described your work in the refugee camps early in your career when in the immediate aftermath of the cold war, people did turn to the UN and its competence has expanded. Since then, has the UN continued to basically expand because people keep turning to it and adding new competencies such as climate? Or actually, do you feel that in this period where the UN is under attack and there’s cold war two-style deadlock, that actually, the UN’s competencies are being eroded and falling away?

Mark Malloch-Brown
I think it’s not a good period for the UN. And you know what you’re seeing is in some issues non-UN bodies emerging. So if you look at global economics, for example, the G20, which represents the biggest 20 now-plus economies in the world and, you know, an overwhelming majority of global GDP. The UN General Assembly rather resents the G20 and grumbles that it’s not a treaty-based body; it’s an ad hoc grouping. Yet it has become, you know, a much more important centre of setting economic global policy goals like minimum corporate taxation rates and other things than the UN General Assembly. And it’s a reflection of the fact that you’ve got a period where you’re more likely to get a group of countries with shared interests to be first movers on something and then let the rest of the UN membership catch up if they want to, rather than taking everything to the consensus-based, potentially lowest common denominator environment of a universal body like the General Assembly.

That said, the UN General Assembly often the most ridiculed of UN institutions, 193 members. What are they gonna agree about? There’s always a risk of a Tower of Babel dimension. You know, for UN watchers, it’s having a little bit of a renaissance at the expense of the Security Council, which is this much smaller body tasked with political and security issues, which is completely gridlocked because of primarily the Ukraine war, but now the Middle East as well. And so there’s a strange forum shopping where people look for fora which will work for the particular issues of the day.

And I would say at the moment there’s a potential for progress on some economic issues because every country, whatever the nature of their rulership and whatever their disputes with each other, all want to see economic growth. That’s how they satisfy their citizens. And climate, where there’s similarly a recognised global dimension necessary to the solution, so I see some sort of energy and evolution of institutions in those spaces, and potentially also migration, but a kind of graveyard atmosphere in the Security Council.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, we’ll come to the Security Council in a minute, but it strikes me that for all the abuse that’s often thrown at the UN, people do still seem to somehow recognise it has a certain moral authority. I was very struck by the way in which the votes on Ukraine and how those votes went in the General Assembly were watched very closely as a barometer of where the world was on that issue.

Mark Malloch-Brown
Yes, that’s right and, you know, there was a very clever resolution put out by a very small country, Liechtenstein, whose permanent representative is a very astute, long-serving UN ambassador, which passed which said that every time a permanent member uses its veto in the Security Council, there will be a vote that follows in the General Assembly. It cannot overturn the Security Council veto but it offers a sort of test of where the wider membership opinion is. So Russia has been steadily embarrassed by such follow-up votes in the GA after it’s used its veto on Ukraine resolutions in the council.

Now the United States is getting a similar sort of cold water dousing for using its veto on Gaza and Israel resolutions, and the General Assembly is, in a sense, it’s flexing its muscles to try and demonstrate that the rule of law should not be interpreted through a subjective political lens. It needs the sort of objectivity that they feel they’ve been able to deliver in the GA, and which was reflected in another UN institution, the International Court of Justice’s ruling on what’s going on in Gaza, or at least initial ruling. And so you do see an attempt to stick by shared standards and values, which is not itself able to stop conflicts, but which is a very important expression of moral solidarity around some of these cases.

Gideon Rachman
And yet, do you think it’s inevitable that despite the energy of the General Assembly and all the other issues that the UN does important work on, such as climate and the others we’ve spoken about, that it will be judged really on issues of war and peace and security issues? And it’s there that the deadlock with the Security Council really sidelines the UN.

Mark Malloch-Brown
Well, during those long cold war years, it was kept from the top table in terms of these kinds of frontline peace and security issues. And, you know, the same is happening now. You know, it’s allowed to sort of nibble around the margins — a grain deal to allow Ukraine and Russia to export its grain to allow a stabilisation of world food prices; observation of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which was damaged earlier in the conflict and occupied by the Russians. So it’s playing useful roles at the margin but is kept away from the main table, if you like.

And I remember even during the heyday of Kofi Annan’s secretary-generalship when I was his deputy, you know, we would occasionally be warned off putting our noses too deeply into the Iran-US issue, for example. I remember an ambassador wagging his finger at me and telling me it was above our paygrade. So, you know, the UN has often been kept in the anteroom of the big conflicts, but at the time that Kofi was secretary-general and I was his deputy, we were privileged to be able to run massive peacekeeping operations across Africa, in the Middle East, in south Asia, elsewhere, which were an integral part of how peace was kept in the world.

Now, those peacekeeping operations have been reduced to a much smaller rump and one by one in Africa, particularly, getting chucked out on their ear, in several cases being replaced by first, Wagner mercenaries and now, potentially regular Russian troops. And it’s a measure of the fact that while I can try and explain away the UN situation, as you know, this happens, it’s cyclical. To be honest, this is a very low point, a very big trough in any cycle. The UN does look in pretty serious trouble at the moment.

Gideon Rachman
And so how much of that do you think can be laid at the door of the secretary-general? I mean, you worked for one of the most charismatic of recent times, Kofi Annan, but Guterres doesn’t seem to have many fans. Do you think he could have been doing better?

Mark Malloch-Brown
Well, I do think any secretary-general needs luck and needs one of these windows when global geopolitics has opened up some space for a secretary-general to lead and convene and find consensus amongst people who want to be led and want to find consensus around global issues. And Kofi was lucky enough to have the job during one of those rare moments, and he shone because he took advantage of it. He, you know, was a figure who encapsulated a lot of the world’s hopes for a better, more peaceful, more racially integrated and just future for all of us.

This secretary-general hasn’t been blessed by that luck but also doesn’t, frankly, have the same charisma. And so he does seem a slightly shrill observer and a person who’s always complaining that things are on the edge and it’s a disaster about to happen and the world’s getting worse, but he seems to be yelling it from outside. There’s a sense that he’s an observer of these events, not a participant, let alone a decisive participant in how they play out. So I think he does have a real stature and authority problem and legitimacy problem.

Gideon Rachman
Yes. I mean, the adjective shrill is an interesting word, isn’t it? Because if you contrast him with Annan, who however much the pressure was on him, he was always very measured and never rose to the bait and never sounded despairing. Guterres sometimes just, as you say, sounds like a despairing observer.

Mark Malloch-Brown
It’s very strange because I’ve known him for many years. Kofi appointed him high commissioner for refugees during his term, and he did 10 years there. He’d been prime minister of his country before. I think we all felt he was the most qualified individual ever to come to the job of secretary-general with this combination of national political experience, UN experience and a very big brain on his shoulders.

He’s a very clever man and a very kind and lovely man. But perhaps because his first years were spent with Trump in the White House and he had to act like an almost a desk officer for the American relationship to make sure nothing was done that sort of sent Trump off the edge and had him chucking the UN out of New York or something. You know, those crisis management years seem, I think, at the eyes of many who watch him, to perhaps knock the stuffing out of him.

And he just has had difficulty since framing a vision which people will come to. I mean, he says a lot about climate. He’s got a summit for the future later this year at the UN, which he’s vested huge hopes in. But he’s just not, it seems, because of the times, able to carry people with him on these agendas.

Gideon Rachman
To finish, I mean, you mentioned the strain of a Trump presidency and the kind of extreme threats that Trump will brandish, like kicking the UN out of New York. Do you think that even a Trump, though, would ever do that? Because coming back to what we were discussing earlier, the UN, though it’s not the most popular of organisations in the US or maybe anywhere, it’s very hard to imagine what would replace so many of its key functions.

Mark Malloch-Brown
Yeah, and it’s the last defence UN supporters tend to make. If we didn’t have it, we’d have to invent it. But the fact is we couldn’t invent it. We don’t have a 1945 moment when the world would come together to allow the soaring ambition of the UN charter.

So, you know, I think many of us feel that if there is a second Trump term, one way or another, even if the UN has to be sort of buttoned down and put in the attic for a while, it will come back. But there’s no doubt that the UN, like so many international institutions, could suffer extraordinary damage during a second Trump presidency. The Americans and American public opinion as well as its politicians often rail against the UN and seem to view it as a sort of foreign body on their shores.

The rest of the world looks at it rightly, I think, as an institution which many ways reflects in its charter the values of the American founding fathers, which is being the instrument of a very American vision of global liberal democracy and latterly, free markets. And, you know, this strange sort of rupture between America and the UN says more about the sort of state of political culture in the US rather than the UN’s shortcomings themselves, plenty though they are.

Gideon Rachman
Last thing then, I mean, a lot of this conversation has been necessarily fairly gloomy. What could go right?

Mark Malloch-Brown
Well, I think the climate story, which often gets told around these vast, unwieldy COP summits — most recently in Dubai, before that in Sharm el-Sheikh and before that in Glasgow — what we’re missing is actually, we are bringing down the rate of global warming. The temperature increases are slowing. They’re not yet where they need to be but huge technology leaps are being made in terms of emissions control and management.

And so climate is an area where through a combination of business as much as governments rallying to this issue and applying its technology and its capital to lower emissions, economic steps and many governments doing the same, and a government like China really trying to make itself a market leader in renewable energies.

You know, it’s around those places where there are opportunities, where there is a convergence of interest where I think we’ll see progress. So climate, global economic management, migration — these are issues which actually I can see some real multilateral blue sky if handled correctly.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Gideon Rachman
That was Lord Malloch-Brown, former deputy secretary-general of the UN and current president of the Open Society Foundations, ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.

[MUSIC PLAYING]