On January 26, 1982, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s
Ambassador to the United Nations, delivered an address before the
Foreign Policy Association in New York called “Making Things
Worse.” I was her speechwriter at the time, and I prepared a
draft for her which, I’m pleased to say, she did not
use; instead, she drafted a far better speech of her own.
Ambassador Kirkpatrick did, however, cite a book called A
Dangerous Place: The United Nations as a Weapon in World
Politics, written by two political scientists, Abraham
Yeselson and Anthony Gaglione, that I brought to her attention
(as a political scientist herself, I knew she’d go for it), and
whose theme — that the UN, designed to make things better, was
actually making things worse — became the theme of her remarks
to the Foreign Policy Association. Ambassador Kirkpatrick’s
speech made quite a stir at the time, and after 28 years, I still
believe it is the most trenchant critique of the UN ever made by
a senior American official. Here is the critical part of her
address:
The UN process breeds polarization which, as Yeselson and
Gaglione observed in their stimulating study of the United
Nations (which, like [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan’s book, also was
titled A Dangerous Place), “by constantly forcing
states to choose up sides, progressively destroys neutral
havens.” Obviously, extending and polarizing conflict is the
very opposite of resolving it. For as the conflict is extended,
polarized and publicized, flexibility is diminished, and the
possibilities of conflict resolution decrease as heat and light
increase.
This process of conflict extension, exacerbation,
polarization, has progressed so far that Yeselson and Gaglione
pointed out: “Use of the U.N. is a barometer of the hostility
existing between nations. Nations interested in reaching
agreement almost always ignore or avoid the U.N…Bringing an
issue to the U.N. is likely to be regarded as a hostile act.”
Naturally, the United Nations’ reputation for partisanship and
conflict exacerbation severely limits its utility for conflict
resolution.
It is fortunate that Ambassador Kirkpatrick despised the
State Department, and refused to submit her major speeches for
clearance (as a Reagan favorite, she could get away with this).
Otherwise, Foggy Bottom would never have allowed a major American
official to publicly state that far from resolving conflicts, the
United Nations exacerbates them.
The recent attempt by Turkey and its new Arab friends to
use the UN Security Council as a means of criminalizing and
de-legitimizing Israel is yet another in a depressingly long
series of events demonstrating the validity of Kirkpatrick’s
thesis. Had Turkey wanted to genuinely defuse the crisis with
Israel, it could easily have done so through quiet diplomatic
channels; but because Turkey’s leaders, intent on playing a major
new role in the Middle East as standard-banners of Sunni Islam,
are not interested in conflict resolution, but rather in conflict
extension, exacerbation, and polarization (or, in plain English,
in leading a lynch mob), they naturally turned to the UN to
advance their purposes.
During her tenure at the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick
demonstrated how an American Ambassador should conduct herself.
Her speeches to the Security Council invariably injected an
element of moral clarity into an otherwise degraded debate. But I
don’t think she ever addressed the fundamental problem her
analysis raised: How can the United States return the UN to its
original, conflict-resolving purposes.
For my part, I used to present my colleagues with what I
called “The Magic Button Test.” Imagine there was a Magic Button,
and all you had to do was press it, and the entire UN apparatus
would simply vanish into thin air — would you go ahead and press
it?
To my surprise and dismay, some of my colleagues refused to
press the Magic Button. They agreed that the UN’s major
institutions — the Security Council and General Assembly — are
a menace to civilization, but they felt obliged to support the
UN’s humanitarian agencies. I argued that the world’s civilized
states, along with non-governmental organizations, would quickly
find substitutes for UNICEF, the World Health Organization, etc.,
so that the truly needy would not suffer as a result of the UN’s
demise.
To my intense regret, I never had the opportunity to pose
the Magic Button Test to Ambassador Kirkpatrick. Today, however,
I think it is more important than ever that we press the Magic
Button — that is, withdraw from the UN and all its
works. The world is a very dangerous place. The last
thing it needs is an institution like the United Nations, which
mainly serves to make it more dangerous.
