Is the international order capable of meeting the enormous challenges facing states and societies around the world? We look at the four main challenges facing International Geneva.
The coronavirus pandemic should have been a moment for global action. Instead, the U.N. is riven with dissension and self-doubt, and countries are going their own way.
Unlike nearly six years ago, when the Security Council declared Ebola a threat to world peace and security, a disease that doesn’t respect borders is no longer enough to push feuding world powers — the United States, China and Russia — to use the U.N. stage to coordinate a political response. China, which held the Security Council presidency in March, when the illness was declared a pandemic and began to overwhelm some European and American health systems, did not call a meeting on it. The U.S., increasingly guided by President Donald Trump’s America First views, has not stepped up at the U.N., feeding the sense that the world body is hobbled, if not utterly paralyzed by the very kind of crisis it was meant to address.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/08/united-nations-coronavirus-176187
The WHO needs more authority, not less.
It needs the capabilities to independently investigate outbreaks and to provide rapid and significant support to control those outbreaks where they occur. The WHO should be able to fund and coordinate the development and global rollout of tests, equipment, treatments, and vaccines, and it should be able to rely on other parts of the United Nations to support a financial response designed to limit the economic costs of an outbreak. The WHO has many of these powers on paper. What it needs is more money to execute them.
President Trump went to Manhattan this past week to meet with world leaders at the annual U.N. General Assembly. In a speech that featured a threat to destroy North Korea, he also lambasted the international nuclear deal with Iran while sprinkling in praise for the United Nations’ ideals and some of its activities. But the address, and the reactions to it, reflected misperceptions about what multilateral organizations really do. Here are five of the most persistent errors.
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