Annan at the End: Grading the Secretary-General

Few institutions are as much discussed or as poorly understood as the United Nations. The media frequently cover specific crises but rarely offer in-depth commentary on the organization. Meanwhile, the many academic theses, commission reports, and expert analyses that are published on the UN remain inaccessible -- and often incomprehensible -- to the lay reader. Most Americans remain ignorant about how the UN is structured, what shapes its agenda, and why it acts the way that it does.

With any luck, all of that is about to change. This year, a burst of new books that delve deeply into the UN are being published by well-known authors -- a measure of attention unprecedented in the recent history of the world body. The books include a study of the UN's first 60 years by the Yale historian Paul Kennedy; a biography of Secretary-General Kofi Annan by Stanley Meisler, a former foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times; an account of the life and tragic death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the UN's most formidable diplomats, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power; an overview of the U.S.-UN relationship by Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state and now the president of the Brookings Institution; and, finally, The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American Power by James Traub, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.

What explains this sudden American interest in the UN, a critical but confounding organization? The answer may stem in part from morbid curiosity with the numerous scandals that have beset the UN in recent years. It may also owe to genuine concern with the issues that preoccupy the institution: terrorism, globalization, AIDS, and environmental degradation. And it probably also reflects awe at how the UN and its leaders have managed to survive -- and occasionally prevail -- in the face of their various failures.

The organization has always had a particularly complicated relationship with Washington. The United States has especially intimate ties to the UN. No country was more directly responsible for the organization's creation; it was two U.S. presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who propelled the UN into being in 1945, eschewing "coalitions of the willing" in favor of a permanent, worldwide security institution. Truman was clear from the outset on what his involvement would mean. On June 25, 1945, in his closing address to the San Francisco conference that drafted the UN Charter, he stated, "We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please." With these words, Truman signaled that he was abandoning the U.S. traditions of isolationism and unilateralism in favor of a new, universal alliance -- a task that would require serious adjustments by future U.S. presidents.

This shift has not always sat comfortably with Truman's successors. Indeed, Washington discovered soon after the UN's birth that despite its veto power in the Security Council, it could not always control its wayward child. As a result, ever since 1945, U.S. leaders have approached the UN with ambivalence: hoping, on the one hand, to use it to further U.S. national security interests, while, on the other hand, worrying that too much involvement might constrain the United States' ability to act.

This concern is easy to understand. For although the UN has backed the United States on many important occasions -- helping it resist a communist invasion of South Korea in 1950, aiding the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and endorsing the ouster of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 -- it has also frequently defied Washington. Thanks to the U.S.-Soviet split during the Cold War, the UN stood by impotently as a number of great emergencies -- such as the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968 -- unfolded. At other times, the UN has deeply offended U.S. leaders and large segments of the U.S. population, as when, in 1975, it passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism. Even after the Berlin Wall fell and the Security Council finally began to act in unison, it still failed to support NATO's air war on Kosovo in 1999 and the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003.

This mixed record has caused great frustration among many members of the U.S. Congress, who have expressed their pique over the years by periodically blocking the payment of the United States' UN dues. It has not helped matters that the UN has also failed to accomplish most of its idealistic goals, such as alleviating poverty, ending armed conflict, spreading democracy, upholding human rights, eliminating AIDS, and improving the lot of the world's women and children.

Yet despite its tattered legacy, the organization has shown immense durability, and polling data in the United States continue to suggest that more than 60 percent of the American people support the organization. Much of the credit for the UN's persistently high stature in the United States and the world owes to the organization's leadership, especially Kofi Annan -- the UN's current secretary-general and the subject of Traub's new book.

VERY GOOD YEARS

The Best Intentions is the first full-length account of the ways in which Annan, despite his well-publicized stumbles, has enhanced the UN. Traub presents a thorough report on one of the UN's most turbulent eras (1997-2006), using Annan's own record as a way to describe the inner workings of the UN and provide a first cut at history. The result is one of the most definitive and accessible studies of the UN and its chief executive ever published.