Is there room for more than one U.N.?

last updated 8 January 2015

Spain

Andrés Ortega

John Bolton certainly knows how to shake things up, said Andrés Ortega in Madrid’s El País. The flamboyantly mustachioed U.S. ambassador to the U.N. has singlehandedly “brought the world body to the verge of paralysis.” The U.S. is responsible for a large chunk of U.N. funding, and Bolton threatened to block the budget if the U.N. didn’t pass comprehensive reforms. No one doubts the need for such reform—the oil-for-food scandal alone showed that the bureaucracy leaves a lot of room for corruption—but few believe that an organization can restructure itself while it’s starved of cash. Bolton finally relented and allowed a six-month budget to move forward, but then he dropped another bomb. The U.N., he said, got so fat and so lazy because it has no competition. Why not, then, give some of its duties to other bodies, such as NATO or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe? Bolton says this “competitive multilateralism” would spur all agencies to greater efficiency, just as companies compete for market share. Only apparently, instead of being governed “by the invisible hand of Adam Smith,” the market in international organizations will be ruled “by the invisible hand of John Bolton.”