Renewing Washington's multilateral leadership.

Weiss, Thomas G.

NEW YEAR'S DAY 2012 WAS THE SEVENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF A SIGNIFICANT achievement in US foreign policy, although most Americans were probably more aware of a hangover from a late party than of this commemorative event. Undoubtedly, more were aware of Mohamed Ali's or Stephen Hawking's seventieth birthdays in January 2012 than of the signing ceremony in Washington, DC, on 1 January 1942 by the twenty-six countries allied to fight World War II. Later that month, The Economist presciently described the "Declaration by United Nations" as "the most comprehensive system of international association the world has yet seen. The students of post-war leagues and federations would do well to study it." (1)

This student insists that the combined Allied military efforts and a strategic vision of a postwar multilateral order were both fundamental components of the United Nations. Pundits who denigrate the world body betray their ignorance about the strategic thinking behind institutionalized cooperation. Scorn for the UN is hardly new, of course, including the 1960 dismissal by Charles de Gaulle of le machin (the thing) in referring to multilateral efforts in the Congo. Like contemporary critics, he conveniently overlooked the extent to which unprecedented multilateralism saved France, defeated fascism, and laid the foundations for immensely successful postwar security cooperation and for sustained economic growth in the West.

A made-in-the-USA version of scorn was illustrated by Congress in October 2011. In retaliation for the admission of Palestine, the US Congress invoked a 1994 law to cut off funding (about a quarter of the budget) for the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). (2) The governing bodies of other specialized agencies are subject to similar retaliation over Palestinian membership. In the United Nations, the US veto in the Security Council obviates financial retaliation.

With Iran's nuclear politics and Syria's nascent civil war having displaced Palestine as preoccupations, a more widespread funding crisis for multilateralism appears to have been postponed for the moment. However, myopia is never in short supply in Washington. An issue ignored during the primaries and the presidential campaign must return for the next administration: the value of multilateralism in US foreign policy. In spite of the raucous domestic applause virtually guaranteed for Washington's favorite sport, UN-bashing undermines US leadership and the effective pursuit of the country's foreign policy goals.

Congressional forays in mindless chauvinism are not the only way in which the US government goes about diminishing its capability to advance the global interests of the United States. Although not for the most part as noisily and consistently hostile to institutionalized multilateralism, successive occupants of the White House--George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama--have conspicuously failed, each in his own way, to exploit the opportunity opened by the end of the Cold War to reshape multilateral institutions to better address contemporary challenges to interests that the United States shares with most other states. Missing the multilateral moment has been, in other words, a bicameral and bipartisan achievement. The missed opportunities of the past two decades are in a sense the obverse of the country's World War II successes.

Leading, from Ahead and from Behind

Understanding how international organizations provide strategic leverage requires an appreciation for both the nature of US interests in a globalizing world and the exercise of US power. Realists erroneously claim that international organizations merely reflect the global distribution of power and therefore offer countries a redundant way to legitimize policies that their power affords them. When states create institutions and willingly constrain their own freedom of action, they not only reassure others but also acknowledge that power advantages do not last forever. Creating and using international institutions to pursue national interests is a long-term strategy that reflects both the realist's prediction that the world returns to a kind of balance of power and the idealist's conviction that new laws and norms can mitigate the abuse of power. Would that the Obama administration and its immediate predecessors understood this as Franklin D. Roosevelt did.

Building a multilateral web of war-fighting and war-constraining organizations was wise seven decades ago. It still offers a map for navigating the shoals of contemporary problem-solving. Terrorism, climate change, nuclear proliferation, drugs, pandemics, and money laundering are making the United Nations more (not less) pertinent. Unlike the Congressional politics over Palestinian membership in UN bodies--reflecting point-scoring by domestic lobbies and ignoring vital interests--multilateralism remains a time-tested way to pursue a longer-term strategy.

Whether combating religious extremism, promoting democratic values, or protecting civilians from mass atrocities, multilateral approaches are usually more legitimate and effective than unilateral ones. Indeed, US participation in the international effort to oust Muammar Gaddafi was one of the few unequivocal and nonrhetorical successes of the Obama administration's foreign policy. Speaking in Brazil after the Security Council imposed the no-fly zone that ultimately resulted in regime change, the president saw no contradiction with his Nobel Peace Prize--a laureate can authorize military force to halt the "butchering" of Libyans. If the president's decision provided no immediate political advantage, it fostered US values, enhanced the battered US image among Arab peoples, and prevented massacres that would have "stained the conscience of the world." (3)

Using military might to bolster such new international norms as the responsibility to protect builds on the World War II legacy. The much-scorned "leading from behind" actually meant acquiring the legitimacy of a UN Security Council authorization to complement essential US military assets with those from NATO. This also aligned the United States with the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the African Union. Given cuts in defense appropriations, future efforts will require pooled resources and the collective decisionmaking that pooling requires. Whether leading from ahead of others as in 1942 or from behind as in 2012, working within the UN framework enables the Unites States to share the burdens of maintaining political order and promoting democratic values.

Too many policy analysts and politicians are mired in today's headlines or newscasts. For politicians, medium-range planning is the next public opinion poll, and long-range planning is the next election. For national and global interests, however, leadership is about the next generation, not the next election. Moreover, many analysts are obsessed with the last crisis, exasperated and out of breath after extrapolating from current events. Indifference to historical experience leads to shallow analysis and consequent policies that inflate the costs of statecraft.

For those analysts and political leaders capable of learning from not very distant history, the conception, birth, and early years of the UN ought to be instructive. A fundamental puzzle arises from those linked experiences: why were policy and the related operational experiments during World War II (and even in the decade preceding it) so much more imaginative and robust concerning roles for international organizations than they are now? (4) What currently passes as forward-looking proposals appears pale beside mainstream thinking and operations under the duress of 1942-1945.

Do we require a cataclysm--a dirty nuclear bomb, perhaps, or a world-wide economic depression, irreversible climate change, or a regional war that ignites the Middle East--to generate creative ideas and new institutions capable of handling global challenges? Or can we learn from the past?

The Problematique--Mixing Idealism and Realism

Active US initiatives and participation have been essential for seeking world order, including the creation of the United Nations. Yet much supposed wisdom, especially in an election year, now has it that the United States derives virtually no benefit from multilateralism. In light of the present discourse within the US foreign policy establishment, proponents of international cooperation may conclude that I have been inhaling and not merely smoking when I continue to look toward Washington with some lingering hope for an epiphany. Hope in my case is sustained by the premise that ignorance and indifference, driven by a throwback ideology and knuckle-dragging instincts, will founder ultimately on the rock of need for institutionalized multilateral initiatives. I believe that leaders and analysts may finally come round to conceding that a host of issues--Libya is an obvious illustration, but economic instability, environmental deterioration, nuclear proliferation, and international terrorism also jump to mind--require multilateralism. Launched with the Declaration by United Nations, the world organization was not seen as a liberal plaything to he tossed away when the going got tough but as integral to serious war fighting and postwar peace and prosperity. It is time for the United States to embrace this reality once again. By renewing multilateral leadership, the United States can more effectively pursue its own interests while helping Jay the foundations for future efforts to address global problems and help others.

At the outset of the Obama administration, John Ikenberry's long-standing position about Washington's objective interest in the creation and maintenance of a liberal international order had a moment in the sun. (5) So committed was Washington to demonstrating its benign intentions, despite its hegemonic power, and so convinced were the Allies that US power would be deployed in an unthreatening manner, that institutionalized multilateralism achieved a "constitutional settlement." Moreover, as John Ruggie maintained, because "multilateralism matters," the United States "embedded liberalism" in the institutions that it helped create and thereby ensured that its interests were served through broad-based participation in these institutions. (6)

Although these arguments have fallen out of favor since the Obama administration's initial rhetorical flourishes, they remain persuasive. While the United States remains the dominant power, it should do everything possible-to get all UN member states, including the emerging powers, to invest politically in international organizations. It is in the member states' interests to do so, and it benefits the United States as well because those institutions reflect core Western values.

Multilateralism was and remains not merely idealistic but also realistic. Hard-headed calculations of US geostrategic interests were behind multilateral diplomacy and operations during World War II, and their pertinence remains--contrary to the beliefs of those ideologues who viscerally reject the very notion of institutionalized international problem solving. In claiming that US leadership demands the unilateral assertion of power, Fox News and Mitt Romney ignore the extent to which multilateral channels are force multipliers. They overlook moral authority, international legitimacy, and cooperation, which together enhance such capabilities as intelligence gathering and permit greater cost-and risk-sharing. A reflexive rejection of multilateralism restrains the options for exercising US power. Ideologues limit the ability to garner international support for US objectives, which in a globalizing world often requires, if not widespread approval, at least more rather than fewer members in coalitions of the willing.

The cheerleaders from the contemporary flat-earth society should recall January 1942 and the far-reaching vision that remains crucial today. The "United Nations" was not a postwar afterthought but a wartime necessity for the Allies. Institutionalizing multilateralism was necessary to defeat the enemy abroad. It also helped check the intrigues of domestic isolationists, some of whom would have been happy to see Nazi rule over Europe. Is multilateral cooperation really so frivolous in comparison with unilateral realpolitik?

UNRRA, from the Ashes

Although some observers seem unaware that the Allied war effort was called the "United Nations," the now almost forgotten first UN operational invention, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), provides valuable insight into the direction that US policy should take today. That first UN initiative was envisioned as short-term supplementary provision of basic necessities to people in the liberated territories. It grew to a deeper commitment to care for war victims by "helping them to help themselves," a reflection of UNRRA's leadership style, operational flexibility, and democratic values--all held together by a compelling made-in-the-USA strategic vision that implies close and sustained multilateral collaboration.

UNRRA embodied an unprecedented commitment by the United States to multilateral problem solving with 43 other member countries. It remains the biggest and most successful humanitarian operation. Contributions to UNRRA made by 30 donor governments were about $4 billion (or some $55 billion in current dollars), and the US share represented about three-quarters of the bill. Life-saving succor was provided to some 8 million displaced persons in the war's immediate aftermath in Europe. Intergovernmental guidance came from the UNRRA council, which met six times between November 1943 and December 1946. The official history names Dean Acheson, at the time assistant secretary of state, as a founding father. (7)

"Present at the creation" of the first UN organization, Acheson recounted in his autobiography of the same title the principle that guided UNRRA's operations: "The problems will be so great and the demands so many that UNRRA should adopt something in the nature of an international Jeffersonian principle of doing the least which is necessary to accomplish a result--which is another way of saying that it should center its attention upon the essential problems which cannot be solved without it." (8) Acheson recognized from the start, of course, that national interests remained decisive. When he later criticized the Soviet Union for treating UNRRA as an "organization [that] existed to give prizes for fighting Hitler," he had in mind national interests and the inability of an institutionalized framework to prevent a falling-out between what soon would become hostile super-powers. (9)

As tension rose, the State Department argued that the newly minted Marshall Plan "must avoid getting into another UNRRA. The United States must run this show." (10) This not only signaled another instance of a love-hate relationship with multilateralism--what Edward Luck calls "mixed messages"--but also represented a failure by both Cold War antagonists to employ an institutionalized multilateralism. (11) Acheson and the other creators of UNRRA understood that national interests would remain dominant while intergovernmental organizations could solve problems more effectively than could a single country, no matter how powerful.

People and Ideas Matter

Washington took senior appointments to UNRRA seriously. (12) Roosevelt named former New York governor and future New York senator Herbert Lehman as the first director-general. Lehman, a successful banker as well as a politician, had the capacity and credentials to sell the idea to a skeptical Congress. President Harry S Truman, less keen than Lehman and Acheson on multilateralism but supportive nonetheless, afterward named New York City's popular, three-term mayor Fiorello La Guardia as the second director-general.

Especially crucial for the UNRRA, however, was the operational leadership of Robert Jackson, the Australian senior deputy director-general. While Lehman and La Guardia handled opposition in the United States, Jackson was the operational genius guiding the vast enterprise on three continents, especially directing the creation of displaced-persons camps in Europe. A pioneering international civil servant, he was handpicked for UNRRA because of his extraordinary performance in the victory in the Mediterranean, as head of the Middle East Supply Centre that ensured the area was fed, stable, and largely self-sufficient. He positioned himself between the policymaking intergovernmental council and the empowered field teams. A testament to both his leadership and that of UNRRA, procedures were not imposed from on high but emerged organically from needs on the ground.

Jackson demanded that UNRRA member governments provide "first-class people" to staff the organization. He persuaded Washington to renew its faltering commitment to UNRRA by contributing more funds. UNRRA's administrative expenses were held to only I percent, a figure that shames current internationally executed projects--whether implemented by the UN, nongovernmental organizations, or bilateral aid agencies. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked when unveiling Jackson's portrait, "Jacko, where are you now when we need you?" (13)

People were an essential part of UNRRA's story, but multilateral organizations also live or die by the quality of the ideas that they put forward and carry out. UNRRA reflected mainly good ideas, which can be summarized in four categories. First, it was necessary to broaden the narrow interests of national sovereigns. The enlightened need to succor, shield, and shelter 8 million displaced persons and maintain law and order were framed as vital to military success and the stability of the postwar international order.

Second, generous and farsighted financing was of the essence. Unoccupied countries contributed 1 percent of national income to UNRRA. Other than a few Nordic countries, most donors today fall well below that aim and even contest the relevance of the 1970 development assistance target of 0.7 percent of gross national product (GNP). Harry Dexter White--better known for his role at Bretton Woods with John Maynard Keynes--influenced Acheson's UNRRA formula of 1 percent of GNP as an automatic contribution.14 Financial support is a tool of foreign policy, but let us not forget the value of a generosity of spirit and of cash: with essentially no debate, the United States footed the lion's share of UNRRA's costs.

Third, national contributions were administered by an independently operating international staff recruited from the forty-four participating countries to pursue common (not national) objectives. Jackson was not deterred by a complaint from the US senator from North Dakota that Lehman's deputy "does not come from Tennessee or the State of Montana or from Maine." (15) He recruited first-rate staff and decentralized decision-making to field personnel who were then held accountable. The deterioration of today's international civil service--with favoritism and quotas indicates that we have much to learn from the UNRRA experience.

Fourth, the agency embraced democratic ideals by committing to "help people help themselves." Humanitarian aid is, above all else, about empowerment of individuals, and UNRRA assumed that people freed from Nazi subjugation should regain immediate control over their lives. It placed the administration of displaced-person camps to a remarkable degree under the direct control of the residents, whereas we are still attempting to reduce the footprint of outsiders and to turn over control and authority to local populations in the administration of humanitarian and development projects.

Following FDR's death in April 1945, Washington's attitude toward UNRRA shifted. European reconstruction and rehabilitation were taken away from the United Nations and "bilateralized" through the Marshall Plan. By deciding to "run the show," Washington abandoned its successful multilateral leadership style and encouraged great-power competition.

Strategic Vision--Then and Now

The United Nations provided the backbone for a long-term strategic vision during World War II, and this experience still could and should inform US foreign policy. At that time, the best way to defeat threats to US security and to assist allies in a common strategy was to embrace institutionalized multilateralism. Intriguingly, this approach was aimed at not only coopting a long-time foe such as Moscow but at friends as well. Part of die multilateral bargain involved pressing the United Kingdom, for instance, to abandon policies that went against the grain of Washington's key values. To counter the threat of fascism through the formalized structure of the United Nations, US commitments came with pressure on Britain to abandon the empire.

Today's fight against religious extremism could benefit from a comparable approach. It could check extremist elements and bring influence to bear on allies, for instance Israel, to abandon practices that fuel resentment against the United States (and the West more generally). The 2011 decision to cut UNESCO funding was carried out by those who see themselves as friends of Israel. However, being held hostage to pro-Israel lobbies undermines US interests in regional stability. Working through rather than against the United Nations is a more plausible way to guarantee US vital interests in the region. Whether helping Middle Eastern allies with their security concerns or European friends with economic and political problems stemming from the, economic recession, multilateralism provides Washington with options and leverage in the pursuit of interests, which bilateralism simply does not.

To that end, there is much to learn from the successes and failures of the wartime United Nations in its collaboration with an antagonistic Soviet Union. Washington and Moscow managed to set aside differences and work together to defeat the Third Reich. Keeping strategic options open was vital to a wise foreign policy and to the UN's wartime successes. That openness gave way to steadfast Cold War opposition, the result in part of a changed policy that Truman pursued after Roosevelt's death and the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. However, what some view as FDR's naivete about the intentions of the Soviet Union, and more particularly the character of Josef Stalin, its unchallenged master, is better understood as the wisdom of a long-term strategic vision to entangle great powers, whether friends or foes, in a multilateral web. He foresaw the costs of conflict with the Soviet Union and decided to rope Moscow into an institutionalized system of cooperation. Roosevelt viewed war time cooperation the way that he viewed a postwar collective security organization--more promising than the simple assumption of irreducible and comprehensive conflict. (16)

Could the United States now approach Beijing in a comparable fashion? Despite real differences, are there not shared interests in fostering global economic stability, avoiding trade and currency wars, and enhancing regional security (resulting from a more predictable North Korea)? Common interests make cooperation possible, but to encourage other countries, the US-China relationship should include a mutual commitment to multilateralism, which can address regional and global problems more effectively than a testy bilateralism constantly at risk of deteriorating into fixed hostility.

Institutionalizing the UN alliance early on had a valuable effect in domestic US politics. As Dan Plesch notes in America, Hitler and the UN, it countered isolationists and fascist sympathizers at home and prevented the postwar organization from suffering the same fate as the League of Nations. (17) Yet today's ascendant isolationists and leftover neocons somehow oppose the compelling case for international engagement in an era when globalization increasingly gives US exceptionalism a hollow ring.

The fundamental ambivalence of the United States toward multilateralism was evident from the volte-face toward reconstruction. Despite UNRRA's notable achievements and the goodwill generated by its lifesaving activities, Washington shifted to bilateral reconstruction with the Marshall Plan rather than helping to get Europe back on its feet through the newly chartered United Nations organization. Had European reconstruction been financed and administered the way that UNRRA was, the fledgling UN would have received a substantial jump start. The Cold War may not have been averted by such an enhanced multilateral framework, but it might have been attenuated; and the world organization and multilateralism would have been strengthened as a trusted partner to a key security concern of the United States rather than being on the sidelines. The US desire to control the flow of resources generated counterproductive grumbling among Western allies, even as it sought to maintain a united front against the Soviet threat. With a ferocious anticommunism that sought to isolate the resurgent Moscow, the move to bilateral reconstruction of Europe cemented a posture of generalized and reflexive hostility toward Western initiatives, even those arguably consistent with Soviet bloc interests.

UNRRA had demonstrated that, if run with the right operational parameters, a UN operation can succeed on a grand scale. In post-9/11 US foreign policy, this realization was once again absent, and another opportunity was missed. Washington relied upon a crude bilateralism, fostering resentment, which a more multilateral approach might have mitigated.

In 2011, US leadership was exercised in another fashion in Libya, demonstrating how a shift toward multilateralism can be advantageous. In this common effort sanctioned by the United Nations, the costs and risks were shared by seventeen partners that ousted the flamboyant colonel after four brutal decades in power. The effort was deemed legitimate because of its essentially humanitarian nature and because of its approval by the Security Council at the behest of regional organizations.

International legitimacy is a form of power, which can be withdrawn in order to weaken and punish violators of international norms. The outcome of the 2003 US-UK decision to invade Iraq was anything but what was sought in Washington and London. Just as the their images were tarnished by going ahead without international approval, so too will the reputations and leverage of Russia and China suffer from standing in the way of international action to oppose Syrian atrocities, expressed so clearly in the General Assembly and Human Rights Council.

Renewing the US commitment to multilateralism demands not only strategic wisdom but also political savvy. Presidential leadership distinguished the wartime years. Roosevelt displayed it; Obama and his three immediate predecessors have not. Whereas FDR was able to harness public opinion and generate the political wilt to move the United States toward a new vision of world order, Obama's rhetorical talents alone have not persuaded the public to accept an FDR-like approach. Libya stands as an exception to an otherwise lackluster foreign policy balance sheet.

Two other differences could be understood as arguments that multilateralism fits badly with our times. Instead of US power at unprecedented and ascendant levels, we are witnessing the growing presence on the world stage of states--China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and South Africa foremost among them--determined and able to resist US bilateral pressure to accept its strategies, tactics, and goals. Furthermore, whereas the US defense establishment had grown quickly from a meager base in 1942, there is now in the United States an entrenched "military-industrial complex" dubious about multilateralism and in constant search of enemies, a complex whose dimensions would have surprised even Eisenhower, who invented the term in his farewell address. (18)

Roosevelt demonstrated that imaginative leadership could circumvent obstructionists and steer US foreign policy toward a cooperative, even visionary, modus operandi that served US interests and values, even as it pointed to more cosmopolitan ones. In 1942, Roosevelt was a wartime president with all the power and support that implied; and by 1945, he was the president who had won the great world conflict and enjoyed the general support of the still powerful and cohesive American elite. Obama has, of course, none of these trumps. The difficulties that beset him include the dysfunctional political culture, fragmented media, deterioration of the old WASP elite, mobilization of right-wing populism, reluctance or inability of the Chinese elite to accept co-responsibility for addressing the great transnational problems, and profligate waste of resources by the preceding Bush administration and the resultant diminished US influence.

In addition, Obama's multilateral leadership has disappointed. He has at times articulated something of a liberal internationalist vision, with multilateral organizations at the center of a more cooperative world order; he has yet to demonstrate the political skill to build on that vision, however. His rhetorical contributions have been appreciable--his Cairo speech on tolerance and numerous other public appearances have indicated that the United States is rejoining the planet, reengaging with both friends and foes, and embracing multilateralism as an essential component of US foreign policy. Many of his first small steps were in the right direction--including repaying US arrears to the UN, funding programs for reproductive health, joining the Human Rights Council, moving ahead with nuclear arms reductions, and preparing to initial the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Until Libya, however, there were too few major commitments to reinforce the administration's rhetorical return to multilateralism. Words alone will not strengthen international organizations, nor will they suffice for the effective multilateral pursuit of national goals.

US leadership has long been a prerequisite for UN success when national interests are pursued in a way that strengthens international norms of cooperation and trust. Obama's immediate Republican predecessor and Mitt Romney support policy stances that actively undermine the United Nations. Revitalizing the world organization may strike bean counters on the election teams as far-fetched and peripheral in the midst of massive domestic problems, but it is not. The reelection campaign affords Obama the opportunity to clarify how his conception of US leadership involves strengthening rather than weakening multilateralism.

Contrary to popular views, multilateral approaches find support among experienced governmental leaders, not merely academics and advocates. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who served both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, observed shortly before retiring from the Pentagon in mid-2011 that "the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory" and "is unlikely to repeat another Iraq or Afghanistan--that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire." (19) But failure on the ground was the consequence of a larger failure in strategic vision. The sobering experiences of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan should highlight the limits of US military and diplomatic power, just as the continuing recession indicates Washington's inability to go solo in addressing the ongoing economic and financial crisis. Similar conclusions came from Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former deputy secretary of state, who wrote that "mega-threats can be held at bay in the crucial years immediately ahead only through multilateralism on a scale far beyond anything the world has achieved to date." (20)

Such a change would require US leadership like that in World War II, when the United States boldly led the effort to construct a second generation of international organizations on the ashes of the first, the League of Nations. Council on Foreign Relations analyst Stewart Patrick reminds its that "the fundamental questions facing the 1940s generation confront us again today. As then, the United States remains by far the most powerful country in the world, but its contemporary security, political, and economic challenges are rarely amenable to unilateral action." (21) The creation of a third generation of intergovernmental organizations belongs on the US foreign policy agenda. We can only hope that it does not take such a horrific worldwide catastrophe as a loose nuke, the Outbreak of a lethal global pandemic, irreversible climate change, or a devastating regional war to force policymakers to see the wisdom of such a strategy.

Conclusion

The period of 1942-1945 involved a creative projection of US power built on multilateralism as a fundamental foundation not only for war fighting but also postwar peace and prosperity. Roosevelt possessed a strategic vision and was able to mobilize support for it, Political will is not hidden in a cupboard or under some rock: it has to be painstakingly constructed through the exercise of leadership.

US leadership is not best exercised through the unilateral assertion of dominance in a world with increasingly less support for such arrogance--from ahead or from behind. It must embrace a foreign policy course that points toward a world governed by public international law and multilateral institutions. At their best. UNRRA's efforts were better coordinated, less bureaucratic, and more democratic than comparable modern-day efforts by UN, nongovernmental, or national organizations. And UNRRA was only one part of FDR's comprehensive strategic vision of postwar international order. Current policies could better serve both US interests and ideals by recommitting to a more imaginative and robust multilateralism.

The title of Dean Acheson's autobiography is usually interpreted as his role in the apparatus that led to victory in the Cold War. Rut he was also "present at the creation" of the first UNRRA council in November 1943, just as the Washington policy establishment was engaged in efforts to construct international organization. That history suggests why more, not less, US participation in today's UN system would serve US interests, and why more UNESCO-like decisions would he counterproductive as well as short-sighted. Brian Urquhart, who fought in the war and was one of the first officials recruited by the world organization in 1946, reminds us that the remarkable group of American leaders and public servants "were pragmatic idealists more concerned about the future of humanity than the outcome of the next election; and they understood that finding solutions to postwar problems was much more important than being popular with one or another part of the American electorate." (22)

In Washington now, the radiance of the times of Roosevelt and Truman has dulled, paradoxically when the legitimacy of the universal United Nations is even more pertinent to what former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan aptly calls "problems without passports." (23) To be sure, we cannot simply extrapolate from the 1945 institutional response. But the historical comparison is more than a rhetorical gambit; the architect, the blueprints, and the results contain insights and lessons.

Based on these lessons, Washington might well announce two initiatives at the United Nations. They would be symbolically important and allow the next administration to occupy the diplomatic and moral high ground. Rather than resist the initiative of the "Small 5" (Costa Rica, Jordan, Liechtenstein, Singapore, and Switzerland), the United States should announce--whether the other members of the P-5 agree or not--that it will refrain from using its Security Council veto for proposed actions to prevent or halt genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. And Washington should announce that the next president of the World Bank will not be a US citizen and the next managing director of the International Monetary Fund will not have a European passport. These stances would rejuvenate Washington's leadership at the world organization and signal an important recommitment to the values espoused by the UN Charter.

At the outset of his first term, Obama announced that the United States had rejoined the world and acknowledged what was evident to anyone not enclosed in the ideological bubble of the Bush administration--namely "that the global challenges we face demand global institutions that work." (24)

That message was loud and clear in January 1942 as well. We ignore it at our peril.

Notes

(1.) "The United Nations," The Economist CXLII, no. 5136 (13 January 1942):134.

(2.) Limitation on Contributions to the United Nations and Affiliated Organizations, Pub.L. 103-236, Title IV, [section] 410, 30 April 1994, 108 Stat. 454.

(3.) Quoted by Mike Doming and Hans Nichols, "Obama Says US Allies Acted to Head Off Massacre in Libya," Bloomberg News, 29 March 2011, www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-28/obama-says-u-s-allies-acted-to-head-off-massacre-in-libya.html.

(4.) See Thomas G. Weiss, "What Happened to the Idea of World Government?" international Studies Quarterly 53,2 (2009): 253-271.

(5.) G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins. Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

(6.) John G. Ruggie. Winning the Peace: America and World Order in the Peen. Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),

(7.) George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950).

(8.) Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: Norton Press, 1969), p. 78.

(9.) Ibid.

(10.) Ibid., p. 231, emphasis added.

(11.) Edward C. Luck, Mixed Messages: American Politics and International Organization, 1919-1999 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999).

(12.) UNRRA illustrates the findings by the independent United Nations Intellectual History Project. The last two lines of the first of 17 commissioned hooks capture the bottom-line of the period since 1945 as well as the interwar years: "People Matter. Ideas Matter." Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly, and Thomas G. Weiss, Ahead of the Curve? UN Ideas and Global Challenges (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 214. See also the project's final volume, Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, and Thomas G. Weiss, UN Ideas That Changed the World (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009).

(13.) James Gibson Jacko, Where Are You Now? A Life of Robert Jackson: Master of Humanitarian Relief, the Mall Who Saved Malta (London: Parsons, 2006).

(14.) Woodbridge, UNRRA. p. 86.

(15.) Gibson, Jacko, p. 75.

(16.) See Stephen Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Boulder: Westview. 2003); and Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FUR and the Creation of the UN (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

(17.) Dan Plesch, America. Hitler and the UN (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011).

(18.) Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Farewell Address, 1961," in Richard D. Heffner, ed., A Documentary History of the United States (New York: Mentor, 1976), p. 314.

(19.) Robert M. Gates, "Helping Others Defend Themselves," Foreign Affairs 89, no. 3 (2010): 2-6.

(20.) Strobe Talbott, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), p. 395.

(21.) Stewart Patrick, The Best Laid Plans: The Origins of American Multilateralism and the Dawn of the Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), p. xxx.

(22.) Brian Urquhart, "The New American Century," New York Review of Books, 11 August 2005, p. 42.

(23.) Kofi A. Annan, "What Is the International Community? Problems Without Passports," Foreign Policy, no. 132 (September--October 2002): 30-31.

(24.) "Announcement of National Security Team," 1 December 2008, www.politicos.com/blogs/bensmith/1208/Obamas_foreign_policy.html.

Thomas G. Weiss is presidential professor of political science and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Among his recent books are the revised editions of What's Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It (2012) and Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (2012), as well as Thinking About Global Governance: Why People and Ideas Matter (2011). He can be reached at tweiss@gc.cuny.edu.