DONALD Trump is right to criticize the United Nations’ red tape and bureaucratic ways. At a New York meeting Monday on reforms to the international organization he made the compelling point that the UN should be concentrating more on people and less on bureaucracy. That the UN is even thinking of reform is due to its new Secretary General Antonio Guterres whose bid for the job included a promise to change the way the organization does business.
Two years ago, when the UN turned 70, the calculation was made that with its peacekeeping forces and its raft of different organizations covering everything from health, food, education and human rights, it cost every person on the planet just $6 a year. The proposal was that this figure should be increased to $40. In the euphoria of its significant birthday, no one was of a mind to ask if the $6 per head, equivalent to more than $42 billion, was actually being well spent.
As those working at the sharp-end on UN programs in conflict areas have repeatedly attested, there is a vast and sluggish bureaucratic machine behind them which is generally incapable of rapid action, even when the safety of their own people is involved. Endless form-filling, almost constant committee meetings at which decisions are all too often avoided and the sheer incompetence of individual managers cause despair in the front line of UN initiatives.
Part of the problem is that key jobs are not allocated on the basis of ability and qualification but rather political influence. This vitiates against good management. UN workers who are focused enthusiastically on their roles have, if they can, to negotiate their way around the dead lumber with the organization.
Trump also complained about what he said was the disproportionate financial contribution to the UN made by the United States treasury. Here, he was on different and shaky ground. Washington once funded the UN on the basis that he who paid the piper called the tune. But the world has moved on. One of the glaring problems facing the UN is the imbalance in its governance. The UN Security Council sits at the peak of this disequilibrium. America, France and the UK hold three of the five permanent seats, Russia and China the others. Even allowing for the ten rotating national seats on the Council, Asia is still seriously unrepresented. There is a very strong case for India to have a permanent seat and a somewhat less compelling argument for Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, to be a Security Council fixture.
The 1945 UN charter focused on global peace and development. In the last 72 years there have been wars aplenty but nothing on the scale of the World War II which inspired the creation of the UN as an organization that would do markedly better than its post World War I lackluster predecessor the League of Nations. There has also been considerable development, thanks in part to far-sighted UN programs. It might be argued that this development, particularly in Asia and Africa, would have happened anyway even without the UN’s participation. But the overarching ambition of the organization continues to be that the nations need a forum in which to resolve their differences and build prosperity. The reforms that are needed are not simply bureaucratic but also representational. Has Trump appreciated this?
