Lawmakers should ask U.N. ambassador-designate Linda Thomas-Greenfield about the Biden administration’s strategy to counter Chinese influence at the U.N.
Tomorrow is the Senate confirmation hearing for Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Joe Biden’s U.N. ambassador-designate. Lawmakers should take the opportunity to ask about the Biden administration’s strategy to counter Chinese influence at the U.N.
The reckoning with Beijing’s influence at the U.N. preceded the outset of COVID and the revelations about Chinese sway at the World Health Organization (WHO). When China’s candidate to lead the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization in 2019, the Trump administration realized that it had a true problem on its hands, according a September Wall Street Journal report. But China’s growing influence at the U.N. can be traced back years to its growing push to shield and even endorse its domestic conduct at the U.N. Human Rights Council and in its broader bid to install Chinese nationals at the top of U.N. agencies, such as Interpol.
Toward the end of the Trump administration, a strategy to push back against Chinese cooptation of U.N. committees, agencies, and other bodies had started to take shape. U.S. diplomats fought to install more Americans in jobs within the U.N. system, and a wide-ranging effort to push back against Chinese-backed candidates during U.N. elections took shape, culminating in the March 2020 triumph of Singapore’s candidate to lead the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), over China’s favored pick for the job. This was the result of vigorous lobbying by American diplomats, who engaged Britain, Australia, and a number of other countries.
In July, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, testifying about the WIPO effort before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that his department’s budget requested $20 million to make the team that worked on that election permanent and a second one to focus on staff-level roles within U.N. bureaucracies.
This is a growing topic of focus, and the new administration inherits a growing effort, but one that is still in its infancy.
Biden campaigned on a gauzy rhetoric of engaging with the world and multilateral organizations. There’s not necessarily a problem with taking an active role at such global bodies — and in fact this often comes to America’s benefit. But engagement should not come for its own sake, as a signal to the rest of the world. There are hard choices implicated in deciding to engage with certain U.N. bodies, such as the Human Rights Council, and merely pledging to return to the institutions from which the Trump administration won’t magically fix their problems.
It’s troubling that the Biden administration has yet to offer any indication that it will tackle China’s malign influence at the WHO, and thus far, officials haven’t demonstrated a belief that the deeply flawed U.N. Human Rights Council is to become a battleground between U.S.-led democracies and authoritarian regimes when the U.S. inevitably rejoins (as Biden promised during the campaign).
These are difficult questions that Biden’s triumphalist rhetoric about multilateralism and international organizations has generally avoided, but the choice is not just that between whether to stay in or leave these bodies. It’s about how Washington should engage and what’s to be done when it can’t engage in a way that advances the national interest.
How will Ambassador-designate Thomas-Greenfield rally U.S. allies to prevent Beijing from passing laudatory resolutions about its human-rights record? Is she willing to criticize the WHO leadership for obsequiously backing the Chinese Communist Party’s early, flawed assessments of COVID, and its persistent obstruction of a thorough investigation? What will she do about the targeting of U.N. bureaucrats that have blown the whistle about their superiors’ collusion with the Chinese government in a way that endangered human-rights activists? And how will she build on the previous administration’s strategy?
Thomas-Greenfield, a highly respected career Foreign Service Officer, is a bipartisan favorite on the hill, and her nomination is expected to sail through. But it’s crucial that the senators tomorrow get assurances about how she’ll counteract authoritarian attempts to use international organizations to their own dangerous ends.