Ruth Wedgwood Defends Secretary-General Ban

Ever since Ban Ki-Moon became UN Secretary-General, I have been hearing complaints about, well, nearly everything.  He’s a colorless personality.  He’s a diplomat and not ‘global-presidential’.  He brings no passion to the job.  He wants (anyway wanted) senior officials to disclose their finances.  He’s just a placeholder.  Etc.  Many of these criticisms could be reduced down to … he’s not Kofi.  Or, he’s not a rock star.  He lacks charisma.  He doesn’t inspire the UN bureaucracy.

My own view is that Ban is exactly what the UN needed.  I rather liked Annan.  There were troubling ethical issues, particularly involving his son, quite apart from the whole Oil-for-Food scandal, but what they pointed to were as much a sort of attitude and expectation of the senior UN leadership about its prerogatives and perks of office and the utter failure of any sort of internal checks on self-dealing.  However, Annan had to navigate across the divide between the world of the 1990s and its expectations of the UN as an evolving forum of political global governance backed up by global civil society, and the post 9-11 world, in which nation-states were back in a big way.  In the former, the role of secretary-general was seen by many as a sort of incipient, president-in-waiting of the world.  In that latter, the secretary-general was very much a diplomat, shuttling among the nation-states, and very much a creature of the Security Council.  As James Traub noted in his study of the UN, after 9-11, Kofi Annan understood very clearly that his constituency was the SC and that he was once again in a diplomatic role.

The rise of multipolarity – whether or not it is accompanied by the breathless announcements of US decline that arise with clockwork regularity every generation – also favors the diplomatic role of the SG.  Nation-state competition, great power competition, all of this favors a model of the UN that is about multilateralism conceived as sometimes cooperation and sometimes jockeying among states.  It does not favor a model of the UN that is about multilateralism on the road to global governance, at least not in the liberal international sense.  The UN would do well to focus on doing a few things well, or at least better – think of itself as a series of low, competent hedgerows, rather than a burgeoning tree that somehow never seems to get where it’s supposed to go.

Ban is a competent hedgerows kind of UN leader, while many of his critics are dreaming of an institution of genuine governance in which the SG really is a kind of global president.  In a multipolar world, however, that dream is further away than ever and what looks to be a form of idealistic progressivism is really a nostalgia for the 1990s.  In any case, the world of the 1990s was a world of dreaming about the future of the UN – dreaming underwritten, however, by the unstated premise of American unipolar supremacy.  Diminish the latter, diminish the former.  They are joined together at the hip.

In this new piece, Ruth Wedgwood offers a defense of Ban, with particular pointedness to the US and what she fears will be a US reaction to undermine him and not allow him a second term – for not being sufficiently charismatic in the service of global governance:

Ban is a “spineless and charmless man,” wrote one Norwegian diplomat in a home-office memo almost designed to leak.

At least he wasn’t called a “monster.”

This game of whispers may amuse coffee-lounge diplomats, but any enthusiast of the sport of destroying U.N. secretaries-general should think again. It would be especially unworthy for the U.S. to add fuel to this no-alarm fire. The U.S. already has a bad record in this respect, and three cases might seem a trend.

I myself think the lack of charisma charge somewhere between silly and misconceived – thinking that an SG needs charisma in that way quite mistakes the office in what it can actually be.  Ruth’s criticism is more narrow, putting it in strategic terms of what is in the UN’s own best interest strictly understood:

Admittedly, when measured against the charm and charisma of a gifted U.S presidential leader, a former career diplomat from an Asian country will cut a plain figure. But this matter of cultural style should also be a cue for caution. In some quadrants of the world, finger-wagging and microphone-grabbing are not seen as an effective way to proceed.

The SG’s position is not Bono.  I am no fan of the UN, to be sure – I differ from Ruth in this way, because she really is looking to the best interests of the institution, in ways that I would not – but undermining SG Ban on the bases that this piece identifies cannot do the institution any good, even in those limited areas in which it has something useful to offer.