UN Secretary-Generals are infamous for their reform initiatives. Each new Secretary-General has paraded plans to change the organization, and follow-on initiatives have continuously cascaded down from his 38th floor office, so that by the end of a term it seems a Secretary-General must be reforming his own reforms. 

Kofi Annan was no exception. As a career UN manager he profoundly believed in the need. He introduced three major waves of reform: at the beginning of his term, when he was re-elected for a second term, and then again in his last two years. 

I was particularly involved in that last round. In between, there was a steady trickle of lesser proposals. Across the road in the UN funds and programs, such as UNDP where I was Administrator for six years, or at the agencies in Geneva, Rome, and elsewhere, we, the different chiefs, also had reform-prolix. We were all at it.           

            Probably, the UN is the rare organization where the internal talk seemed to be more about reform than sex. And staff and delegates were largely fed up with it, reform, that is. Each new initiative led to greater levels of cynicism and reform-fatigue. It was often dismissed as being about politics, not real change.

            The critics were half-right. UN reform is about politics in the sense that it is a response to the frustration of governments and the UN’s other stakeholders and partners that our capacity to get results seemed so impaired. People wanted more from us. Unable to deliver, we kept on trying to fix the machine. It became an occupational obsession.

            And for nobody more than a Secretary-General, who, despite his elevated status, had less management power than many of his underlings. I had certainly much greater management authority at UNDP. There, a relatively harmonious board had demanded results but given me the space and the say over budgets, staffing, and priorities to achieve them. And at UNDP reform was better than sex! Staff had seen it work and were for the most part, themselves enthusiastic agents of change. By contrast, the UN was a political bog. Almost nothing moved.

            The last Annan reforms at the UN came after the Oil-for-Food scandal.  This sequence posed the reform issue particularly sharply, in that was this just about politics. Were the proposals we made, after Paul Volcker reported, an attempt to deflect the allegations of wrong-doing by changing the conversation and talking about reforms or were they a serious effort to fix something? The American right wing, who led the charge calling for the resignation of Kofi Annan and fundamental reform of a corrupt institution, were initially wrong-footed by our calls for reform starting in early 2005. How could they not support these calls.

            To their chagrin Volcker did not find a particularly corrupt organization. Only a small handful of UN officials seemed to have been guilty of taking bribes or other unethical behavior. Even one case of corruption is too much but it was so much less than the UN’s fevered critics claimed. Billions of dollars of oil revenue appeared to have been directed honestly towards Iraq’s immediate needs, which was the purpose of the program. The real corruption to a fair-minded reader of the Volcker reports was not that of the UN. The corruption was between companies which were buying Iraq ’s oil and selling the country goods and the Iraqi government which organized an elaborate kickback scheme with the companies that allowed monies to be skimmed off. And the principal blame for this probably should be laid at the door of the governments that either condoned or turned a blind eye to these corporate crimes. That was the big scandal.

The UN’s fault lay elsewhere. It was not corrupt but incompetent. Its failures were supervisory and operational. There was inadequate auditing and in many cases little-to-no attempt to rectify the faults that were found in audit. The muddled lines of responsibility and accountability went all the way to the top.

            Where I was, at UNDP, as disappointing was the way the Oil-for-Food Program had become a major income source for cash-strapped parts of the UN system that had no business being in Iraq in the first place. I found that, because of arcane administrative rules requiring us to find another UN entity actually to implement operationally our program in Iraq, UNDP were using a UN Secretariat department whose traditional work was drafting reports and servicing conferences to rehabilitate the electricity system in the Kurdish parts of northern Iraq. Inevitably, little had happened. The lights and power were still off.

            I put a stop to this and had UNDP take direct charge under a couple of our strongest field managers. We planted them on site and results quickly showed.

            Another UN agency eager to grab a share of the action proposed to build a chalk factory to service the country’s schools, rather than allowing Iraq to import chalk. Years later having failed to manufacture chalk that could withstand contact with a blackboard, the factory was closed. How school children and their teachers got by in the meantime is not clear.

            For a manager confronted with such examples, reform becomes not politics or spin but, a necessity and a deeply-held conviction. You feel ready to throw yourself against a wall as many times as it takes and however bruising, in the hope of breaking through and moving reform forward. The world surely could not afford a dysfunctional United Nations and conscience did not allow any good manager to preside idly for long over such a poorly functioning system.

            Yet the honest judgment on accumulated decades of these efforts is that, while different bits of the UN system have been able to move ahead and improve performance, as a whole the gap between capacity and demand is increasing. The world wants more of the UN, and it is only able to deliver less.

            A second part of the judgment is that reform led by managers alone is a tall order. Governments need to be on board, and powerful ones need to lead. The reforms of 2005 were based on proposals by Kofi Annan to governments that drew on several panels he had commissioned. These were screened and debated by UN diplomats and made the basis of the draft Summit Declaration in the run-up to the Heads of Government meeting at the UN in September 2005.

            While a number of reforms covering peace-building, human rights, development, humanitarian relief, and management made it through the labored preparatory process of drafting committees by the eve of the Summit, the writing was on the wall. Frustrated diplomats still had more than a hundred brackets, as they call them, in the text. That is, language they had not agreed to. With impeccable timing the secretariat produced a compromise text the day before the summit. Key ambassadors were called during the morning in a carefully orchestrated sequence, which included me calling Condi Rice’s delegation, already ensconced at the Waldorf, to by-pass the irascible US ambassador John Bolton. This effort culminated in a lunchtime release of the text. Ambassadors, alarmed at the imminent arrival of their Presidents without a text to show them, fell into line. It was easy to defer to Kofi Annan’s compromise. So there was a summit and a declaration.

            But as soon as the Presidents were gone, battle was joined again. Impassioned divisions between North and South reopened: the North wanted more on security, including an unambiguous definition of terrorism; the South wanted more on development, choosing to treat the huge aid pledges made at Gleneagles in preparation for the Summit as old news and less important than having a few extra officials to service UN meetings on development. On management reform, even more damagingly, developing countries chose to view a stronger Secretary-General with greater authority but also greater accountability as a plot to increase American and Western control over the organization.

            The series of reforms to fix the basics that I, my predecessor Louise Frechette and a dedicated group of UN officials had carefully crafted, with the help of McKinsey’s senior partner Rajat Gupta and his team, proposed personnel reforms to allow mobility and better quality of staff; a more rational budget process, together with flexibility so that every single post was not approved by a committee of 192 member states; topping up field salaries and contract terms to overcome high vacancy rates and rapid staff turnover in our peacekeeping operations; a new outside audit committee to ensure real compliance in correcting financial control problems; and proper terms of reference for the Deputy Secretary-General to make him or her a real chief operating officer for this sprawling under-managed organization. Pretty much all of the management reforms, despite the summit leaders’ endorsement either went down in flames at once or through less dramatic, but no less lethal, attrition over time. What was let through was hollow and silly. Our proposals had been were blocked by diplomats who cared little about management but a lot about politics.

            Despite the finding of Volcker that the Secretary-General and his Deputy did not know who was in charge of Oil-for-Food, I served my time as Deputy without a terms of reference because the Secretary-General and I concluded it would be too controversial to commit anything to paper. It would be opposed on principle as an attempted Western coup. More power for a British deputy would mean less power for an African Secretary-General. In truth, however, nothing disempowers a chief more than having no deputy with clearly delegated responsibilities. The political stubbornness was management folly.

            There was, though, provocation. Paul Volcker himself, as an American chair of the Oil-for-Food investigation, was seen by many ambassadors to be adding fuel to trumped-up Washington charges. Therefore, much of the membership had already made its mind up about his report before it was received. It was dead on arrival. Few wanted to be seen as embracing reform as a consequence of an American neoconservative witch hunt against Kofi Annan and the UN. This was to miss Paul Volcker’s own disquiet with the allegations and the political name-calling. His calm investigation into the facts took the air out of the five congressional investigations and the almost daily tirades of Fox News and the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. His investigations established the truth and arguably saved the UN. But his argument about the necessity of major management reform was lost in the hubbub.

            The greater provocation came, though, from America’s accidental ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. He had arrived in July 2005 banished from the State Department, but needing a prominent position, with a well-advertised anti-UN record. The Wall Street Journal, in trumpeting his credentials, several times in editorials referred to my imprudent partial-endorsement. Seeking a silver lining, I had told them that if he became a champion of reforms at the UN, he would be better placed than anyone else to sell them to Washington. No one would suspect him of going soft on the UN.

            By July when he arrived, the drumbeat of reform was loud in both New York, as the delegates ploughed on with their negotiations of a summit reform text. Indeed, my main fear was that Bolton might try to trump our proposals with something even more far-reaching and therefore less likely to succeed. However, he adopted our proposals without ever quite saying so. It was quickly evident he did not have the knowledge of management in general or the workings of the UN in particular to come up with anything of his own. Nor was it ever clear whether his real intent was to reform or wreck the UN.

            With antagonism towards John Bolton running high, the consent of the world leaders was a hollow victory. As soon as they had left New York, the ambassadors fell on each other again, full of recrimination and score-settling. Dumisani Kumalo, who was South Africa’s ambassador and chairman of the G-77, led the developing countries in their growing opposition to any more talk of Western reforms. Bolton threatened to block the new two years’ budget, due to start in January 2006, to force agreement to the reforms. Developing country counterparts, who seemed almost as keen to provoke a shutdown, convinced themselves that closing down the UN would backfire on him in the same way Newt Gingrich’s similar budgetary action, closing down the American Federal Government, had boomeranged a decade earlier in Washington. Annan and I considered this a real conceit. Many, not just on the right, would have seen the UN’s shuttered headquarters on Manhattan’s First Avenue as a victory and the world was unlikely to launch into a crisis as a result. The field operations, which by contrast would have been quickly missed because they kept the peace and saved lives, would for an odd budgetary quirk have carried on much as before. So, instead we brokered a deal to put the budget on a six-month installment while negotiations on reform acrimoniously continued.

The mood just got worse. By the middle of 2006, the reformers essentially threw in the towel. The budget cap was lifted and face was saved with a few positive comments by all sides, including pious comments from Dumisani Kumalo about the G-77’s commitment to reform. Then, it was back to business as dysfunctional usual.

            A couple of important new institutions had been squeezed through: the Human Rights Council and the Peacebuilding Commission. To have failed to follow through on the Leaders’ Summit commitment to those two institutions would have been too public an act of insubordination by ambassadors to their political masters. Other than that, though, reform was now reduced to what we could press through under our limited executive powers. Where later inter-governmental approval was necessary, we gambled on the inter-governmental mood improving. We focused on personnel reform. First, we tried to tackle a running sore of the UN, the backroom deals that that surrounded the top appointments. We began to publish short lists of candidates for the most senior jobs, along with job descriptions and criteria for the selection. We also reached out widely to governments but also NGOs for candidates, as well as conducting our own parallel search efforts. We began to use headhunters.

            This was quickly noticed. At the same time as the World Bank Board was loyally rubber-stamping the closed selection by the White House of Paul Wolfowitz, the Defense Department deputy and neo-conservative architect of the Iraq War a real development professional Kemal Dervis, a Turkish economist and governmental reformer with decades of developmental experience, emerged from one of the first of these processes as the new head of UNDP. The contrast could not have been more marked.

            Soon, we had similarly good outcomes for, among others, the selection of the new High Commissioner for Refugees, the Under Secretary-Generals for Oversight and children in armed conflict and the head of the UNEP, among others.

            We also put senior people onto a much more accountable contract, as they had become almost impossible to remove. We added a clause reminding them that they served at the pleasure of the Secretary-General and that he reserved the right to remove them with three months’ notice.

            Reflecting on our rocky path, I had concluded by the middle of 2006 that, while a Secretary-General could drive reform with smart proposals that countries could rally around in a way they never would if an individual country proposed them, there was no alternative to a real commitment by countries to a better UN. If they remained outside, lobbing grenades at reform, we could not progress.

            By mid 2006, I had had enough. My frustration went much deeper than John Bolton. It seemed to me that the United States had to be the indispensable partner in UN reform. It was the architect of the institution and no major innovations had occurred without its sponsorship and, usually, leadership. Perversely, although its motives and positions often evoked the most suspicion and hostility, countries liked to be able to fall in with the United States. They deferred to American leadership and had done so repeatedly over sixty years. The speed with which the new US Ambassador Zal Khalilzad has been able to turn around the mood in New York indicates this.  Diplomats want to get on with America.

            The US, long before John Bolton or the Bush Administration, had treated its UN role as a casual seigniorial right, rather than as a unique diplomatic authority to be cultivated and invested in. The United States would use the UN when it suited it, but did little or nothing to speak up for it or support it in between. And when the UN was not convenient, it was equally casually discarded. I would grumble that we were like a menu from which the US ordered sparingly on a la carte basis. There was no recognition that, to make the UN function effectively, it was necessary to buy all the courses, we were a prix fix deal!

            By the early summer of 2006, with reform failing, it seemed the time had come to try to appeal directly to the American people. A forum presented itself in a conference on US foreign policy by the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress. While the speakers were bi-partisan, the organizers had a distinct Democratic Party hue. But I chose not to wait for a more neutral forum. The speech, or at least the speaker, could not wait.

            Carefully with no mention of Bolton and no direct criticism of President Bush, I laid out the complaint: the US took the UN for granted. Presidents and their administrations had lost the habit of standing up for the UN against its critics and of educating Americans in the UN’s usefulness to American foreign policy objectives.

            The location, the speaker, and the theme were too much for Bolton, who was quickly at his microphone outside the Security Council. He demanded that the Secretary-General disown it and that I apologize. Neither happened, and indeed in his closing weeks in office Kofi Annan gave a similar speech from the Truman Library where he was able to gently compare American leadership then and now. What Bolton ’s outburst did do, however, was allow my speech to become defining in terms of the US-UN relationship. In perhaps the best barometer of impact, the Bolton-Malloch Brown spat it made it onto Jon Stewart Daily Show, where Bolton was portrayed as a walrus, and was debated in editorials and blogs across the country.

            A lot of Americans and others around the world had clearly hankered for some kind of correction to the hectoring and bullying the United Nations had suffered at the hands of its US critics. White House behavior that had allowed the attacks to proceed largely unchallenged, even as it turned to the UN for vital strategic assistance in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, was too much for many fair-minded people to stomach.

            In an unanticipated reaction, the professionals in the State Department and elsewhere in Washington, while irritated at having to navigate yet another small tsunami in a fraught relationship, were inclined to discount my words as an inevitable corrective in the light of the US right’s assault. What could a pro-American senior UN official do to preserve his perceived objectivity with other states, went their thinking. For them, the incident was further evidence that Bolton must be doing terrible damage to so provoke a friend of America!

            The underlying point that my speech sought to confront, though, was that reform in the UN was impossible without the United States. Snarling from the sidelines was a deeply damaging substitute for honest engagement. The United States had to patiently build a widening coalition of the like-minded if it was to press through the changes the organization so badly needed. In 1945, when the US led, the UN was established, an astonishing diplomatic achievement by any standard.

            The question for the future is, how reform will be again set up for real action? A new Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, is following the path of his predecessors and proposing to move bits and pieces of the structure around. Nothing yet indicates that he understands the scale of change required. It is easy to imagine reform slumping into a long period of tinkering with the UN machinery in a way that allows the gap to increase between performance and growing need.

            Events are, however, likely to bring matters to a head. First, that growing gap between UN performance and the scale of global problems will prompt a renewal of calls to address UN weakness more systematically. When politicians reach for a solution for climate change or a war and cannot find it, this absence will build the case for a better UN. And if the direction of global events leads, as it inevitably must, to more such demands on the UN, the call for reform is likely to grow steadily. In that sense, a fresh try at reform remains inevitable and the question remains “when”, not “if”.

            Real reforms will require major concessions from powerful and weak countries alike. The inter-governmental gridlock between the big contributors and the rest of the membership concerning governance and voting is the core dysfunction. To overcome it, both sides would have to rise above their own current sense of entrenched rights and privileges and find a grand bargain to allow a new more realistic governance model for the UN.

            That may take a crisis. Indeed, if 1945 created a moment of malleability and vision because of war, there sadly may need to be some similar spur – environmental catastrophe, terrorist attack, global recession, a major breakdown of peace. One wishes for none of them, but it may be that we only see the necessary galvanization of reform when such a crisis is viewed as having been brought about in some major part by the absence of the international means to manage it.

            So reform is likely to move, from a UN management worthily trying to keep up with what it is asked to do, to a real restructuring. This may occur, however, only in the aftermath of events that bring countries to the table ready finally to do business and cut a new deal on the UN. That said, some kind of perfect storm where events drive reform seems likely sooner rather than later.

            I had thought early in 2005 that we might at the September summit reach something significant, even if short of that. Kofi Annan and I both used the term “a San Francisco Moment” for what we hoped would be some kind of renewing of vows by member states to the organization. Yet what seemed the strong pillars for such a recommitment – fighting poverty, addressing security, and promoting human rights and democracy – were not enough to lift us above the fray between the US and its critics.

            Understanding what real reform entails may explain why it seems delegates will fall on almost any excuse not to discuss it. Scrapping in the committee rooms and not grasping the reform nettle can look like a good option for diplomats scared of being drawn into major concessions of rights and privileges that have been the bread and butter of member state representatives.

            The bar is so high for UN reform because the most powerful and the weakest member states both need to give ground in order to make additional space for the emerging new powers. A Britain or France may need to move aside to make room for India or Brazil. But, equally, small countries will have to allow these same new regional powers a preferred status. The pretence of equality will recede further.

            The veto rights of the US, China, Russia, Britain, and France have become the outward symbol of a system still skewed towards the victors of 1945. An irreverent Italian ambassador in New York, when challenging the notion that Germany and Japan might now get permanent seats on the Security Council but not Italy, wondered why, given that the privilege was now apparently being extended from those who won to those who lost in 1945.

            In 2005 and 2006, two reform options were considered: the first was to add new permanent members but without, it was concluded, the veto. The candidates would be Japan, Germany, Brazil, India and two undetermined countries from Africa. The second option was to create an intermediate class of membership where countries would be elected to six-year renewable terms rather than being given permanent membership. It was hoped this would lead to greater accountability and be more democratic than permanent membership.

            Both options fell short probably of the overall change required. This was largely because of a little-challenged assumption that the current P-5 would never give up the privileged terms of their own membership. However, the same was said about the European Union, where similarly Britain and others clung onto the veto until it threatened to invalidate the institution as a whole. There comes a moment in diplomatic calculation, when preserving power inside an organization is more than offset by the consequent loss of that organization’s own power. What is the privilege worth if it is power in an increasingly powerless organisation. Holding more of less needs to be weighed against holding less of more. That negotiator’s tipping-point will be arrived at in the UN, regrettably only perhaps when it is in the throes of crisis and its legitimacy and representativeness under assault.

            The reform that emerges will need, however, to have a built-in flexibility that will self-adjust representation arrangements as power shifts. The mistake of 1945 was to set a particular order and privileges in stone. As the last decades have shown, countries can rise or fall very fast. The need is to be able to correct their representation in a low-key semi-mechanical, self adjusting way that avoids a political showdown.

            My successor as administrator of UNDP, Kemal Dervis, has proposed a weighted voting system for the Security Council similar to that of the World Bank. Unlike the World Bank, countries would not formally vote on behalf of their region or constituency on security matters. Nevertheless, one can imagine a country’s weighting being determined by GDP, population, UN financial contributions, and peacekeeping and aid levels. We slipped in the latter three conditions of global good citizenship to the election criteria for the new Peacebuilding Commission. There are early signs that it is creating a little bit of healthy competitive pressure between candidates as they seek to prove their eligibility.

            Reform of the Security Council can easily lead one to sound like an institutional chiropractor. If only this critical piece of the organization’s spine is properly aligned around members that are thought to represent the world as it is today, goes the hope, then the alignment will fall down through the lower spine, arms, and legs as the whole UN body politic recalibrates itself.

            The resuscitation of the developing countries’ opposition lobby, the G-77, certainly owes a lot to this fight for a more representative Security Council. The G-77 had become a club for hardliners like Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria until India, Brazil, South Africa, and others essentially revived it as a means of confronting the West on UN reform and thereby ultimately securing membership of the Security Council.

            Perhaps even more than adjusting vertebrae, such a change could draw the poison from discussion. Each intergovernmental forum from the Human Rights Council, the management and budget committees, the Economic and Social Council, the Committee for the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinians, and the rest of the alphabetic cacophony of committees, councils, and governing boards exhibit the same distorted behavior patterns. Each has become about politics and point-scoring. The proper work has too often been jettisoned.

            Hopefully, therefore, one could envisage the fever receding; the Human Rights Council becoming a serious deliberative place where delegates of real stature debate countries’ performance and behavior against objective human rights criteria rather than crude political targets; the Fifth Committee, which covers budget and administrative matters, might recognize that a group of almost 200 generally-junior diplomats, one from each country, with little management experience, is not the best way to manage the affairs of the institution, and so begin by reforming themselves, either by creating small professional sub-committees or by promoting external control mechanisms like an audit and oversight committee whose membership would be of the highest professional standards; when the Economic and Social Council ends its interminable discussions of abstract development objectives and policies and becomes a very practical inter-ministerial committee for the Millennium Development Goals, tracking progress, identifying problems, building agreement between donors and poor countries for corrective solutions. In other words an inter-governmental system that works to make the world a better place.

            The World Bank, which has struggled for years under the handicap of having its President chosen in the White House and its policies allegedly too much under the thumb of its Washington neighbor the US Treasury, has been struggling with the composition of its Board. Too easily, vital issues like corruption, universal primary education, or economic reform become hopelessly politicized by both sides. Then, lending slows up, projects become ever more timid in their scope, and political support from donors and recipient countries alike starts to slip away. Paul Wolfowitz became engulfed in the kind of leadership crisis that this lack of legitimacy and acceptance engenders.

            Getting a stable inter-governmental platform, where all have a voice but one weighted to power and contribution, is a vital foundation step to a more stable international system. Good can only flow from it, not least if empowered governments leads to empowered UN management.

As I said at the start, taking a demotion to come over from running UNDP to be Kofi Annan’s chief of staff was a much bigger step down than I had anticipated. Rather than a man in charge of my own show I was to be chief of staff, but to the man who was nominally the most powerful person in the UN system, the Secretary-General himself. Instead, I found when it came to management and budgetary matters, he was less influential than I had been. Whereas I had a cooperative Board that had not been infected by this bitter political confrontation, he was hostage to intergovernmental warfare much more committed to its own fight than to allowing a Secretary-General the authority to lead and manage the UN.

            What we could do at UNDP on our longer leash was remarkable. UNDP had doubled its resources as a reward for reform. In several performance assessments by donors, it moved to the top of the league in terms of its client satisfaction ratings and business efficiency. Annual internal staff surveys showed it to be a highly motivated place with a staff who felt they were making a difference, enjoyed their work, and for the most part respected their managers.

            The personnel reforms that we made so little progress on at the UN because of continuous political interference had sailed through UNDP. We had put in tough rules of mobility, forcing people to go to the field to win further promotions. We were able to establish schemes to recruit and develop bright diverse younger staff and to retain and support our women colleagues as they balanced careers, difficult travel, and hardship assignments with families.

            Early on we had reduced the headquarters staff by 20%, dramatically simplified our focus, and then required all of our field offices to take out functions and activities that no longer fitted with the new priorities. The savings allowed us to staff up around our new key areas such as democracy-building and post-conflict. We were able to re-fit the organization for what our developing countries wanted from us. In the process, we got faster and better at what we did. Clearly when I left there was still a lot to be done. Although much stronger than in the UN, proper audit and controls for example needed further strengthening. Like later in the UN, I had help from McKinsey. In this instance we all were anxious to learn from them to weigh what worked in the private sector and whether it was transferable to the public sector. At the UN, before McKinsey had given any advice, the company was, predictably, already tagged as an American Trojan horse. It was the enemy, not the consultant.

            The contrast was remarkable, and the lesson perhaps obvious. Until the sense of crisis at the UN is strong enough to make governments let go of their own agendas, there cannot be the kind of cathartic recommitment and renewal of the UN proper that is required. Until then, satellites like UNDP or WFP will continue to do well, and at the center the tinkering will go on but it will be no substitute for real reform.

            The roadblock to reform is inter-governmental gridlock.  A good Secretary-General, like Kofi Annan and a dedicated committed UN staff alone cannot overcome this.  Nor, however is it right to single out the US, the G-77 or for that matter Europe or others to blame.  And it is certainly not right to take an individual ambassador and lay the blame at his door.

            All are symptoms of a system imprisoned in a 1945 structure that set everyone at each others’ throats in a 2007 world. Until statesmen are willing to step forward and negotiate a new government which gives everybody significant confidence of ownership to stop acting like dissident shareholders using any means or device to stop the show; and rather be willing to allow an empowered accountable management to lead a modern UN under the strategic direction of governments, the UN will continue to disappoint.

            The world has never in human history been more integrated but less governed. Problems from terrorism to climate change, crime and poverty, migration or public health, security and trade, have escaped national control and the UN is in no state to catch them.  How long can we allow such a global dysfunction to endure?