Throughout the Ukrainian crisis, Russia has demonstrated a keen appetite for both territory and power. It has shown less concern for international agreements and institutions. While Moscow has largely kept the United Nations out of the conflict, it has permitted the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to monitor the situation on the ground. Even this looks like a mere ploy to deflect Western criticism: Russia has used OSCE peacemaking efforts backed by Germany as a cover for its efforts to destabilize Ukraine, and its proxies in the east of the country have menaced and kidnapped the organization’s observers. [...]
Last week’s top-level session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York offered three basic lessons. The first is that the United States can still dominate the U.N. when it wants to. The second is that a clear majority of other countries’ leaders are quite relieved to follow an American lead. But the third is that the U.N. is only really still relevant in two—admittedly sensitive—regions: Africa and the Middle East. America’s ability to direct U.N. affairs was in doubt a year ago, when the annual General Assembly jamboree was overshadowed by the Syrian chemical weapons crisis. While the [...]
Ban Ki-moon revealed a new side to his character over the past week: Action Ban. Last Thursday, the secretary-general of the United Nations, often written off as the personification of process-driven diplomacy, announced that he was tired of just talking about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. “We don’t need all this time-consuming, so-called consultation, or consensus-building,” he told the Security Council. “There is a consensus already that this is very serious and urgent.” He outlined plans for an ambitious regional mission to fight the disease. Then he hit the streets of Manhattan on Sunday, joining 310,000 marchers calling for [...]
