2005: Security or Poverty? America’s Year of Choice

It is a great pleasure to be here at the World Affairs Council of Northern California, one of the oldest and largest organizations covering foreign affairs in the United States. Indeed, I could not be in a more propitious location to address the critical international issues we fact today than in San Francisco, birthplace of the United Nations where nearly 60 years ago the historic UN Charter was signed.

This is of course a momentous time in the development of the UN and in UN-US relations. With the recently published report of the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, commissioned by the Secretary-General, we have one of the most far-reaching analyses of the current threats to international peace and security, how existing policies and institutions have performed in addressing those threats and recommendations on how to strengthen the United Nations so that it can provide the collective security so critical to all, rich and poor, in the 21st Century.

But just as that report was launched two weeks ago, we have seen the culmination of months of attacks on the UN system and its leadership in Kofi Annan which has put the standing and role of the UN in the spotlight like never before. In particular, the allegations of mismanagement by UN officials in the running of the Oil-For-Food-Programme in Iraq had drawn widespread attention, so allow me to address this head-on.

Whether there was misconduct or corruption in the UN is the focus of an Independent Inquiry Committee of a group of 65 investigators led by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Its interim findings are due in January and a final report in mid-2005; we should await its findings. If UN officials are found to have taken bribes or otherwise been involved in illegal activities they should face the full legal consequences.

But it’s clear that already, some people have seen fit to prejudge the inquiries underway by both the UN and Congress, directing their opposition to the very concept of multilateralism around this issue and the embodiment of the organization, the Secretary-General. And when some people don’t understand the billions involved in a complex inter-governmental process, in which Security Council Members themselves, including the United States, designed and oversaw the Oil-for-Food-Programme and awarding of contracts, then alleged indiscretions by a son can equally be used to inflict severe injuries on both the UN’s leadership and its standing as an organization.

But working with Kofi Annan on a daily basis as I do, I can testify that the Secretary-General is completely focused on his ongoing efforts to reform and strengthen the UN, which as I will focus my remarks on today, has never been more critical to global peace and security, not least to the interests of the US as the world’s sole remaining superpower.

Today’s Global Challenges: Security and Poverty

Today we live in a world which is in some ways as dangerous perhaps as at any point in the post-1945 period; a world where the risks of a wrong response to terrorism are not just a kind of status quo with another incident here or there, but of at least as dramatic an escalation of confrontation and violence in the world as during the Cold War. Because we live in another very sensitive age, one where the wrong actions can have devastating and long-term consequences.

It is, however, also an age where the United Nations potentially has an extraordinary new role to play, an age which does not need to go badly, and one where in many ways the elements of response are not beyond our collective means. Terrorism does not need to march forward unchallenged, nor is a descent into polarization and violence along the lines of religion and geo-politics pre-ordained. In fact it is very avoidable - if the right steps are taken to address human security in all its dimensions.

Sitting where I do in the UN, I think my starting point is how can we preserve the effectiveness of our institution to deal with this very dangerous, very difficult world we live in?

Recognizing the importance of the challenges we face today, the report of the Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on today’s threats to global peace and security sets out the broad framework for collective security for a new century and the new ways in which we need to understand the connections between them if we are to address them effectively. Whereas the concern of the United Nations founders in the devastating aftermath of the second World War was collective security in the traditional military sense of preventing aggression between the Great Powers, we know that the biggest security threats we face now, and in the years ahead, go far beyond States waging aggressive war.

As the report makes clear, threats to security extend to poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation, and war and violence, more often than not within States as opposed to between them, the spread and potential use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and terrorism and transnational crime. And the threats are from non-State actors as well as States; to human security as well as State security.

Hence, the central challenge the international community faces is to shape a new understanding of the nature of these multi-dimensional threats, of what collective security means in today’s increasingly interconnected world where disease, terrorism or threats to our environment are no respecter of national boundaries, and to understand all of the responsibilities, commitments, strategies and institutions that need to be in place if a collective security system is to be effective, efficient and equitable.

Because, as events demonstrate, from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on the US and the war in Iraq, to the daily assault on human dignity and security caused by extreme poverty, disease and hunger affecting more than a billion people on our planet, there are widely differing views as to what constitutes a threat to security. As the report acknowledged, some will regard one or more of these threats as not really being a threat to international peace and security; HIV/AIDS viewed as a devastating disease, but not a security threat; or civil wars in Africa a humanitarian tragedy, but not a problem for global security; or poverty as a problem of development and not security.

But extreme poverty and infectious diseases are not only threats in themselves; they also create environments which make the emergence of other threats, including civil conflict more likely. And it also works in reverse; according to the World Bank, the attacks of September 11th cost the world economy more than $80 billion dollars and pushed some 10m people in developing countries into poverty.

In today’s global environment, a threat to one is truly a threat to all. And in view of the limitations on what one country alone can do to protect itself, all States, including the US, have an interest in building a new comprehensive collective security system that commits all to acting cooperatively in the face of today’s wide-ranging threats. Indeed, if we are to have a credible and sustainable multilateral system, there must be a legitimate recognition of the security needs both rich and poor countries face, a coming together of the security and development agendas in a grand bargain that benefits all.

So, what about the US in all of this? Will it buy into this grand bargain?

America’s Choice

We are at an extraordinary moment in the world, where the US is more powerful, economically and militarily, compared to the rest of the world than almost at any time. And I say almost at any time, because many would argue that in 1945, in many ways the US was more militarily powerful than today. While both the vanquished and victors in Europe were on their knees from the results of the second World War, the United States successfully occupied and pacified Germany and Japan, and poured millions of dollars in the most successful development model of all, the Marshall Plan, which saw the US plow the equivalent of $100billion in today's money to help rebuild war-torn Europe, reaping an incalculable dividend in terms of building a stable, democratic West.

And certainly if you look at the US in terms of its share of global GDP, it held a bigger share in 1945 than it does today. But at that point, a bi-partisan leadership led by President Roosevelt, made a clear commitment, despite the distressing failure of the League of Nations, to find a multilateral way to manage global conflicts, global challenges, and threats to peace.

They decided to defy the historical experience of the League of Nations, instead believing that because they were so dominant militarily, and economically, they had a huge stake in a prosperous, fair and free world. It was their future market, their political stability. It would directly influence how much the US had to maintain a standing army, if they could only get these collective security systems in place. And if the price was some dilution of its own power within this multilateral system, that was fine, particularly if it was preserved by a veto in the Security Council, and other institutional arrangements which meant that the US was more than just one member of the new United Nations. Recognizing this new reality, speaking to the final plenary session of the founding conference of the United Nations Organization, President Truman said “We all have to recognize – no matter how great our strength – that we must deny ourselves license to do always as we please.”

Indeed, in the midst of the current controversy surrounding US-UN relations it is all too easy forget the role the US has had in the United Nations since its creation. In many ways the UN Charter reads like an American civil society document. Read the charter, and take out the slightly grandiloquent language of 1945, and it could be the vision statement of the Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights, or of CARE, or of the International Rescue Committee. This vision of civil society, and of human rights, and of pluralism, and of market economics, and democracy, already informed actions in 1945 at the historic Conference here in San Francisco when the UN Charter was signed.

And those values have got ever stronger, culminating in the Millennium Declaration of 2000 agreed by all 189 UN Member States, which was an open call for peace and security, disarmament, human rights, democracy and good governance, free markets and truly free and fair trade and the opportunity to unite around a common vision to build a better world for all people. Throughout our history, there has been a huge coincidence of values between an American vision of the world, and a UN vision of the world.

Now, that system has broadly served the US well. But while there has been no chronic collapse like the League of Nations, it’s clear that the UN has a record which is far from perfect. The Security Council was unable to prevent atrocities such as the reign of terror under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, or genocide in Rwanda. Undoubtedly, the UN is a system which fundamentally needs to be modernized and reformed to meet the much greater challenges that we now face in the post Cold War world and the world post September 11th.

So, nearly sixty years on, we find ourselves at another historic crossroads, faced with the choice of building an effective UN and multilateral system able to respond to the increasingly complex challenges we face, or the more perilous and uncertain alternative of ad hoc alliances to deal with threats to peace and security.

If we are to take the route towards a shared global prosperity and international peace and a collective security where the security concerns of all States are addressed, it is a path that the UN and the US must embark on together.

Working Together to Build a More Secure World for All

The international community has already sought to address the reality of today’s global politics in the Millennium Declaration. Agreed by all UN Member States at the Millennium Summit in 2000, they capture the aspirations for a world united by common values, working to achieve peace and security and a decent standard of living for every man, woman and child. Emanating from the declaration, the Millennium Development Goals are an ambitious global poverty- fighting agenda, embodied in a set of eight goals that respond to real world inequalities that threaten the security of us all: halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, making primary education available to all girls and boys, halting and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other major diseases, reducing child and maternal mortality around the world and working for global cooperation, not least in the critical areas of aid, trade and debt relief.

At this time of debate on the links between security and development, and increasing cynicism from some quarters on whether helping poor countries, while worthy, can really make a difference to security, it is worth reminding ourselves of the fact that development works. Over the past 40 years life expectancy at birth in developing countries has increased by 20 years – about as much as was achieved in all of human history before the middle of the twentieth century. Over the past 30 years, adult illiteracy in the developing world has been cut nearly in half, from 47 percent to 25 percent. Clean water, education, access to health care, all these critical indicators of human development are moving steadily upwards, to cover larger and larger parts of developing country populations. The Millennium Development Goals, while ambitious are feasible at a global level and are still achievable at national level for nearly every country – if there is the political will.

So while 2015 is the deadline for meeting these Goals, it has become increasingly clear that the year 2005 will be critical to achieving them for two reasons. First is a simple development reason: if we do not have at least a decade of steady promotion of the right policies with the right level of resources to back them, we will not get the kind of outcomes we need to correct the path of development towards meeting the MDGs in the next decade.

Second, in the same way that the International conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey two years ago provided a deadline for big commitments on development assistance by both the United States and the European Union, the pledges and commitments made in a number of fora in 2005 can be similarly geared towards securing a success at the UN high-level summit next September when world leaders will meet to review progress on the MDGs as well as the restructuring of global security called for by the UN's High Level Panel.

And it is here that we see these two agendas coming together. The report of the High-Level Panel which argues that there is only one legitimate security system: a global security system which doesn't just meet the needs of the rich to be protected against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, but a security system which also meets the needs of the poor to be protected against poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation, sets us up for a second crucial report. Under the leadership of Professor Jeffrey Sachs, nearly 300 policy makers and academics have prepared the Millennium Project, the single biggest piece of intellectual work undertaken at the UN in the last 20 or so years, which has developed a set of core recommendations and actions on how the world could achieve the MDGs by 2015, which will be published in mid-January. And this development work will come together, first in a report by the Secretary-General to the UN Summit on the implementation of the Millennium Declaration to be published in March, but then, we hope, in a grand bargain at that Summit, where the development agenda of the poor will be married to the security agenda of the rich, perhaps in its way as important a bargain as the founding of the UN represented in San Francisco in 1945.

At that summit, the hope is to secure not just an endorsement of the Secretary-General’s vision for the UN’s role in the world, but also, even more ambitiously, to gain agreement on this grand bargain that can address the needs of “all States – rich and poor, weak and strong”, a deal that would include greater development assistance coupled with capacity building by the governments receiving that assistance.

We are proud of a Secretary-General who, despite the travails of the concerns regarding the Oil for Food Programme and many other attacks at the moment on the UN, is remaining absolutely focused on making sure that next year the UN is able to sort of offer a renewal of itself, but also a renewal of global trust and multilateralism, by focusing on these security and development agendas. Given the challenges that the world now faces, I believe this agenda may be just as important as the work that was done to set up the United Nations, addressing the biggest problems that humanity faces in the 21st century.

As Kofi Annan said in his address to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles last December, while “the United Nations is not perfect, it is precious. Indeed, it is indispensable to the security and progress of all nations – including this one.”

So, to answer the question I posed in the title of my address today on the choice America faces -- security or poverty – the reality is that there is no choice, it must be both. There cannot be peace with poverty, nor can there be development if there is conflict and insecurity in the world, and therefore we need to drive both agendas. The UN remains absolutely focused on making sure that over the next year we are able to offer a renewal of ourselves, but also a renewal of global trust in multilateralism, by focusing on these security and development agendas.

So, 2005 is a year of global decision, for the US and the world. My own view is that the agenda of reforming the Security Council, to make it more representative of today's world, making the UN as a whole more politically effective, will come together with the agenda on the fight against global poverty, AIDS, and the absence of education, to perhaps create a global deal here at the UN, where in return for a better resourced, better supported effort to fight global poverty, there will be a strengthening of the political and security institutions at the UN, to make them more effective, for the US and for many other countries that care deeply about that agenda.

Thank you.