It seems a strange time to organize a millennium meeting of the world's heads of government at the UN this week. What are they supposed to do? What are they supposed to say? Is anything new afoot? Indeed one could ask, in all seriousness, are there enough toilets for them all with their mammoth entourages? Isn't it the same old dreary UN that everyone loves to use as a punch-bag and which they occasionally run to when they are in trouble?
The millennium changes nothing -- eight months on that is very clear. The thing that could give the UN a jolt, a charge, that would give it a chance of recapturing its old idealism is not a poorly prepared meeting of bosses, nor is it a new Secretary General. It would be for the world's only superpower to take it seriously.
Not only does the US need to pay off its enormous debt of back dues, it needs to put a stop to its unerring ability to paint the organization black.
The latest phase began with US President Bill Clinton's malevolent campaign to shift the killing of American soldiers in Somalia onto the UN, even though it emerged that the US troops were operating independently from the UN, directly under the US command in distant Florida. It interfered counterproductively with the UN operation in Bosnia, criticizing from the sidelines, but slow to act where it might have been useful, with logistics and transport. And it continued with the use of its veto to block preemptive peacekeeping in Rwanda, an action that could have headed off the genocide that followed. Perhaps, for the long run, its gravest fault has been to play around with UN treaty-making on crucial issues, acting the "big boy" that could have his cake and eat it.
The US works hard to get other countries involved in these ground-breaking treaties -- and later expects them to toe the agreed lines -- but then has a nasty habit of stepping back at the last minute and playing the rest of the match by its own rules. We have seen this lately with the establishment of the International Criminal Court for trying war criminals and with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
With the first, after pushing it hard, Clinton, subject to remorseless pressure from the Pentagon, suddenly got cold feet at the last minute. In the second, after years of hard American effort (beginning with President Dwight Eisenhower) to get the world on board, Clinton seemed to lose interest in pulling out the stops to get it ratified in the Senate and last October lost.
The story of the Law of the Sea -- the UN effort to bring law and order to the anarchic world of the seas and oceans that occupy the greater part of our planet -- is nothing less than a parable for our times. It is the UN at its best and the US at its worst and the blame stretches over a number of US administrations. The most that can be said for Clinton is that he appears to have forgotten about it.
The Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994. Before then the seas were ruled by a mixture of customary practices and the dictates of whoever was the predominant power of the time -- the Romans, the British and, more recently, the Americans. Control over territorial waters was for long enough accepted as lying only within cannon-shot, later firmed up as three nautical miles from the shore.
Submarines made nonsense of that during the second World War and since 1945 these traditional limits lost their force. Particularly badly hurt was the fishing industry. With no agreed limits on territorial waters there was massive over-fishing.
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