Hudson Institute scholar Anne Bayevsky details how President Obama, in presiding over a UN Security Council session today, will harm American interests. As the first President to do so, he will confer more legitimacy on the UN, whose anti-Americanism is deep-seated and unchangeable. Also, 44 plans to discuss nuclear disarmament without naming violators like Iran & North Korea, and lump in reduction of American arsenals along with rogue proliferators. (Here is the text of President Obama's Sept. 23 address to the General Assembly; To his credit, 44 mentioned Iran & North Korea negatively, and comdemned "reflexive anti-Americanism"; the chamber was silent.)
Blindness to huge differences between disarming rogue proliferators and dealing with other nuclear problems can only provide succor to the rogues, who have not been moved one whit by America having already dismantled some 95 percent of its nuclear arsenal, a fact 44 never mentions (and may not even know).
UN maven Claudia Rosett, bane of the oli-for-food fraudsters, chimes in with a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed arguing that Obama will demean himself & his office by chairing the Security Council meeting. CR fears (rightly that Obama will make more unreciprocated arms control concessions and get only a photo op in return:
The United Nations holds votes, but it is not a democracy, and it does not cleave to its own lofty charter principles about upholding human dignity. If it did, quite a number of member states, including one of the major founders, Stalin's Soviet Union, would never have been enrolled, and others would have been kicked out years ago (that's never happened).
In practice, the United Nations is a messy, murky despot-infested collective - opaque, girdled in diplomatic immunities, and thus largely unaccountable for its actions. The biggest voting bloc in the General Assembly is the 130-member G-77, which this year picked for its chair - I'm not kidding - the genocidal government of Sudan (whose President Omar al-Bashir is under indictment by the International Criminal Court).
The Security Council isn't all that much better. Chairmanship rotates monthly through all 15 members, with no regard for what kind of regimes that might entail. The five permanent members are democratic France, Britain, and the United States, plus despotic Russia and China. The current roster of 10 rotating members includes not only Japan and Austria, but Vietnam and Libya. This month it is America's turn to preside; Obama will sit in the same chair occupied in March by an envoy of Moammar Gadhafi's Libya. With heads of state summoned for Thursday's historic occasion, it's likely history will record the spectacle of terror-drenched tyrant-for-life Gadhafi sharing the table.
In this setup, the most law-abiding of the 192 member states tend to get stuck with the results of whatever the Security Council agrees to. The most unscrupulous, which account to no electorates back home, feel free to lie as they please and do whatever they can get away with, which is plenty, because the United Nations leaves individual member states to police their own compliance with U.N. deals. From the oil-for-food scandal to the current sanctions-busting traffic with the likes of Iran and North Korea, it is common practice for some Security Council members to violate, with impunity, the same deals they vote for. That goes far to explain why a series of "binding" Security Council resolutions over the last three years imposing sanctions on North Korea and Iran have failed to stop the nuclear programs of Pyongyang or Tehran.
Sending an envoy to navigate this scene and report to the president has the great advantage of leaving room to maneuver, revise, rethink, defuse, and deny without showcasing the U.S. president as petitioning support from whatever despot has been exalted to swing vote of the season. Even Jimmy Carter was not foolish enough to try the stunt of subbing for his own ambassador at the Security Council.
In an AEI column last week, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton also assessed the President's UN prospects at the UN. JB notes that 44 will get loud cheers, unlike Bush 43 (he got applause, but no fan cheers, ususally at the wrong moments). This is because unlike his predecessor 44 has sucked up to every dictator on the planet (Bolton is too diplomatic to put it this way). 43 called the UN a "wax museum" because he was given the silent treatment. That was, however unintentionally, an insult to Madame Tussaud's and the other wax museums on the planet.
While the stage was being set for this week's grand opening in NYC, what did the United Nations do recently? In Vienna, at a meeting of member nations of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), sitting on secret data on Iran's program, the IAEA passed a resolution by a 49-45 vote, with 16 abstentions, condemning the nuclear activities of...Israel. Yes, Israel.
Bottom Line. While President Obama diddles at the UN, the UN continues its old ways of shafting Israel, and the clock runs on Israel's Day of Decision re Iran.
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