Global Archive

The United Nations is an organization that is willing to learn from failure. This is fortunate, because it fails quite a lot. The U.N. has absorbed the lessons of previous catastrophes, such as the Balkan wars and the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, and now deploys peacekeepers far more professionally than in that nightmarish era. In the near future, it will face a reckoning over more recent failures, as its efforts to bring peace to countries destabilized by the Arab revolutions—most notably in Syria but also in Libya, Yemen and Mali—have veered off course, costing thousands of lives in the […]

Editor’s note: Guest columnist Sarah Hearn is filling in for Richard Gowan, who is on vacation this week. At the end of March, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched a new report about international aid and development, co-authored by myself and several colleagues at New York University’s Center for International Cooperation. The report, titled “States of Fragility 2015: Meeting Post-2015 Ambitions,” comes ahead of the United Nations Summit on the Post-2015 Development Agenda in September this year, which will adopt a new set of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when […]

Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama unveiled a diplomatic framework designed to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Opposition to the negotiations in Washington, which was intense all along, exploded, soon collapsing into near-hysteria. Critics compared the framework to the 1938 Munich agreement—the widely accepted gold standard for weakness and appeasement. Opposition to the Iran framework agreement has many sources. One of the most important is that, after several decades with no major arms control agreements, the American public and its elected representatives no longer understand the complex and often counterintuitive logic of arms control. Paradoxically, the more hostile and […]