Big Ideas in International Relations: The UN General Assembly.

In this weekend's NY Times Book Review, Francis Fukuyama, the famous theorist of "The End of History" and a one-time "compagnon de route" of the Neo-conservatives, reviews a book by Samantha Power, who among other things is now a senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama,. Power's new book is a biography of Sergio Viera de Mello, who was the UN's special envoy to Iraq until he was killed by a suicide bomber in the summer of 2003.

For Fukuyama, his book review is a chance to offer his own judgment of the UN:

On Aug. 19, 2003, a Kamash truck pulled into the alley behind the Canal Hotel in Baghdad and a bomb detonated, crumpling a corner of the United Nations’ mission in Iraq. Inside the building was Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian-born United Nations official who had previously served in Vietnam, Lebanon, Cyprus, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor. More than anyone else at the United Nations, he embodied the organization’s idealism, as well as its limitations. Vieira de Mello was pinned under the rubble and hung on for several hours before dying. The ineffectual efforts of American forces to save him were a harbinger of the larger American failure in Iraq.

Samantha Power, whose earlier book, “‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide,” won a Pulitzer Prize, has written a comprehensive biography of Vieira de Mello that explains how his personal evolution paralleled that of the United Nations and how his contradictions and failures were rooted in those of the institution he so loyally served. Vieira de Mello was born in 1948. The son of a Brazilian diplomat, he was a prototypical global cosmopolitan who grew up in Europe and, as a student, manned the barricades during the événements of 1968 in Paris while studying Marxist philosophy. The young Vieira de Mello was instinctively anti-American and cringed when he heard an American accent. After earning his degree, he found work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, traveling to southern Sudan, Mozambique and Vietnam, and passionately embracing the United Nations and international law as the embodiments of global justice.

But the organization’s approach was fraught with internal contradictions that were rudely exposed in the genocidal crises of the mid-1990s. Before the end of the cold war, its peacekeeping operations involved interspersing lightly armed international troops to separate combatants who had signed peace deals and providing humanitarian assistance. The United Nations racked up some successes in places like Namibia, El Salvador and Mozambique, where security conditions were not terribly demanding.

After 1991, however, the number of peacekeeping initiatives exploded, painfully revealing the United Nations’ limitations. Its ethic of strict political neutrality between warring parties ended up favoring aggressors like the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo. Moreover, the peacekeepers’ restrictive rules of engagement prohibited them from firing their weapons, even in self-defense. This led to disgraceful episodes like the one in Rwanda in 1994 when Belgian peacekeepers abandoned the Tutsis to rampaging Hutu militias.

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Samantha Power will be appearing at NYU's Center for Global Affairs on March 10 at 6:30. [More Info]