Top 10 Things the UN Does Well, and Some It Needs To Work On!

I've been reading Democracy Arsenal a lot lately. It is a group blog about "US foreign policy and global affairs." One of the writers is Suzanne Nossel, a Senior Fellow at the Security and Peace Institute. She served as Deputy to the Ambassador for UN Management and Reform at the US Mission to the United Nations from 1999 – 2001 under Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke. The other folks who write there have equally impressive backgrounds.

Nossel wrote a post called Top 10 Things the UN Does Well. She is guest blogging at the another blog I regularly read, that of the conservative Daniel Drezner. (Drezner is a political science prof at the University of Chicago and previously served as an international economist in the Treasury Department.) At Drezner's blog, Nossel wrote What's Wrong With the UN, showing that support for the UN and support for reforming the UN are not mutually exclusive. Obviously I do not have anywhere near the experience she does, but the two lists make sense to me.

One item on her list of things that the UN does well is this:

4. Peacekeeping. The UN has 16 active peacekeeping missions right now, in places like Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Lebanon, Liberia and Burundi. Make no mistake: in most of those places if the UN weren't there, no one else but the marauders would be and the peace or relative peace being kept would have disintegrated long ago. The history of UN peacekeeping is checkered for at least 2 reasons: a) vague mandates and inadequate resources decreed by the countries on the UN Security Council and b) poor planning, management and capabilities. On the latter front (the only front which the UN qua UN can do anything about), the organization has made real progress based on a 2000 reform report. While holes still exist, a most-improved-player award is in order here.

This stood out to me because I have been reading a lot about Rwanda recently, where the UN was a complete failure. It is good to see that the UN is making improvements. The 2000 reform report can be found here.

Nossel also has written more thoughts about needed UN reforms.