It should be beyond dispute that the United Nations and its specialized agencies are organizations of member governments. Member governments create the organizations, pay for them, and direct them. Accordingly, employees of these organizations (the “secretariats”) work at the collective behest of the member governments, as their subordinate staff.

The operative word should be “subordinate,” but high-ranking U.N. officials too often seem to have trouble finding dictionaries that define that word for them. Mohammed el-Baradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example, could never quite seem to understand that he worked for the IAEA’s member governments, not the other way around.