United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visited Washington on Wednesday to ask for additional money for U.N. peacekeeping. His visit came against the Trump administration’s decision to reduce its share of the cost of U.N. peacekeeping operations from 28.47 percent of the peacekeeping budget to 25 percent.
The problem with U.N. peacekeeping and, more broadly, the U.N. itself, is that Guterres and his predecessors have preferred to prioritize imagery over reality and sweep incompetence under the rug rather than address it directly. Consider, for example, that on the day Guterres visited Washington, the U.N. appointed Iran to a U.N. body fighting for women’s equality, this after Iran sentenced a leading women’s rights lawyer to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. Or, consider that in the 1990s the U.N. promoted the late Kofi Annan, the director of peacekeeping operations, to under-secretary-general even though his cravenness directly contributed to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. That he subsequently became secretary-general is a scandal unto itself.
That said, U.N. peacekeeping can be valuable and, in certain countries, can work. U.N. Missions in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Côte d’Ivoire were largely successful. But, if Guterres deserves more U.S. taxpayer money, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton should demand answers to some very specific questions about ongoing peacekeeping operations to ensure that Guterres, and the U.N. more broadly, are serious about putting mission above moral equivalency.
Guterres might want to explain, for example:
- How the U.N. peacekeeping mission on the Israel-Lebanon border is holding up? More specifically, has Hezbollah rearmed and restocked its missile arsenal? If so, did UNIFIL detect and report that operation in real time and report, for example, where Hezbollah weapons caches are?
- Or, whether Hezbollah violated U.N.-certified borders by building tunnels into Israel? Given such tunnels were discovered, Guterres might explain why the U.N. was so unwilling to report who dug them? Is the U.N. or UNIFIL afraid of criticizing Iran or Hezbollah?
- If UNIFIL is an effective use of money, did it report how heavy weapons were smuggled into southern Lebanon? Did they arrive via Beirut International Airport? Or were they transported overland from Syria? Or did they come via sea? Or a combination of all three?
- Is UNIFIL in control of territory it is supposed to secure on Lebanon’s side? Does it defer to Hezbollah or answer only to the Lebanese government? Does Guterres see any effective difference after the rise to the presidency of Michel Aoun or after the most recent Lebanese elections? Do the Lebanese Armed Forces provide any meaningful assistance to the U.N. or is the LAF thwarted in practice by Hezbollah?
- Likewise, why is the U.N. peacekeeping mission on the Golan Heights only now based on the Israeli side? If the mission can no longer operate and observe inside Syria in any meaningful way, why does the mission still exist or exist with the same budget as when it operated according to its original mandate?
Guterres’ predecessors saw their mission to be a more constant expansion of budget and building of a bureaucratic empire than mission fulfillment. Too often, they did this on the backs of U.S. taxpayers as successive administrations, both Republican and Democrat, accepted U.N. spin at face value and refused to challenge U.N. failure. If Guterres wishes to receive an additional $200 million in U.S. funding and win the confidence of those countries upon whom the U.N. has grown to depend for its finances, perhaps he might even answer such questions publicly.
After all, truth should never be the enemy of diplomacy.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
