The Economist: US Bolton showing his teeth - Crunch time for UN reform

Economist

Bolton showing his teeth - Crunch time for UN reform

If there was still any question that America is taking a new line with the United Nations, the answer now seems clear. Next month, 175 world leaders will gather in New York to consider a raft of reforms for the world body. But just weeks before the summit is to begin, America has asked for extensive changes to the draft “outcome document” that many other negotiators felt was almost finished. Many detect the hand of John Bolton, America’s controversial new ambassador to the UN, who offered the proposed changes on Wednesday August 24th. But Mr Bolton is probably more symptom than cause—George Bush sent him to the UN as a signal that business-as-usual would no longer be acceptable. There is talk of crisis in many of the media reports about America’s proposed changes. The Washington Post reported that 750 such edits had been made to the draft “outcome document”. In truth, the majority of these are nitpicking wording changes that have little effect on the content. But some of them would change the declaration considerably, particularly regarding development efforts and intervention to stop human-rights catastrophes.The proposed American edits to the document remove nearly all references to the MDGs, referring instead to more vaguely-worded “internationally agreed development goals”. In place of the MDGs, America wants to put more emphasis on the “Monterrey Consensus”, the result of a 2002 summit in Mexico that concluded that developing countries need to take more responsibility for their own growth by fighting corruption, improving the investment climates and otherwise making their countries more hospitable to economic activity. America has annoyed many with some seemingly needless niggling points—cutting “respect for nature” from a legally meaningless laundry-list of the world’s basic values, for example. Critics say that the deletion is emblematic: America is taking an overly lawyerly approach to a non-binding political document on which all have made compromises. An American spokesman responds that “mumbo-jumbo” does no one any good, and that America may support a shorter statement instead of the current 36-page draft.