On the menu today: The International Olympics Committee, the United Nations, the World Health Organization — they’re all big global institutions that are supposed to uphold the “rules-based international order” that the Biden administration keeps emphasizing. But they’re all belly-flopping when the world needs them most.
Great Call, International Olympic Committee — Was Pyongyang Booked This Week?
Tonight, the 2022 Winter Olympics — a.k.a., “The Genocide Games” — begin in Beijing. Our Wesley Smith urges Americans not to watch. Last month, I suggested we should minimize our viewing, sending “just enough of a signal to NBC and the advertisers that we’re just not as interested in the Olympics when they’re hosted by nightmare regimes — and that if the IOC wants the big audiences to return, then in the future, it must select noncontroversial host cities in free nations.”
President Joe Biden will be watching, according to Jen Psaki, in news that sent Chinese state-run media into a burst of glee. (The decision is a no-win situation for Biden, but in the end, do any Olympic athletes really care if the president is watching any of the coverage or not?)
This isn’t the first time the International Olympic Committee has selected a host city in an autocratic nation, but it’s starting to feel like a more frequent habit. Remember Sochi, Russia, hosting the Winter Olympics in 2014 and Beijing hosting the Summer Olympics back in 2008?
No one ever thought that the International Olympic Committee was a bunch of saints. (The current membership does have a lot of royalty, however: a couple of princes and princesses, a grand duke, a baron, and a lord; and the honorary members include two kings, three princes, and a raja. You’ll be lucky to ever get a poker hand with as much royalty as one table of an IOC meeting. Maybe we shouldn’t expect much defense for the principles of democracy from monarchs.) And there have always been allegations of bribery and corruption surrounding the Olympics, as well as the World Cup and other international sports competitions. But you would have thought that after 1936, ongoing genocide would have been sufficient factor to change a venue.
Our Jay Nordlinger closes a terrific piece with this revealing anecdote:
In 2003, I moderated a session on sports at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This was a dinner, with remarks and discussion. Many prominent figures from the sports world were in attendance. In the course of the evening, I asked, “Does anyone think the Olympic Games should not be held in police states?” Probably a fair number did, but only one person raised her hand — the wife of one of the main participants. If I remember correctly, and I believe I do, she was the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
The United Nations secretary general, Antonio Guterres, will be attending the games in Beijing, and defended the decision after our Jimmy Quinn asked him about it during a press conference:
“Let’s be clear — this visit to the Olympics is not a political visit,” said Guterres, in response to a question from National Review during a press conference. “This visit is a visit that comes out of an invitation by the International Olympic Committee and corresponds to what has been a very solid partnership between the U.N. and the International Olympic Committee.”
The so-called international community faced the moral challenge of an Olympics being hosted by a government that is committing genocide, and it absolutely flopped. But then again, the international community is flopping in a lot of things lately.
The United Nations Is Never All That United
When Joe Biden describes his foreign policy and the world he wants to leave behind as president, he keeps using the term “rules-based international order.” The administration characterizes a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine as “an episode that has the potential to undermine that core tenet, that core tenet of the rules-based international order.”
There is no “rules-based international order.” Maybe there was one, a generation ago, a brief, post-Cold War window where most of the governments of the world could be persuaded to join big efforts to punish rogue actors backed by international organizations. The international coalition against Saddam Hussein back in 1991 was pretty wide ranging; and it wasn’t just the U.S. and our traditional allies — we even had Syria on our team back then. Back then, Russia and China weren’t willing to expend much capital or effort to defend the Iraqi regime. But we left that world behind decades ago.
There was a fascinating exchange between State Department spokesman Ned Price and Associated Press diplomatic reporter Matt Lee Monday, in which the reporter pressed the spokesman for evidence that the U.N. Security Council was actually doing anything to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine:
QUESTION: Okay, but I’m just trying to — because it just sounds like the same thing going back and forth between both sides. And when you say that the Security Council takes the lead in determining the existence of a threat to international peace and security, did the Security Council actually do anything?
MR PRICE: Matt, this was not about a resolution. It was not about a vote. This was about an exposition of the facts.
QUESTION: And hasn’t [sic] there been expositions after expositions after expositions of this going back months now?
MR PRICE: Matt, we are not — we are not —
QUESTION: You yourself get up here every single day and talk about — or whenever you get up here, I’m just saying — I mean, just when you’re briefing, you get up here and you talk about the G7, you talk about the EU, you talk about NATO, you talk about any number of international fora that —
MR PRICE: Sure.
QUESTION: — where this stuff has actually come out and been agreed on. And when you say —
MR PRICE: Matt, we are not going to apologize for engaging in robust diplomacy.
QUESTION: Okay, but —
MR PRICE: For bringing this to every conceivable fora [sic] and appropriate fora [sic].
QUESTION: But when you say – okay, fine.
MR PRICE: — and for continuing to be transparent with our concerns.
QUESTION: Okay, but that’s —
MR PRICE: If the criticism is that we are engaging too robustly in diplomacy, that we’re being too transparent, that we’re being too consistent in what we’re saying, that is criticism that we will accept if that’s a criticism you want to lodge.
QUESTION: Okay. Well, I’m not criticizing at all. I’m just curious as to when you say the world is united in opposing Russian aggression, but — and you say that because of what happened in the Security Council today, then that’s just flat wrong because the world isn’t united. There were two members of the council that vetoed, wielding members of the council that didn’t even want to have this meeting in the first place.
The Biden administration really wants to believe that the U.N. is going to play a constructive role in deterring a Russian invasion, which is akin to thinking your eighth-grade child can effectively cover wide-receiver Cooper Kupp in the Super Bowl. You may want to believe it, but you’ve got no good reason to believe it.
As I’ve noted before, NATO is unified in the sense that its members don’t want to see Russia invade Ukraine. But the leaders of NATO member countries are not unified on what to do to deter it, and what to do if it happens — and those questions are where the rubber meets the road. It’s a similar story at those other institutions Lee mentions, the G-7 and the European Union. Big international institutions run on consensus, which means that the most reluctant and intransigent member sets the pace. The best attribute of a “coalition of the willing” is that it doesn’t include the unwilling.
Apparently, the WHO Will Get Fooled Again
But when it comes to the performance of international organizations in recent years, perhaps the biggest and most spectacular belly flop belonged to the World Health Organization. The Covid-19 pandemic was the nightmare scenario the WHO was formed to prevent or mitigate — and it utterly failed, in large part because it kept echoing the increasingly implausible assessment of Chinese government-controlled medical experts that the virus was not contagious until it had spread into other countries. (Insert every “you had one job” meme here.) Credit the WHO for commissioning an independent panel that published a scathing review of its management of the earliest weeks of the crisis. And for what it’s worth, every now and then, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus makes a statement that suggests he realizes how colossally his organization messed up by trusting Beijing’s assessments.
You would think that the entire, still-ongoing debacle of the Covid-19 pandemic would spur WHO members to recognize that the organization needs to demonstrate that it has learned its lessons, and turn the page and start fresh under new leadership.
Nope, not even close. Ghebreyesus isn’t just going to get reelected; he’s going to run unopposed:
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), is all but ensured to lead the organization for a second term, from 2022 to 2027, because he is the only candidate in the race. As a matter of procedure, on 25 January, the WHO’s executive board is expected to nominate him for re-election in May.
This isn’t the first time a WHO director-general has run for a second term unopposed. Typically, however, several countries propose candidates in the year before an election. Elections are held every five years at the World Health Assembly in May, an annual meeting of delegates from WHO member states. This year, Tedros is the only nominee, with 28 member states, including several European countries and 3 African nations, backing him.
China, the United States and about 160 other countries did not nominate anyone. This could be a modest vote of confidence in Tedros, an acknowledgement that a competitor would not prevail, or a matter of pandemic practicality, global-health researchers tell Nature. Amanda Glassman, executive vice-president at the Center for Global Development in Washington DC, says, “Generally, you don’t want to change leadership in a war.”
Back when Biden had the U.S. rejoin the WHO, in the first days of his administration, I noted that Biden’s letter to the WHO didn’t even mention any problems at the organization. If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve been getting.
Big international organizations are not great at solving problems. They’re really good at hosting summits and meetings and issuing joint statements and communiqués and looking like they’re working hard at solving problems. Biden is trying to preserve his romanticized vision of a “rules-based international order” . . . instead of confronting the more difficult problem of international institutions failing in their stated missions.
ADDENDUM: You should always be reading the print edition of National Review, but, uh, I think this week’s cover story is particularly good.
It is long. It is detailed. It begins with why it was entirely reasonable to suspect a wet market as the most likely source of Covid-19 in early 2020, and moves through the mountain of circumstantial evidence that strongly suggests a lab accident involving bat-based-coronavirus research in Wuhan — at either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control — occurred in late 2019, setting off the global pandemic. In somewhat ironic timing, a variant of that virus has me typing in the guest bedroom this morning, self-isolating.