UN Reform?

There's an interesting discussion project that Patrick Belton and others have started up under the rubric "UN Modernization Project."

Under its current charter, the United Nations has proven itself unable to prevent or stop ethnic cleansing and genocide. This panel of contributors has been assembled with the hope that an intelligent, spirited discussion will produce concrete ideas to update the U.N. Charter and correct this systemic and moral failure.

I'm all for improving the UN, but I think this may be barking up the wrong tree. The UN, it seems to me, is primarily valuable for its more charity-oriented institutions than for its security-related ones. In addition, it serves a valuable quasi-asperational purpose of asserting that all mankind is a member, in a sense at least, of some sort of global community that would ideally be regulated by a common norm of justice. That's important, but in terms of getting concrete things done, it's counterproductive. Any organization in which the governments of Burma and Sudan are members in good standing is bound to be ineffectual when it comes to confronting humanitarian problems. At the same time, it's a very good thing that we have an organization in which the governments of Burma and Sudan count as members in good standing.

I think the right way to cope the UN's limits is exactly the way the Truman and Eisenhower administrations did -- by create other, more limited international organizations that are better equipped to other tasks. But we can't just rely on the old regional organizations -- NATO and so forth -- we need new regional security organizations (where appropriate, underwritten by the US) that can act more nimbly than the UN. The oft-mooted proposal for some kind of global alliance of democracies is in the right spirit, though I think it would be bound to founder on the vagueness of what counts as a democracy. The general idea, though, is that you would think of a purpose for a given organization and then come up with a list of member states that would be well-suited to accomplishing that goal. The US needs to start moving away from the model that's prevailed since 1991 where we are essentially the sole provider of global public goods. We're not especially good at many aspects of this, it's not especially in our interests to be bearing such a high proportion of the burden, and the rest of the world has come to resent rather than appreciate it. A simple American retreat isn't the best solution, but we should be looking to put institutions and systems in place that don't require constant US-presence on the front lines of everything.