U.S.
Underwhelmed With Emerging Powers At U.N.
by
MICHELE KELEMEN, September 17, 2011
It's the
time of year when world leaders converge at the United Nations headquarters
in New York. And this year, there will be a lot of talk about multilateral
diplomacy — a priority for the Obama administration since it came to office.
Obama's
team has courted the world's rising powers, even publicly backing India's hopes
to one day be a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. But now that
India, along with South Africa and Brazil, have rotating seats on the council, U.S. officials and many human rights
activists complain they're not living up to expectations.
Susan
Rice, the
U.S. ambassador to the U.N., says she's had a chance to get a close-up look at
how those three countries have been acting on the world stage lately. She's not
sounding particularly enthusiastic.
"This
has been an opportunity for them to demonstrate how they might act if they were
to obtain permanent membership, and for us to assess our level of enthusiasm
about that," she says. "Let me just say we've learned a lot, and not
all of it, frankly, encouraging."
'Extremely
Disappointing'
Philippe
Bolopion, who monitors the U.N. for Human Rights Watch, has also been keeping
tabs on these countries and doesn't like what he sees, either — especially
in the case of Syria.
"It
is extremely disappointing, to say the least, to see that India, Brazil and
South Africa, for example, are not more eager to get more Security Council
action on Syria," he says. "Over 2,000 protesters, peaceful
protesters, have been killed — and yet these countries are reluctant to apply
any significant pressure on the Assad regime."
U.N.
ambassadors from those three nations went to Syria to meet with officials in
President Bashar Assad's government. While Bolopion says it made sense for them
to try diplomacy, that effort has clearly failed. Still, he says, they don't
seem eager to step up the pressure on Assad even now.
The same is true in the case of Sudan, he says, despite U.N. reports that the
Sudanese air force has been bombing civilians in a region called Southern
Kordofan.
"The
U.N. has documented crimes against humanity, in some cases. U.N. peacekeepers
have been subjected to mock executions. A U.N. contractor was even
killed," Bolopion says. "And yet the Security Council did not say a single
word, not even a statement, absolutely nothing. And of course, the Sudanese
regime takes notice of that stuff."
That's
a case where you might expect a big regional player like South Africa
would want to take a lead, he says.
"Their
inaction on key human rights issues is quite puzzling, because they do at home
defend the very values we would hope to see them defend in the Security
Council," Bolopion says.
Competing
Interests
But
there are a lot of big power politics at play at the United Nations, according
to David Bosco, author of the book, Five to Rule Them All, a
history of the Security Council. He says Brazil, India and South Africa have
their own historical allies and see themselves as representing the developing
world.
"There
is, kind of coded into the DNA of these emerging powers, a deep skepticism of the West, in particular Western interventionism," Bosco
says. "The Libya operation actually intensified that uncertainty and
suspicion of Western intervention, because they saw the Libya intervention as
regime change in the guise of humanitarian intervention."
Bosco,
an assistant professor at the American University School of International
Service, says there's another reason why these countries don't often align
themselves with Washington. If the Security Council ever does expand, they'd
need broad support.
"They
have to think about not only how do we cultivate Washington, but how do we
cultivate all the other small and midsized states around the world that are
going to determine what the shape of the new Security Council will be," he
says. "Russia and China, of course, are big players here, and they are an
alternative pole of many of these issues on human rights and
interventionism."
Eventually,
Bosco believes, this dry run of sorts will sour the U.S. on the idea of
Security Council expansion.
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DO
DO
The gist is that the emerging powers do not live up to expectation. Why do we set the standard for them higher than the one for P-5? How long did it take for the EU to impose oil embargo on Syria? What did the U.S. do?
