Global Archive

It is hard to feel excited about United Nations Security Council resolutions anymore. On Saturday, after days of exhausting diplomacy, the council unanimously passed a resolution calling for a 30-day cease-fire across Syria. Most diplomatic observers reacted either cautiously or outright cynically. Previous U.N.-backed cessations of hostilities in the country have evaporated quickly. A veteran of the siege of Sarajevo in Bosnia in the 1990s once told me that he had kept a list of how long each cease-fire there had lasted before a shot was fired. The shortest was less than a minute. The record in Syria is no […]

Editor’s note: This is a special Wednesday edition of Diplomatic Fallout. Judah Grunstein will return with Balance of Power next week. There is a long history of bold ideas for peacekeeping missions that never quite took off. In 1936, British officials considered deploying 10,000 peacekeepers to the Rhineland as a buffer force between France and an increasingly aggressive Nazi Germany. In 1969, the Irish foreign minister called for a United Nations force to counter mounting sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland. London said no. In January 2009, in one of its very last foreign policy initiatives, the outgoing George W. Bush […]

Analyzing the United Nations is rather like being a nervous seismologist in California. Geological experts are accustomed to tremors and small quakes along the San Andreas Fault, which bisects America’s most heavily populated state. But they are on alert for a much more powerful earthquake that could wreck some of the country’s most prosperous cities. Some say this will come soon. U.N. experts are likewise hardened to the regular crises that shake the organization but do not upend it. From Mali to Syria, the U.N. is struggling to make or keep peace. But despite occasional bouts of diplomatic frustration, the […]

International institutions offer spies incredibly easy places to ply their trade. Although this is a sensitive topic, it may be these institutions’ most important contribution to international stability. While organizations like the United Nations and African Union emphasize their contributions to peacemaking and sustainable development, their headquarters are also hunting grounds for spooks. Last month, Le Monde revealed that Chinese intelligence services have been downloading vast amounts of data from the servers at the AU’s offices in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, every night for five years. Beijing says that this is absurd. Everyone else assumes it is a fact. China generously […]