UNreformed

IN his 16th month as Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan has emerged as a serious challenge to the perquisites—and scope—of America’s superpower status. Unlike his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an imperious exponent of Third World aspirations, Mr. Annan has spent his 32 years in the UN bureaucracy engaged in quiet diplomacy and artful coalition-building of the kind former Secretary of State George Shultz was thinking when he likened diplomacy to keeping a garden. The Financial Times describes Annan as “a man with few enemies . . . with the soft answer that turneth away wrath.” The latest imbroglio with Saddam Hussein illustrates how these qualities, matched with a subtle instinct for power, are helping him challenge Washington’s primacy on the world stage.

Much of this goes back to 1992, when Madeleine Albright and her team arrived at the United Nations spouting the virtues of “multilateralism,” an intellectual contraption designed to mask their confusion about how and when military power should be used. It fit nicely with Boutros-Ghali’s kaleidoscopic ambition, but its limits soon became clear. The UN lacks its own general staff, and so has proved unable to integrate command, control, communications, and intelligence—a precondition to coherent military action. The resulting mismanagement of crises in Somalia, Bosnia, and Cambodia heaped disaster upon disaster. Fortunately Boutros-Ghali’s dyspeptic flamboyance alerted the U.S. and others to his expansive agenda in the peace-making arena and, more fundamentally, to his determination to transfer wealth and resources from the developed to the developing world, causing even the Clinton Administration to resist his election to a second term. When Annan, a U.S.-educated Ghanian whose rough edges were knocked off decades ago, emerged as a compromise candidate acceptable to both First and Third World members, many thought there would be peace in the valley.

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Stefan Halper

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IN his 16th month as Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan has emerged as a serious challenge to the perquisites—and scope—of America’s superpower status. Unlike his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an imperious exponent of Third World aspirations, Mr. Annan has spent his 32 years in the UN bureaucracy engaged in quiet diplomacy and artful coalition-building of the kind former Secretary of State George Shultz was thinking when he likened diplomacy to keeping a garden. The Financial Times describes Annan as “a man with few enemies . . . with the soft answer that turneth away wrath.” The latest imbroglio with Saddam Hussein illustrates how these qualities, matched with a subtle instinct for power, are helping him challenge Washington’s primacy on the world stage.

Much of this goes back to 1992, when Madeleine Albright and her team arrived at the United Nations spouting the virtues of “multilateralism,” an intellectual contraption designed to mask their confusion about how and when military power should be used. It fit nicely with Boutros-Ghali’s kaleidoscopic ambition, but its limits soon became clear. The UN lacks its own general staff, and so has proved unable to integrate command, control, communications, and intelligence—a precondition to coherent military action. The resulting mismanagement of crises in Somalia, Bosnia, and Cambodia heaped disaster upon disaster. Fortunately Boutros-Ghali’s dyspeptic flamboyance alerted the U.S. and others to his expansive agenda in the peace-making arena and, more fundamentally, to his determination to transfer wealth and resources from the developed to the developing world, causing even the Clinton Administration to resist his election to a second term. When Annan, a U.S.-educated Ghanian whose rough edges were knocked off decades ago, emerged as a compromise candidate acceptable to both First and Third World members, many thought there would be peace in the valley.