By Gideon Rachman
Published: September 28 2009 20:29
Barack Obama normally likes to talk about hope. Last week at the United Nations he had the audacity to fear. The US president conjured up a vision of a dystopian world: “Extremists sowing terror ... Protracted conflicts that grind on and on. Genocide and mass atrocities. More and more nations with nuclear weapons. Melting ice caps and ravaged populations.” That is our collective future, according to Mr Obama, unless the world’s leaders co-operate to find “global solutions to global problems”.
As if to illustrate his point about this dangerous new world, two days later it was revealed that Iran has a second, secret, nuclear site. The mental image of bearded mullahs watching spinning centrifuges in a secret nuclear-facility hidden in a mountain sounds like something out of a James Bond film. It is, however, exactly the kind of international challenge Mr Obama was referring to. The question is whether the world’s leaders can rise to the occasion.
If the major powers can establish a united front and force a change in Iranian behaviour, it would be a triumph for the co-operative internationalism that underpins Mr Obama’s foreign policy. Unfortunately, the odds are on failure.
In the short term, the revelation of the second Iranian nuclear site is very helpful to US efforts to ratchet up the pressure on Iran. The government in Tehran may now agree to allow international inspections of the new site. If Iranian co-operation is insufficient, as it is likely to be, it will be easier to get support for new UN sanctions.
But diplomatic progress should not be confused with real progress. The economic and political situation in Iran is unstable enough to hold out some hope that extra international pressure could force a change in policy. However, any sanctions package that is acceptable to Russia and China, both of whom have vetoes at the UN Security Council, is likely to be too weak really to damage the Iranian regime. The Chinese, in particular, are eager to protect a burgeoning energy relationship with Iran.
Many Americans gave up on the UN years ago. But Mr Obama is a believer – and the UN remains the only international body with the power to impose comprehensive international sanctions and to decide whether a war is legal. The Security Council, however, is often blocked because the Russians and the Chinese remain extremely wary of US-inspired interventionism on everything from Darfur to Iran. Even when the Security Council gets its act together, it often fails to make a difference. Iran is already the subject of UN sanctions, as Iraq was. A Security Council resolution on Gaza earlier this year was blithely ignored.
Meanwhile the very legitimacy of the Security Council is increasingly under challenge, since it still reflects the balance of power at the end of the second world war. The other decision-making organs of the UN are not faring much better. The UN’s climate summit last week did not advance the prospects of a global agreement very much. The UN General Assembly is largely powerless, and so has become a forum for tub-thumping speeches by the world’s least attractive leaders. Beneath the surface, the mood of the UN is moving increasingly in an illiberal direction. Recent research by Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner for the European Council on Foreign Relations reveals a steady “erosion of support for western positions on human rights” in the General Assembly.
For those western leaders who are hoping that the UN will tackle the frightening challenges identified by Mr Obama, it is all very depressing. One senior European politician in New York last week fretted: “On issues like Iran, the Middle East and climate change, we know what we want to get done. We just seem to lack the levers.”
If the UN is blocked or ineffective, then the search will be on for new forums and methods. The G20 summit in Pittsburgh last week looked like a model of efficiency and co-operation after the circus of the UN General Assembly. Since the countries around the table represent the world’s most populous nations and 85 per cent of world economic output, the G20 is more legitimate than the Security Council or the G8. But the G20 works only because it has confined itself to relatively bloodless issues of international economic co-ordination. If it were ever to stray on to questions like Iran, then the divisions that too often cripple the Security Council would simply reappear.
President George W. Bush had his own answer to the question of global governance – the G1. Under Mr Bush, the US was quite prepared to act alone, when necessary. But unilateral American action cannot deliver a climate-change regime or an effective package of international sanctions on Iran.
The only unilateral American policy that the US could adopt towards Iran would be military intervention – and any such response would run against the grain of everything that Mr Obama stands for. But perhaps it may still come to that, nonetheless. Listening to the debates in the General Assembly last week, I was irresistibly reminded of the most famous quotation attributed to Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian politician and patron saint of foreign policy realists. “The great questions of the day will be decided not by speeches, or by resolutions of majorities, but by blood and iron.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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