The United Nations General Assembly vote on December 21 may not make much difference to Jerusalem’s status. But, it did mark yet another milestone along the distance that is growing between the lone superpower and the world body. The US is the UN’s biggest contributor, and India knows from experience that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Republican senator, who had been US ambassador to India and the UN, dismissed the organisation as “theatre of the absurd”. President Gerald Ford warned of the “tyranny of the majority”.
Dismissiveness was not without racial overtones. Perhaps there was an element of truth in the seemingly facetious comment by a leading Democrat, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, that the Republicans disliked the UN because “there are just too many foreigners there”. The Republicans have traditionally been especially impatient of the UN’s moral pieties and strictures. Newt Gingrich, who became Congress speaker in 1994, called it “a totally incompetent instrument any place that matters.” He added, “When you get a serious problem with serious violence, the UN is literally incompetent, and it kills people by its behaviour.”
The question arises – Can the UN survive if the US, which provides territorial hospitality and the bulk of its funding, is so sceptical? Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s ethnic Indian ambassador to the UN, sounded threatening just before the vote on the resolution, co-sponsored by Turkey and Yemen, which declared Mr Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “null and void”. Mrs Haley sought to buy respect. “I must also say today: when we make generous contributions to the UN, we also have expectation that we will be respected,” she told delegates. “What’s more, we are being asked to pay for the dubious privileges of being disrespected… If our investment fails, we have an obligation to spend our investment in other ways… The United States will remember this day.”
No wonder 35 countries abstained, among them five European Union members, even though ambassadors from several abstaining countries, including Mexico, used their time on the podium to criticise Mr Trump’s move. The absence during the vote of another 21 delegations confirmed that the warning over funding (and aid!) cuts may have had some effect.
The world body was very much a creature of Western interests in the 1950s. It was only in 1960, the UN Year of Decolonisation, that 17 new members and the passage of a major resolution against colonialism turned the tide. After that, Washington saw the UN “as an inconsequential talk shop, the more so because the talk is usually directed against the United States.” Two-thirds of its 152 members were “new or underdeveloped nations” (Asian or African) who used it “blatantly to promote their interests, which often conflict with those of the US or its allies”.
As Moynihan explained, the world body became marginal to US foreign policy “for the simple reason that American foreign policy is normally preoccupied with the Soviet Union (this was long before the USSR disintegrated), whereas the UN, with its profusion of small countries, even mini-states, is the last setting in which two powers would wish to conduct their affairs.”
Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq restored America’s original domination of the UN. But, there were doubts whether the existing charter sanctioned an interventionist role such as President George H W Bush favoured. The Americans wanted to change the constitution. They recalled that Harry S Truman had said on the last day of the charter conference in San Francisco that no one could claim that the UN charter was “a final or a perfect instrument”. Like any national constitution, it would be expanded and improved. “Changing world conditions would require readjustments”.
Flushed with the success of Desert Storm and the end of the Cold War, many Americans hoped the world body would be reinvented to promote good governance, democracy, human rights and the free market. Richard Cheney, the US vice-president, boasted to the Senate armed services committee in January 1992 that America no longer had any global challenger, except with respect to strategic nuclear forces. “No country is our match in conventional military technology or the ability to apply it. There are no significant alliances hostile to our interests.” The new UN would be the instrument of Western policy.
That was precisely why P V Narasimha Rao demurred at the proposed revamping. He did not want the UN institutionalised as a US rubber stamp. Its response to the 1971 Bangladesh crisis had exposed how majority decisions were manipulated. Desert Storm had confirmed the power of money and political pressure. The Soviets may have abused the veto, but India saw the stipulation of unanimous endorsement as a safety valve. Narasimha Rao was concerned about the sovereign rights of individual members. If the veto had become ineffective, he looked for some other means of ensuring that collective action reflected international consensus. Either all such decisions would have to have the general assembly’s approval, or the security council should be restructured.
He also firmly opposed intrusive action in defence of human rights, or even “any linkage between democracy and human rights on the one hand and economic assistance on the other.” Far from sanctioning measures that would in effect extend and consolidate Pax Americana, he still wanted UN members to act on Rajiv Gandhi’s action plan for disarmament. This was the last gasp of the new world order.
What Narasimha Rao and other idealists ignored was that the US has been the largest financial supporter of the UN since the organisation’s founding in 1945. A few years ago, the US was assessed as accounting for 22 per cent of the UN’s regular budget and more than 27 per cent of its peacekeeping expenditure. In 2011, Washington contributed $516.3 million for the world body’s regular budget and more than $2.182 billion for its peacekeeping operations. In addition, the US also voluntarily provides money to many more UN organisations. According to the report that the US Office of Management and Budget submitted to Congress, total US contributions to the UN system amounted to more than $6.347 billion in 2009. This was more than $1 billion more than the total contributions as compiled by OMB for 2005, and was indicative of rising budgetary trends in the UN and consequently higher demands for US financial support.
Inder Kumar Gujral sat on the fence to start with when the Gulf War broke out. But, when Washington cut off aid to Yemen for not supporting the US-led coalition at the UN, Gujral knew that near-bankrupt India would have to toe the line. After that, India voted with the US every time though Gujral salved his conscience by refusing to condemn the man whom George W Bush called the “Asian Hitler”.
The writer is the author of several books and a regular media columnist.
