Opinion | Who can save the waning United Nations? Not the US, but China
- The US cannot save the world by itself, as much as it wants to. America must accept that China, while so different and deeply competitive, needs to pitch in
- On China’s part, with a declining population, it must seize the hour if it means to prove it is exceptional
Maybe the United Nations – fumbling, hopelessly bureaucratic, partly corrupt and so on – is in fact beyond redemption. Just forget about it: let it career down the slippery slope of mediocrity and geopolitical irrelevance and splash ignominiously into New York’s East River. Let’s just cut our losses and bail out before its collapse pulls the world into a deep and dark abyss.
Maybe the UN was never going to save the world. Without the United States as a member, the League of Nations flopped after the first world war; post second world war, even with the US in the game, the UN is a near-flop.
Here’s one section in former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s important, realistic and at times riveting memoir, just published, that’s especially telling. The former South Korean foreign minister (2004-2006) recalls an insider’s moment at the 2015 peacekeeping summit organised by the Obama administration in New York.
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Resolved: Uniting Nations in a Divided World is not a joyful book, however. The two-term secretary general (2007-2016) – only the UN’s second ever from Asia – despairs over the primacy of big power politics at the Security Council and national-interest pettiness in the General Assembly.
And furthermore, notwithstanding Xi’s 2015 surprise, China otherwise gets scant mention in Resolved (written with journalist Betsy Pisik), despite its prominence and permanent post on the Security Council.
Ban would never be the one to say it, of course, but in my view, Beijing takes criticism of almost any sort almost as if it were a nuclear missile attack. Instead of rolling with the punches that always come the way of a rising power, it tends to overreact and sulk.
Ban, ever the quiet diplomat whose professionalism is well respected by Beijing, has no appetite for tangling with Xi. But, as China’s leader himself demonstrated in 2015, an upgraded Chinese involvement in the UN might serve to slow the institution’s decline, if not prove its critical saving grace.
