Editor’s note: This commentary is by Don Keelan, a retired certified public accountant and resident of Arlington.
I recently asked a few of my friends who the present Secretary-General of the UN is, and got a blank stare from all of them. I might have just as well asked them, “Who is the present leader of Mongolia?” (Khaltmaagiin Battulga)
If you know who António Guterres is, you may not need to continue to read on. But for those readers who don’t have a clue, he is the current Secretary-General of the United Nations. I dare not have asked if they knew where the UN was located and what it does.
It seems like the UN, the world body of nations, has disappeared from the current news landscape of America. This point is documented in that only a few weeks ago, the UN celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding, during the closing months of World War II. Major American newspapers did not mention a word.
The brainchild of Britian’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the early days of WWII, became a reality in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, when 51 nations signed as charter members. Today, the New York City-based organization consists of 193 member states representing close to 7.8 billion people. This is an increase of over 5.5 billion people since 1945.
Maybe it’s because I grew up less than an hour’s ride on the subway from the UN headquarters that I knew about the UN, its leader, and its role in the world. Most of my boyhood friends would recognize the name Dag Hammarskjold, its long-serving Secretary-General. It also could have been that the UN was involved in the Korean War, that kept the UN in front of us.
With respect to wars, since the establishment of the UN, there has not been a world war. However, there have been numerous regional and civil wars – so many, that one aspect of the UN that is not widely known in America is its peacekeeping efforts.
According to a recent story in the Economist, the UN currently has over 100,000 peacekeepers from 120 countries (none from the U.S.) applying their skills in 13 missions throughout the world. Not since WWII have there been so many refugees, 61 million. Furthermore, 46 million are from within their own country.
There are many who harbor the belief that the UN should have done more to have stopped the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, and more recently, in Syria. However, in fairness to the UN, these tragedies could not have been prevented solely by the UN.
Here at home there has been such an indifference toward the UN that there was little pushback when the U.S. pulled out of key UN agencies – UNESCO, the Human Rights Council, and now the World Health Organization.
America cannot have it both ways. We can’t be against the annihilation that is taking place in so many areas of the world if we have decided that we can go it alone in the world – we have seen the failure of this policy all too often.
A Manchester colleague of mine, who had over 20 years of service in the Office of the UN Secretariat, recently noted, “Given what is happening domestically in the U.S. at present, it is perhaps not surprising that Jack and Jill Americans are looking inwards rather than outwards, except for China. But while American backs are turned and the flag of global leadership is left lying on the ground, America’s friends will increasingly look elsewhere …”
Since its founding, the UN member states have increased four times over and so has the world population. A message from Tibet can reach the UN headquarters in NYC in seconds, and hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty and disease. Much of what the UN does is also replicated by countless worldwide NGOs. One has to wonder if the UN’s underlying structure can still work in a world that exists today.
The U.S. should not be looking inward. Instead, it should be leading as it did in 1945 and work to provide the world with an organization(s) that will continue to prevent world wars, pandemics, famines, and deliver numerous humanitarian services for the next 75 years.
