{"id":116426,"date":"2018-08-13T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2018-08-13T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=116426"},"modified":"2018-08-10T14:29:44","modified_gmt":"2018-08-10T13:29:44","slug":"present-perverse-priorities-will-undermine-the-un-even-further","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/08\/present-perverse-priorities-will-undermine-the-un-even-further\/","title":{"rendered":"Present Perverse Priorities Will Undermine the UN Even Further!"},"content":{"rendered":"

6 Aug 2018 – <\/em>The news came a few days ago: \u201cUN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned member states that the organization is facing \u201ctroubling funding issues as a result of delayed dues payments that will force reductions in non-staff costs.\u201d <\/em>But who really cares? Any Trump tweet or football result is more important to our media and politicians. The members of the UN still give the world\u2019s military about 340 times more than the UN for its core budget.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Ant\u00f3nio Guterres, seen here on a visit to the UN school in San Jose, Costa Rica, says the UN has \u2018never faced such a difficult cash flow situation this early in the calendar year\u2019. Photograph: Juan Carlos Ulate\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

You often hear people raising doubts about the\u00a0 \u201cthe United Nations\u201d and most people then think of the skyscraper in New York as \u201cthe UN\u201d.<\/p>\n

But there is no \u201cUN\u201d independent of what the 193 member states decide to make of it. That was already pointed out by its first Secretary-General, Norwegian Trygve Lie<\/em>, in the late 1940s: The UN will never be stronger or better than the member states want it to be.<\/p>\n

That is the essential \u2013 and in some sense also existential \u2013 truth about the world\u2019s potentially most important and visionary organisation.<\/p>\n

A second truth is that the UN is not, at least not predominantly, the power house in New York (which, in passing, ought to be moved out of the US given the decade-long contempt for the UN Charter shown by that member). The real UN is the family of UN agencies that do good around the world every day and without which the world would be a much worse place.<\/p>\n

A third truth is that a few predominantly Western states \u2013 the U.S. in particular \u2013 have done their utmost at least since the 1990 wars in Yugoslavia (and some would say since Korea and Vietnam) to undermine and marginalise the world organisation.<\/p>\n

Those and many other member states violate the UN Charter\u2019s Article 1 which states that peace shall be established by peaceful means<\/em> on a daily basis, misuse the organisation \u2013 the Five Permanent Members in particular with their nuclear weapons and repeated violations of international law. Think of all the wars fought since Yugoslavia without a UN Security Council mandate but have destroyed countries, peoples, economies and cultures.<\/p>\n

And the UN too.<\/p>\n

If they could, they would love to get rid of the UN once and for all. Because it is based on a Charter that is the most Gandhian governments have ever signed. Back in time, that is, when governments and peoples knew what war was and therefore stated in the Charter\u2019s Preamble that war shall be abolished as a socially acceptable institution \u2013 to boil it down to essentials.<\/p>\n

And where are we then today?<\/p>\n

Well, did you hear any of these states \u2013 the UN Security Council members in particular \u2013 insist on the point that large, robust UN peacekeeping missions should be established in, say, Libya, Syria or Ukraine? No, it is Russia and the US that keep the \u201cpeace\u201d in Syria, right? The truth is that the US has done nothing there but to support various other militant countries and terrorist organisations and to build some 15-20 bases there. The UN wouldn\u2019t have done any of that!<\/p>\n

And while Russia (and Iran) have certainly had a relatively positive influence on the Syrian battlefields fighting terrorism, it is still warfare and not peacemaking. And peace \u2013 mind you \u2013 is not the same as a war dying down.<\/p>\n

Self-appointed peacekeeping countries that are happy to have demolished the finest global organisation on earth are now doing \u2013 with nothing but tragic results \u2013 what the UN could<\/em> have done much better had the world\u2019s governments wanted it to and had they built on the accumulated UN experience since 1945.<\/p>\n

Rampant militarism, nationalism, interventionism and anti-intellectualism among national \u201csecurity\u201d elites and political decision-makers \u2013 even in historically peaceful and humane countries such as my native Denmark \u2013 for decades have fought a war on peace<\/em> and thus \u2013 perfectly logically \u2013 on the UN.<\/p>\n