A New Administration and the UN

Abstract

Among the innumerable issues the Obama administration in Washington will have to deal with very rapidly is the question of how to engage with the globe's most important security organization, the United Nations. As a much-maligned body under the Bush Administration, the UN has only recently come back into the American public purview as the go-to outfit for security matters. Even Bush himself, following his Iraq imboglio, regularly returned to the UN for help. Nonetheless, it seems that this is an appropriate time to take a fresh look at how new leadership in the White House might think about reconnecting with the UN in the coming years both to help restore American leadership around the world and to reinvigorate this institution as the globe's foremost peacemaking enterprise. Here is an agenda for our new president in dealing with the world's premier governing body. The first serious gesture toward the United Nations would be for President Obama to travel to New York City in the first few weeks of his tenure and deliver an address at the UN informing the world community that America is back and ready to re-engage with all member-states. As part of that endeavor, the president has already taken the commendable step of naming his trusted campaign national security advisor, Susan Rice, as American envoy to the organization, while returning the position to the Cabinet-level status it held during the Clinton years. At the same time, the Obama administration must proclaim its support for the continuation of the UN reform movement. Spurred on by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in 2005, the UN enacted a number of important changes to modernize the institution and get rid of archaic rules, and most important, to confront the new twenty-first century perils of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and failed