The Art of the Possible: Bob Rae on the UN's Relevance Today

"The UN offers what it can. It’s not a super world government. It doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t have nuclear weapons."

GEOPOLITICS

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As the United States and other Western democracies keep looking for ways to help Ukraine—think of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Kyiv over the weekend or President Joe Biden’s request to Congress for an additional $33 billion in aid—there’s been little talk (at least in the United States) about involving the one institution that was supposedly designed for problems like this: the United Nations. And that’s a departure from the past. If you compare today’s crisis to the wars in the Balkans in the mid-1990s or even to the conflict in Iraq following the U.S. invasion in March 2003, the UN’s role today seems much more marginal. To get an international perspective on the world body’s relevance today, I turned to Bob Rae. Canada’s current UN ambassador, Rae knows the organization intimately; his father, a diplomat, held the same job 50 years ago, and Rae grew up talking about international affairs at the dinner table. A lawyer by training, Rae spent much of his life in politics, serving as premier of Ontario from 1990-1995 and interim leader of Canada’s Liberal Party from 2011-2013. He then began a second act in diplomacy, working first as Canada’s special envoy to Myanmar and then its special envoy on humanitarian and refugee issues before taking up his post in New York in 2020. We spoke last Friday.

Photo by Jonathan Ansel Moy de Vitry / Unsplash

Octavian Report:­ António Guterres, the UN’s secretary-general, just returned from visits to Moscow and Kyiv. Did he accomplish anything?

Bob Rae: Well, he’s been trying to get a humanitarian corridor established for the last several weeks. He sent Martin Griffiths, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), out there several weeks ago. It’s been very hard to convince the Russians to do much. But I think the secretary-general had to go—it was important for him to be there on behalf of the UN. He is, after all, heading up an organization that has literally thousands of people working in Ukraine and all over Eastern Europe for various agencies and on a range of issues: refugees, all kinds of things. I think he felt he had to show the flag for the organization. We’ll get a sense of whether anything new has come out of it.

OR: UN skeptics would argue that a trip like this highlights the limits of the organization’s peacekeeping role, because there’s not much it can do when the belligerents are intent on fighting and one of them is a permanent, veto-wielding member of the Security Council.

Rae: The UN offers what it can. It’s not a super world government. It doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t have nuclear weapons. Lester Pearson, who was the Canadian minister of foreign affairs in late 1950s, won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping set up the peacekeeping force that went into Suez after the attack by the Israelis, the French, and the British against the Egyptians. But the reality is that the British and French realized they’d made a huge mistake, and the Israelis had no choice once they backed out but to back out themselves and to say, “Okay, we’ll have a ceasefire.”

So the secretary-general’s doing what he can in an almost impossible situation. Don’t forget that Dag Hammarskjöld [the UN’s second secretary-general] lost his life in 1961 when he went to the Congo in an effort to get the parties to stop fighting and his plane was shot down. It’s a hard job.

OR: One of the tools UN secretaries-generals do have is a bully pulpit. Guterres has chosen to conduct the job more quietly than some of his predecessors, like Kofi Annan. Which approach—the loud one or the quiet one—is more effective?

Rae: You have to use both. You need to be trusted to keep secrets and to do stuff behind the scenes, but you also need to be able to speak up. In private conversation, Guterres is very eloquent, has a masterful command of global issues, and is very clear about what he wants to do and where he sees the problems. I think the challenge that he has is figuring out how to get more people to agree with him to do something about it. You have to be careful not to become an international scold. When you can’t do much, sometimes talking quietly is the most effective thing to do.

The main thing to stress is that the secretary-general only really has the clout that the major powers want him to have. And the Russians do not want an effective United Nations. They do not want the UN to succeed in any of its work. They’re not interested in much of what it does. They’re a very negative force in the world today, and the Chinese have their own objectives. Because of the rise of authoritarian powers, which are making life very, very difficult, being secretary-general is a tougher job now than it’s ever been.

OR: You’ve said that the UN works better in practice than it does in theory. Explain what that means.

Rae: The UN is made up of a whole bunch of agencies. The secretariat in itself has a budget that is smaller than most major municipalities in North America—it’s relatively tiny. But then you have a whole bunch of other bodies with bigger budgets: the UN High Commission for Refugees, UNICEF, the human rights tribunal, and so on. The development program is enormous. Plus you have the family of agencies immediately outside the UN, such as the IMF and World Bank, which do an immense amount of work that nobody knows anything about. They’re trying to encourage different countries with different economic and social systems to get on a path of stronger economic development, and that part of the UN actually works tremendously well.

Where the UN is visibly challenged is in its original function, which is to act as a body that would create world peace. The great sounding of the trumpets at the beginning of the UN charter is the language about saving future generations from the scourge of war. Well, when I was in politics, my advisers always used to say, under-promise and over-deliver. This is a good example of the opposite, because the reality is the UN hasn’t been given the capacity to police the world. The member-states don’t want any organization to have that much power.

OR: Your dad was Canada’s UN ambassador 50 years ago. What are the most important ways the institution has changed since his day?

Rae: Well, a lot of what I’m telling you was dinnertime conversation in the Rae household when I was growing up, because my dad was not only ambassador to the UN in New York, he was also ambassador in Geneva. He attended lots of disarmament and trade conferences. Multilateralism was built into his life, as it was for many Canadian diplomats in the years after the Second World War. And what I’ve been saying to you about the problems and challenges we’re facing today is very similar to what he would’ve said. Obviously, he was active during the Cold War, and before China decided to get involved. It was a different world at a different time, but a lot of the challenges are the same. The imperfections of the structure. The persistence of conflict. Take the Middle East: there’s been some progress, but the conflict between Israel and Palestine has not really changed much since 1975.

OR: For many years, the prevailing theory was that as China grew richer and more involved and embedded in international bodies like the UN, it would become more invested in supporting the international order. Today, China is very involved in the UN and other international bodies, but it’s often more interested in rewriting the rules to accommodate its own interests. How do you think the UN needs to change to better reflect the reality of a rising China, of a rising India, and of other states—keeping in mind that we may not like what they want the world to become?

Rae: I think we need to be a lot less starry-eyed than we were, and I include myself in that regard. If you went back and looked at some of my speeches—though I don’t suggest you spend time doing this—you would find much the same assumption, which was widely shared: that if you treat the Chinese like a modern industrializing country, and you let them into institutions like the WTO and the IMF and so on, they would get with the program. Everybody underestimated the extent to which you can’t let a new member come in with that size and expect them to say, “Well, thanks very much. I’m just going to just sit at the back of the room and watch.”

I think the extent of China’s rise is still underreported and underestimated. The Chinese have come bursting onto the stage economically, financially, and in every other way, but there isn’t a lot of transparency to what they’re doing. That said, you can see their influence in certain UN votes, where a lot of countries now abstain and say, “we don’t want to get involved.” China is also trying to change the language used to reflect its own views. And China has set up its own group on development, which is different from the UN’s sustainable development goals because human rights and good governance have been taken out of it.

And the Chinese also make deals on their own terms. Look at the situation of Sri Lanka, for example. It’s a small country, very much troubled by its own internal conflicts. When it emerged from civil war a few years ago, a lot of countries were worried about giving it money. So the Sri Lankans said, “Let’s go to the Chinese.” The Chinese said, “Sure, we’ll build your port for you. But by the way, if you can’t pay for the port, we’ll take it over.” And that’s exactly what’s happened. It’s very troubling.

OR: Twenty or 30 years ago, it seemed like even American conservatives cared about the UN—they hated it, but they cared about it. Today, both sides of the U.S. political spectrum seem indifferent to it, and you can go months without ever reading or seeing a story about the UN in the American media. What explains this shift?

Rae: I think it’s a little more about the U.S. than it is about the UN. The United States was very enthusiastic about the creation of the United Nations; the UN would not exist without the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt. Early on in World War II, he made a major decision with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that there was going to be a new organization, and that they were not going to make the mistakes they made with its predecessor, the League of Nations. There was a powerful drive to create strong international institutions in a rules-based way. And there was quite a lot of support from the Republican Party for that.

But then the world began to change, with the advent of the Cold War. Then you had the decolonization of the developing world, which led to vast numbers of countries coming into the United Nations. So the United States no longer had the kind of influence over organization that it had once enjoyed. And now the world has changed, and the United States has changed. There’s much less support for global institutions. The UN charter was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1945. I don’t think that would happen today. So when people here talk about UN reform, and adding more members from Africa and other regions to the Security Council, I always say, “what do you think the chances are that the Senate will embrace that?”

American exceptionalism has always been part of the culture of the United States. But while the Biden administration has made a point of saying we’re back and multilateralism is back and our commitments are back, has that been matched by support for the UN? I don’t see it. Certainly we don’t see it financially; America still owes the UN money for back dues.

But the UN still needs the United States to play a positive role. The biggest mistake you could make would be abandoning the field at the UN to the Chinese and the Russians. Look at Trump’s departure from the World Health Organization—it was a completely self-destructive act.

OR: Canada has always punched above its weight at the UN. Why is that?

Rae: There are a couple of reasons. One is that even if we wanted to say we’re exceptional, the world would just say, “Who the hell do you think you are? You’re just 35, 40 million people. Who are you kidding?” So we depend on multilateralism as a matter of self-interest. It’s not a luxury for us, it’s a necessity. We need to have rules that allow us to trade and operate in the world because if we don’t, then the big will win out and we’ll be left behind.

On the sentimental side, there is also a tremendous feeling that, to use [U.S. Secretary of State] Dean Acheson’s phrase, we were present at the creation of the UN. Canada’s engagement in the Second World War and the establishment of the UN was a transformation from the relatively isolationist and small thinking that had predominated in the years before. Today, we travel, we engage, we feel at home in the world. At the same time, our own country has become more international, more inclusive, more diverse. So we’re not only comfortable going out into the world, we’re comfortable having the world come to us. This is very significant to Canadians’ identity. I’m sure you felt the same thing when you were growing up in Canada. We no longer wonder how we’re different from the United States. We know who we are, and we don’t have any hang-ups being part of the world. We’re not apologetic about it.

I think the challenge that we face as a country now is continuing to live up to those commitments. A lot of countries are now feeling stretched. Although we did make a strong commitment to increase our defense budget this year, as have many other countries, and we’ve continued to steadily increase our aid commitments in the face of the COVID crisis, it’s a continuing battle to remember why it’s so important. I spend a lot of my time talking to Canadians about why this kind of engagement matters for us.

OR: In addition to representing Canada at the UN, you’re vice chair of the Association of State Parties of the International Criminal Court. What are the odds that the ICC is going to be able to hold war-crimes trials related to Ukraine, given that few Russians are in custody and that the court is unlikely ever to get its hands on Russia’s top leaders?

Rae: I don’t know, but what I do know is that they’re working hard to gather evidence. People are trying, and I can’t believe that we won’t be able to do something about the extent of Russia’s criminal acts. The whole war was a crime from the beginning, because it’s a war of aggression. It’s not as if there’s any debate about who started this thing. President Vladimir Putin has called it a “special military operation,” which has a peculiarity Orwellian feeling to it when you think about how the meaning of “special” seems to be, “We’re going to kill babies and pregnant mothers and blow up nursing homes.” What the hell is that?

OR: You’ve been involved in human rights for your whole career. When you consider what you just said—and then remember what’s happening to the Rohingya in Myanmar or the Uyghurs in Xinjiang—do you think we’ve gotten any better at preventing atrocities than we once were?

Rae: I think the difference between now and the past is that we know more about atrocities than we used to. Nobody at the time would’ve known about what happened in the Belgian Congo. When things happen now, we become aware of them much more quickly.

I think we’re also more aware of the universality of human dignity. Fifty or a hundred years ago, you would’ve had a lot of people saying, “Well, those countries, that’s just the way they are.” Nowadays, when terrible things happen, it’s much harder to say that they’re not terrible, or that they’re just a part of how some places function. Today there’s a vast sense that those things are just completely wrong.

But we still need to call things out when they happen, to describe them in ways that people will understand. If you look at the big picture, probably the greatest atrocities historically were the atrocities of discovery, settlement, and colonial expansion. Terrible things happened in many, many parts of the world over long periods of time: slavery, the destruction of the indigenous populations of the Americas, and so on. The world is getting smaller in many ways, and we can’t hide these things anymore. And there’s no excuse for not calling them out.