How China uses the UN and WHO for its own nefarious ends

December 14, 2021
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This article appeared in the New York Post on December 13, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

One unforeseen consequence of the pandemic was seeing the World Health Organization perform like China’s puppet. 

WHO’s ponderous bureaucracy repeatedly accepted Beijing’s version of the pandemic’s origins; yielded to crippling restrictions on independent epidemiological experts trying to assess the virus, and resisted Taiwan’s efforts to share its successful early-stage efforts against the spreading disease. 

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. WHO’s director-general, Ethiopian scientist Dr. Tedros Adhanom, had won election with China’s enthusiastic support, prevailing in 2017 over a US-backed candidate. Tedros succeeded China’s Margaret Chan, who as director-general spent considerable time placing Chinese and China-sympathetic personnel into key positions. Chan’s 2006 selection (and later re-election) was a visible but far-from-only sign of Beijing’s campaign to increase its senior-level influence across the vast United Nations system, especially in the specialized agencies, which should be nonpolitical. 

Qu Dongyu, over US opposition, became director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization in 2019, like Chan the first Chinese national to head his agency. China’s Houlin Zhao has led the International Telecommunications Union since 2015, as did Fang Liu the International Civil Aviation Organization until earlier this year. 

Fortunately, Beijing’s candidates do not always prevail. In 2020, in a contested race for director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization, a Washington-backed Singaporean citizen defeated a Chinese candidate. 

WIPO has a critical role in protecting intellectual property from global pirates, of which, for decades, China has been undeniably the largest. Had Beijing taken WIPO’s top position, the economic and political implications would have been enormous. 

Pursuing high-level executive positions is in turn only part of China’s effort to dominate the UN system for its own ends, recalling Soviet Union tactics from Cold War days. Moscow famously inserted KGB agents as Russian “interpreters” into secretariats throughout the UN, with predictable results. Who knows if China is doing the same? 

Beijing is systematically pursuing several critical priorities. Most important is excluding Taiwan from significant participation in UN affairs, part of a relentless campaign underway since Beijing replaced Taipei as holder of the “China” seat in 1971. 

Blocked to this day by China from reapplying for membership in the UN itself, Taiwan sought membership in several specialized agencies as a stepping stone to, ultimately, full UN membership. This was anathema to China, which was determined to snuff out any Taiwanese efforts at their first appearance. 

For three decades, Taiwan tried repeatedly to increase its participation in WHO to demonstrate its responsibility and capabilities as a representative, independent state. Paradoxically, humanitarian efforts to demonstrate Taipei’s medical competence, and its specific willingness to aid the international response against the coronavirus, threatened Beijing. 

Because of China’s longtime efforts to increase its influence within WHO, it was no accident Xi Jinping was fully prepared to unleash its bureaucracy to discredit Taiwan’s efforts and manipulate WHO to frustrate any meaningful understanding of China’s role in the pandemic’s origins. Tedros went so far as to accuse Taiwan, without foundation, of originating or condoning racist attacks and even death threats against him, which Taiwan emphatically denied. 

Beijing’s second major focus is subverting the UN’s Human Rights Council. China is always alert to block any UN investigation of its abysmal human-rights record, including the ongoing genocide against the Uighurs in Xinjiang; the broad repression of religious freedom throughout China, and the crushing of Hong Kong’s political rights, in violation of its international commitments (and a model of Taiwan’s fate if Beijing ever gets the chance). 

With publisher Jimmy Lai languishing in prison and many other Hong Kong voices silenced, one searches in vain at the United Nations for criticism of China analogous to what inevitably follows actions by Israel or the United States that displease our adversaries. It is not just the UN’s institutional hypocrisy at work here, but China’s silent, assiduous and unfortunately successful efforts to stifle any unwelcome activity within the UN. 

Washington should not tolerate Beijing’s UN obstructionism, however manifested. Faced with a worldwide pandemic it could have helped mitigate, China acted irresponsibly, blocking scientific inquiry and engaging in its continuing political vendetta against Taiwan. Similarly, while China is not the only UN member trying to conceal its human-rights record, it stands head and shoulders above the other miscreants. 

Although President Joe Biden wants America to remain a WHO member and rejoin the Human Rights Council, he has done nothing to reverse China’s malign influence in the United Nations. We will suffer for this failure of US leadership. 

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019 and US ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006. 

Israel’s (and America’s) imminent UNESCO mistake

August 16, 2021
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This article appeared in The Daily News on August 3, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton

August 3, 2021

Is it possible that Israel’s fragile governing coalition and Joe Biden’s administration will rejoin the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)? Apparently so, according to recent media reports.

If true, such a policy shift would be a significant mistake in dealing with the United Nations generally, and a dramatic repudiation of hard-fought victories against efforts to have “Palestine” declared a state by the UN rather than through direct negotiations with Israel.

Perhaps Yair Lapid, the left-of-center foreign minister of Israel’s morganatic, bare-majority coalition, doesn’t see any problems ahead. What is stunning is that conservative Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has acceded to Lapid’s initiative, risking the ire of his own supporters, not to mention Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud Party, probing continuously and aggressively for mistakes potentially fatal to Bennett’s shaky government.

Equally incomprehensible is why Biden, beset by threats ranging from COVID-19 to rising inflation from huge federal spending increases, would seek to resurrect the UNESCO issue. Even if he did rejoin, Congress would certainly reject paying renewed contributions to UNESCO, much less over $500 million in arrearages America purportedly owes. Biden would face a massive political struggle without the prospect of any substantive accomplishment.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, center, flanked by Alternate Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, left, chairs the first weekly cabinet meeting of the new government in Jerusalem, Sunday, June 20.

The UN’s fundamental basis is that is an organization of member states. Accordingly, because Washington almost invariably opposes politicizing the work of UN technical bodies, it has consistently rejected efforts by non-states to join the UN and its specialized agencies.

UNESCO has long been among the most politicized UN organizations. Ronald Reagan withdrew America in 1983 because of UNESCO’s systematic anti-U.S. biases, and concern for its rampant anti-Semitism. Indeed, even as the Cold War later wound down, George H.W. Bush refrained from rejoining UNESCO, largely due to its deeply embedded anti-Israeli bias.

George W. Bush’s decision to return proved the error of thinking UNESCO capable of reform. Inevitably, despite clear forewarning of the disaster it was courting, UNESCO admitted the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a member state in 2011. Like its predecessor Palestine Liberation Organization, the PA palpably fails to meet customary international law requirements for “statehood.”

UNESCO’s misbegotten decision triggered U.S. statutory obligations to stop funding any UN agency that accorded the PA “state” status. This statute’s origin is an iconic marker of the longstanding, bipartisan, U.S. opposition to Palestinian efforts to create facts on the ground in the UN’s friendly corridors. In 1989, over U.S. and Israeli opposition, the PLO tried to join the World Health Organization. Then-Secretary of State Jim Baker pledged to advise President Bush that the U.S. “make no further contributions, voluntary or assessed, to any international organization which makes any change in the PLO’s status as an observer organization.”

Baker’s warning stopped the PLO cold. Congress subsequently enacted his warning into law, thereby binding subsequent administrations. Nonetheless, in 2011, this plain language was ignored by all concerned: Obama, the PA and UNESCO’s membership. Even afterward, when Washington, as required, terminated funding, UNESCO failed to get the point. Accordingly, in 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced America’s second withdrawal. Given this history of critical Republican attitudes on UN funding and the PA, and significant splits within the Democratic Party on the issue, Biden would be politically myopic to pick this fight again.

So why is Israel raising it now? Axios reports that Lapid believes “Israel’s withdrawal from international forums over claims they were biased only made Israeli foreign policy less effective.” We can only hope this reporting is deeply flawed; if true it would reflect a stunningly naive worldview, unprecedented among Israel’s modern-era foreign ministers.

What next? Will Israel join Washington’s plan to rejoin the deeply flawed UN Human Rights Council? Under Lapid’s reported rationale, and presumably Biden’s as well, this is entirely possible. Created in 2006, the Council was intended to avoid repeating the anti-American, anti-Israel practices of its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission. The reform effort failed so badly, however, that Washington and Jerusalem voted against establishing the new Council, and, once established, the U.S. declined to join. Obama reversed this policy, successfully seeking American election to the new forum. Entirely predictably, the Council’s behavior was as bad as its egregious predecessor. Trump’s senior advisers, rightly concluding there was no prospect for the Council to improve, unanimously recommended withdrawal, which occurred in 2018.

UNESCO membership might well be a non-event but for the evidence it provides of people’s views on larger issues. In “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More says scornfully, “it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world….But for Wales?” We can say here, that it never profits either America or Israel to compromise their vital national interests.…But for UNESCO?

Bolton Speech Underscores Trump Administration Putting America First On The Global Stage

October 06, 2018
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This article appeared at The Hudson Institute on September 17th, 2018. Click here to view the original article.

National Security Advisor John Bolton delivered a blockbuster speech at an event hosted by the Federalist Society last Monday, about how monumentally dumb and dangerous the International Criminal Court is for America.

The ICC is a multinational organization established by the Rome Statute. President Bill Clinton signed on to the statute in 2000 but never submitted the international treaty to the Senate. President George W. Bush then unsigned the treaty. President Barack Obama never signed the treaty, but he was friendly to it and cooperated with the ICC.

Bolton made the Trump administration’s position on the ICC ultra-clear in his speech:

“The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court. We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.”

It was a powerful rejection of the court. But that’s not all it rejected, and to singularly focus on the ICC misses larger principles that will surely guide the administration’s decisions about other international agreements. Three principles stood out.

The United States Is Not the Peer of Somalia

First, not all countries are equally bad or equally good; the United States is a force for good and rejects the notion that the United States, just like other nations, must be constrained.

“The largely unspoken, but always central, aim of its most vigorous supporters was to constrain the United States,” Bolton said. “The objective was not limited to targeting individual US service members, but rather America’s senior political leadership, and its relentless determination to keep our country secure.”

Second, American sovereignty abroad means possessing the ability to act freely in the world, and we must ultimately remain governed by our own Constitution. Bolton said:

“The court in no way derives these powers from any grant of consent by non-parties to the Rome Statute. Instead, the ICC is an unprecedented effort to vest power in a supranational body without the consent of either nation-states or the individuals over which it purports to exercise jurisdiction. It certainly has no consent whatsoever from the United States. As Americans, we fully understand that consent of the governed is a prerequisite to true legal legitimacy, and we reject such a flagrant violation of our national sovereignty.”

Third, international law, treaties, and agreements, while not necessarily useless, are not intrinsically good, either. Nor are they ultimately responsible for restraining evil.

“The hard men of history are not deterred by fantasies of international law such as the ICC. The idea that faraway bureaucrats and robed judges would strike fear into the hearts of the likes of Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Stalin, and Gaddafi is preposterous, even cruel. Time and again, history has proven that the only deterrent to evil and atrocity is what Franklin Roosevelt once called ‘the righteous might’ of the United States and its allies — a power that, perversely, could be threatened by the ICC’s vague definition of aggression crimes.”

ICC Isn’t the Only Agreement Being Reconsidered

This brings us to another newsy decision by the United States that made fewer and smaller waves than the ICC speech this week. The United States refused to certify Russia’s advanced Tu-214ON surveillance plane for inspections under the Open Skies Treaty. The Open Skies Treaty came into force in 2003. Its purpose is to foster transparency and to help verify compliance of other arms control agreements.

The U.S. government hasn’t issued a statement in response to the reports that it has denied certification of Russia’s surveillance plane, but it should not be missed that Russia has a long history of violating treaties and has continually and recently violated the Open Skies Treaty. In a congressional hearing last June, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said he was very concerned about Russian compliance. “We will be meeting with State Department and National Security staff here in the very near future. There certainly appears to be violations of it [the Open Skies Treaty],” he said.

Mattis was rather cryptic in the open hearing, but just a few months before the hearing the State Department published a report that outlined some of Russia’s violations, including prohibiting certain overflights. If the United States has decided it will no longer look the other way when Russia so brazenly violates the treaty, this supposed refusal to certify the surveillance plane is just the beginning.

Countries like Russia should take Bolton’s speech seriously. This administration is taking stock of agreements and treaties that do not serve American interests first. If a treaty is not serving the interests of the American people today, even if it did at some point in the past, and if it is constraining the United States while adversaries violate it, there is a good chance that treaty is close to its expiration date. So be it.

How to Defund the U.N.

December 26, 2017
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A few of its agencies do useful work. American taxpayers shouldn’t pay for the many that don’t.

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on December 26, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
December 25, 2017

As an assistant secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration, I worked vigorously to repeal a hateful United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism. Foreign diplomats frequently told me the effort was unnecessary. My Soviet counterpart, for example, said Resolution 3379 was only a piece of paper gathering dust on a shelf. Why stir up old controversies years after its 1975 adoption?

We ignored the foreign objections and persisted because that abominable resolution cast a stain of illegitimacy and anti-Semitism on the U.N. It paid off. On Dec. 16, 1991, the General Assembly rescinded the offensive language.

Now, a quarter-century later, the U.N. has come close to repeating Resolution 3379’s original sin. Last week the U.N. showed its true colors with a 128-9 vote condemning President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

This seemingly lopsided outcome obscured a significant victory and major opportunity for the president. Thirty-five countries abstained, and 21 didn’t vote at all. Days earlier the Security Council had endorsed similar language, 14-1, defeated only by the U.S. veto. The margin narrowed significantly once Mr. Trump threatened to penalize countries that voted against the U.S. This demonstrated once again that America is heard much more clearly at the U.N. when it puts its money where its mouth is. (In related news, Guatemala announced Sunday it will move its embassy to Jerusalem, a good example for others.)

While imposing financial repercussions on individual governments is entirely legitimate, the White House should also reconsider how Washington funds the U.N. more broadly. Should the U.S. forthrightly withdraw from some U.N. bodies (as we have from UNESCO and as Israel announced its intention to do on Friday)? Should others be partially or totally defunded? What should the government do with surplus money if it does withhold funds?

Despite decades of U.N. “reform” efforts, little or nothing in its culture or effectiveness has changed. Instead, despite providing the body with a disproportionate share of its funding, the U.S. is subjected to autos-da-fé on a regular basis. The only consolation, at least to date, is that this global virtue-signaling has not yet included burning the U.S. ambassador at the stake.

Turtle Bay has been impervious to reform largely because most U.N. budgets are financed through effectively mandatory contributions. Under this system, calculated by a “capacity to pay” formula, each U.N. member is assigned a fixed percentage of each agency’s budget to contribute. The highest assessment is 22%, paid by the U.S. This far exceeds other major economies, whose contribution levels are based on prevailing exchange rates rather than purchasing power parity. China’s assessment is just under 8%.

Why does the U.S. tolerate this? It is either consistently outvoted when setting the budgets that determine contributions or has joined the “consensus” to avoid the appearance of losing. Yet dodging embarrassing votes means acquiescing to increasingly high expenditures.

The U.S. should reject this international taxation regime and move instead to voluntary contributions. This means paying only for what the country wants—and expecting to get what it pays for. Agencies failing to deliver will see their budgets cut, modestly or substantially. Perhaps America will depart some organizations entirely. This is a performance incentive the current assessment-taxation system simply does not provide.

Start with the U.N. Human Rights Council. Though notorious for its anti-Israel bias, the organization has never hesitated to abuse America. How many know that earlier this year the U.N. dispatched a special rapporteur to investigate poverty in the U.S.? American taxpayers effectively paid a progressive professor to lecture them about how evil their country is.

The U.N.’s five regional economic and social councils, which have no concrete accomplishments, don’t deserve American funding either. If nations believe these regional organizations are worthwhile—a distinctly dubious proposition—they are entirely free to fund them. Why America is assessed to support them is incomprehensible.

Next come vast swaths of U.N. bureaucracy. Most of these budgets could be slashed with little or no real-world impact. Start with the Office for Disarmament Affairs. The U.N. Development Program is another example. Significant savings could be realized by reducing other U.N. offices that are little more than self-licking ice cream cones, including many dealing with “Palestinian” questions. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees could be consolidated into the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Many U.N. specialized and technical agencies do important work, adhere to their mandates and abjure international politics. A few examples: the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization. They shouldn’t be shuttered, but they also deserve closer scrutiny.

Some will argue incorrectly that unilaterally moving to voluntary contributions violates the U.N. Charter. In construing treaties, like contracts, parties are absolved from performance when others violate their commitments. Defenders of the assessed-contribution model would doubtless not enjoy estimating how often the charter has been violated since 1945.

If the U.S. moved first, Japan and some European Union countries might well follow America’s lead. Elites love the U.N., but they would have a tough time explaining to voters why they are not insisting their contributions be used effectively, as America has. Apart from risking the loss of a meaningless General Assembly vote—the Security Council vote and veto being written into the Charter itself—the U.S. has nothing substantial to lose.

Thus could Mr. Trump revolutionize the U.N. system. The swamp in Turtle Bay might be drained much more quickly than the one in Washington.

The Hague Aims for U.S. Soldiers

November 21, 2017
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A ‘war crimes’ inquiry in Afghanistan shows the danger of the International Criminal Court


This article appeared in The Hill on November 21, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 21, 2017

For the first time since it began operating in 2002, the International Criminal Court has put the U.S. in its sights. On Nov. 3, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda initiated an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Afghanistan since mid-2003. This raises the alarming possibility that the court will seek to assert jurisdiction over American citizens.

Located in The Hague (alongside such dinosaurs as the International Court of Justice, which decides state-versus-state disputes), the ICC constitutes a direct assault on the concept of national sovereignty, especially that of constitutional, representative governments like the United States. The Trump administration should not respond to Ms. Bensouda in any way that acknowledges the ICC’s legitimacy. Even merely contesting its jurisdiction risks drawing the U.S. deeper into the quicksand.

The left will try to intimidate the White House by insisting that any resistance to the ICC aligns the U.S. with human-rights violators. But the administration’s real alignment should be with the U.S. Constitution, not the global elite. It would not be “pragmatic” to accept the ICC; it would be toxic to democratic sovereignty.

The U.S. is not party to the Rome Statute, the treaty establishing the ICC’s authority. Bill Clinton signed it in 2000, when he was a lame duck. But fearing certain rejection, he did not submit it to the Senate. The Bush administration formally “unsigned” in 2002 before the Rome Statute entered into force. That same year, Congress passed supportive legislation protecting U.S. servicemembers from the ICC, a law that was decried by hysterical opponents as the “Hague Invasion Act.” The U.S. then entered into more than 100 bilateral agreements committing other nations not to deliver Americans into the ICC’s custody.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice later weakened America’s opposition to the ICC. Barack Obama manifestly longed to join but nonetheless did not re-sign the Rome Statute. Thus the U.S. has never acknowledged the ICC’s jurisdiction, and it should not start now. America’s long-term security depends on refusing to recognize an iota of legitimacy in this brazen effort to subordinate democratic nations to the unaccountable melding of executive and judicial authority in the ICC.

Proponents of global governance have always wanted to turn the U.S. into just another pliant “member” of the United Nations General Assembly or the ICC. They know that America’s exceptionalism and commitment to its Constitution were among their biggest obstacles, but they hoped to cajole Washington into joining one day. The new Afghanistan investigation demonstrates why that vision needs to be confronted now and conclusively defeated.

The U.S. has done more than any other nation to instill in its civilian-controlled military a respect for human rights and the laws of war. When American servicemembers violate their doctrine and training—which can happen in any human institution—the U.S. is perfectly capable of applying our own laws to their conduct. These laws and procedures do not need to be second-guessed by international courts, especially ones that violate basic rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, like trial by jury.

Obama’s Parting Betrayal of Israel

December 27, 2016
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Trump must ensure there are consequences for supporting U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334.

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on December 27, 2016. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
December 27, 2016

Last Friday, on the eve of Hanukkah and Christmas, Barack Obama stabbed Israel in the front. The departing president refused to veto United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334—a measure ostensibly about Israeli settlement policy, but clearly intended to tip the peace process toward the Palestinians. Its adoption wasn’t pretty. But, sadly, it was predictable.

Mr. Obama’s refusal to use Washington’s veto was more than a graceless parting gesture. Its consequences pose major challenges for American interests. President-elect Donald Trump should echo Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s defiant and ringing 1975 response to the U.N.’s “Zionism is racism” resolution: that America “does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”

Mr. Obama argues that Resolution 2334 continues a bipartisan American policy toward the Middle East. It does precisely the opposite. The White House has abandoned any pretense that the actual parties to the conflict must resolve their differences. Instead, the president has essentially endorsed the Palestinian politico-legal narrative about territory formerly under League of Nations’ mandate, but not already under Israeli control after the 1948-49 war of independence.

Resolution 2334 implicitly repeals the iconic Resolution 242, which affirmed, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, that all affected nations, obviously including Israel, had a “right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” It provided further that Israel should withdraw “from territories occupied in the recent conflict”—but did not require withdrawal from “the” or “all” territories, thereby countenancing less-than-total withdrawal. In this way Resolution 242 embodied the “land for peace” theory central to America’s policy in the Middle East ever since.

By contrast, Resolution 2334 refuses to “recognize any changes to the [1967] lines, including those with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations.” This language effectively defines Israel’s borders, even while superficially affirming direct talks. Chatter about Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is nothing but a truism, equally applicable to the U.S. and Canada, or to any nations resolving trivial border disputes.

There can be no “land for peace”—with Israel retroceding territory in exchange for peace, as in the 1979 Camp David agreement with Egypt—if the land is not legitimately Israel’s to give up in the first place. Anti-Israel imagineers have used this linguistic jujitsu as their central tactic since 1967, trying to create “facts on the ground” in the U.N.’s corridors rather than by actually negotiating with Israel. Mr. Obama has given them an indefinite hall pass.

The Trump administration could veto future Security Council measures that extend Resolution 2334 (e.g., purportedly recognizing a Palestinian state). Mr. Trump could also veto efforts to implement Resolution 2334 (e.g., the sanctions for what it calls Israel’s “blatant violation under international law”). Still, there are significant dangers. Other U.N. bodies, such as the General Assembly and the numerous specialized agencies where America has no veto, can carry Resolution 2334 forward.

Even more perilous is that individual nations or the European Union can legislate their own sanctions under Resolution 2334’s provision that “all States” should “distinguish in their relevant dealings” between Israel’s territory “and the territories occupied since 1967.” This is a hunting license to ostracize Israel from the international economic system, exposing it and its citizens to incalculable personal and financial risk.

Once in office, President Trump should act urgently to mitigate or reverse Resolution 2334’s consequences. Mr. Obama has made this significantly harder by rendering America complicit in assaulting Israel. Nonetheless, handled properly, there is an escape from both the current danger zone and the wasteland in which the search for Middle East peace has long wandered.

First, there must be consequences for the adoption of Resolution 2334. The Trump administration should move to repeal the resolution, giving the 14 countries that supported it a chance to correct their error. Nations that affirm their votes should have their relations with Washington adjusted accordingly. In some cases this might involve vigorous diplomatic protests. But the main perpetrators in particular should face more tangible consequences.

As for the United Nations itself, if this mistake is not fixed the U.S. should withhold at least its assessed contributions to the U.N.—which amount to about $3 billion annually or 22%-25% of its total regular and peacekeeping budgets. Meanwhile, Washington should continue funding specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency, if only to dissuade them from entering the Resolution 2334 swamp.

Second, Mr. Trump should unambiguously reject Mr. Obama’s view that Resolution 2334 is justified to save the “two-state solution.” That goal, at best, has been on life-support for years. After Mr. Obama’s provocation, its life expectancy might now be only until Jan. 20. And good riddance. This dead-end vision, by conjuring an imaginary state with zero economic viability, has harmed not only Israel but also the Palestinians, the principal intended beneficiaries.

Far better to essay a “three-state solution,” returning Gaza to Egypt and giving those parts of the West Bank that Israel is prepared to cede to Jordan. By attaching Palestinian lands to real economies (not a make-believe one), average Palestinians (not their political elite), will have a true chance for a better future. Other alternatives to the two-state approach should also be considered.

Mr. Obama loves using the word “pivot” for his ever-changing priorities. It is now up to Mr. Trump to pivot away from his predecessor’s disastrous policies on Israel. Taking up the challenge will be difficult, but well worth the effort for America and its friends world-wide.

U.N. Bureaucrats Need a Boss, Not a Dreamer

October 11, 2016
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This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 10, 2016. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
October 10, 2016

Surprisingly to many, the ninth United Nations secretary-general will be António Guterres, a former socialist prime minister of Portugal.

One surprise is that the winning candidate is not from the Eastern European regional group, which has never had a secretary-general, while Western Europe gets its fourth. Another surprise is that the winner isn’t a woman, which will be disappointing to proponents of gender-identity politics. Mr. Guterres did serve 10 years as U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and was previously active in the Socialist International, with both positions serving as springboards for his current candidacy.

What should Mr. Guterres know to perform his new job, and how should we judge his performance over the next five (and perhaps 10) years?

First, he must recognize that he owes his position to the Security Council’s five permanent members. This political reality causes gnashing of teeth in the missions of other U.N. members, and it sometimes raises the blood pressure of a secretary-general. But to be effective, Mr. Guterres will have to live in the rickety house the “perm five” have built, not align himself in opposition to it.

These five nations will often be divided, reflecting their national interests in global affairs, and thereby gridlocking the Security Council, as during the Cold War. So be it—Mr. Guterres must adjust. While there are other powerful, rising countries in the U.N., unless they persuade one or more of the perm five to turn on Mr. Guterres, they inevitably are lesser factors.

Second, across the sprawling U.N. agencies and programs more broadly, Mr. Guterres should recognize that member governments set policy, and the multiple U.N. bureaucracies must implement it. Neither the secretary-general nor U.N. secretariats have any independent policy-making roles, although long years of acting as if they do have created a troublesome institutional culture.

Mr. Guterres will be more productive if he concentrates on his limited turf, such as by reforming the U.N. secretariat’s bureaucratic morass. As Article 97 of the U.N. Charter says, the secretary-general is merely the organization’s “chief administrative officer.” If Mr. Gutteres fancies being this century’s Dag Hammarskjold, floating above the mundane world of nation-states, this may earn him points among the world’s high-minded, but he will accomplish little.

This is where Mr. Guterres’s European Union experience is worrying. Just as they have become accustomed to ceding national sovereignty to EU institutions in Brussels, many European diplomats in New York are perfectly comfortable doing the same with the U.N. Such an attitude regarding already too-independent-minded U.N. staffs is definitely something Washington should oppose. (A reminder for Mr. Guterres: With Britain exiting the EU, that organization will soon have only one Security Council permanent member.)

If member governments cannot agree on policy, then the U.N. should do nothing. Disagreement among the members isn’t an excuse for either the secretary-general (or the secretariat) to freelance, as former Secretary-General Kofi Annan was wont to do throughout his tenure. So doing will invariably lead to conflict with significant U.N. voting blocs and distract from other urgent tasks. Joe Biden likes to quote his mother saying disapprovingly of people who act beyond their bounds: “Who died and made you king?” Mr. Guterres should listen to Mr. Biden’s mother.

Third, when the U.N. does act, especially in matters of international peace and security, the secretary-general must focus diligently on the problem at hand. In particular, U.N. peacekeeping needs urgent attention. These efforts now total (according to current U.N. statistics) 16 operations, nearly 119,000 deployed personnel and a $7.87 billion annual budget. Allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers, spreading cholera in Haiti and mismanagement dog U.N. peacekeeping forces, whose halos have slipped since they received their collective Nobel Peace Prize in 1988.

U.N. peacekeeping history is packed with operations that were launched to end conflicts (or at least bring cease-fires) but never actually resolved them. In effect, U.N. military or political involvement becomes part of the conflict battle space, not a catalyst for ending it. Some disputes, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, are insoluble under existing circumstances. In such cases, withdrawing or substantially downsizing U.N. involvement until conditions are more propitious may, with the U.N. crutch removed, force the parties to take greater responsibility.

But where conflicts are resolvable, an international player of Mr. Guterres’s experience can make a difference, if he puts in the time and effort. It is not his job to appoint special representatives for peacekeeping or political missions, and then sit back and watch how they do. Active management and involvement by the secretary-general—which was the style of early secretaries general—is more likely to achieve concrete results, assuming the secretary-general carefully follows Security Council direction.

Given the problems endemic in the U.N. bureaucracy, and a world in flames—although many of the world’s problems are beyond the U.N.’s competence to solve—Mr. Guterres has more managerial work before him than his predecessors have been willing to undertake. If he sticks to that and whatever else U.N. members assign him in coming years, he will be fully occupied. If he strays beyond his remit, there is trouble ahead.

Hostile Foreign Governments Will Use Obama’s Internet Surrender to Their Advantage

September 30, 2016
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internet

Amb. Bolton on the Obama policy that has devastating long-term consequences- the surrender of American control over Internet registration:

“I understand why Barack Obama wants to take it out of the control of the United States and give it to the rest of the world. That’s consistent with the way he’s handled foreign policy for the last eight years – and, by the way, consistent with the way Hillary Clinton will handle it.”

“It’s completely understandable that Clinton will try to avoid blaming Obama because she desperately needs to recreate the Obama coalition on November the 8th.”

“The Internet as we have known it is about to disappear, and I think that has national security implications. It certainly has implications for freedom of communication internationally.”

“Obama has long believed the United States is too strong, too powerful, too assertive, too successful…he wants to spread the power around. This is going to be a key part of his legacy.”