The search for the next UN leader is on. And appeasing Trump is a must.

Por Daniella Cheslow — POLITICO – TOP Stories

UNITED NATIONS — President Donald Trump has forced the United Nations to an urgent reckoning: Find a way to drastically revamp the world body or risk it getting gutted and sidelined into irrelevance.

It’s a dynamic that will be playing out this week at the annual U.N. General Assembly in New York and in the race for the person to be the next secretary-general. Seven candidates are running so far, and the efforts to appeal to an audience in the White House are clear.

“Not every criticism is fair. But a crisis of trust cannot be answered by assuming the critics are wrong,” one candidate, Costa Rican diplomat Rebeca Grynspan, wrote in The Economist on Friday, the same day she came out as the top vote-getter in a straw poll of U.N. Security Council members.

Other front-runners, like Guyanese ambassador Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett and International Atomic Energy Agency head Rafael Grossi, have made similar comments that appear aimed at mollifying the White House. Grossi told the Financial Times last month that the U.N. risks “a slow death” if it doesn’t make big changes.

“Trump’s impact is huge” on the field of candidates, argued Daniel Safran-Hon, who worked in the U.N. for nearly two decades, including in the office of the secretary-general. “Messaging about the need to reform, the need to refocus the organization, the need to be more efficient, 100% that is absolutely an appeal to U.S. constituencies.”

Current Secretary-General António Guterres is set to step down at the end of this year, when his second and final five-year term ends. The next U.N. chief will lead the organization for at least five years, two of them during the Trump administration.

Trump has made clear that he is paying attention to the secretary-general race. This summer, he reportedly floated FIFA chief Gianni Infantino for the job. While few took that suggestion seriously (and the U.S. has not nominated Infantino), it was a reminder that the U.S. president sees the internal workings of the world body as very much his business and expects to see a friendly face at its top.

The State Department said in a statement that it expects candidates to “get the U.N. back to basics and publicly commit to the changes we require.”

“The U.S. is not walking away, we’re not turning out the lights, but we are demanding reform,” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz said Sunday.

The U.S. — the U.N.’s largest funder — has already forced the organization into a certain amount of restructuring by slashing its contributions. After Washington paid $827 million this month, it was still behind some $4 billion in contributions to support the regular budget of the U.N. and peacekeeping missions.

To deal with the liquidity crisis, the U.N. has eliminated thousands of jobs and is identifying agencies that can be merged. The U.N. also has pared down travel budgets and even eliminated paper towels in its New York headquarters.

“Cost cutting is the name of the game, and it’s been pretty severe,” said Richard Ponzio, who served in senior roles in the U.N. and State Department and is now a senior fellow at the Stimson Center think tank.

The threat goes beyond finances. This time last year, the Trump administration announced an international body to work on the Israel-Gaza conflict, the Board of Peace, that was feared to be an effort to supplant the U.N.

“U.N. officials and diplomats were really, really unnerved when it looked like Washington was going to try to elevate the Board of Peace as some sort of rival peacemaking institute,” said Richard Gowan, who is in regular contact with U.N. officials as a program director at the International Crisis Group think tank.

While the Board of Peace sought — and received — a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing it to operate in Gaza, its very existence added urgency among U.N. members to find a way to deal with the Trump administration before it’s too late.

“We want a secretary-general that has sufficient political clout to make use of all the powers” established in the U.N. Charter, said a French official, granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive diplomatic process.

As Trump has gone after a host of multilateral institutions, the advantage of having a “Trump whisperer” has been clear. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte regularly praises and flatters Trump, both in meetings and in public. Trump credited Rutte with helping resolve a standoff over Greenland at Davos in January.

But unlike NATO, U.S. adversaries also have a say in who leads the United Nations. The 15-member Security Council recommends a candidate as secretary-general to the broader General Assembly. The U.S. and the other four permanent members of that council — Russia, China, France and the U.K. — can use their veto power to sink a contender. Russia has already panned Grossi’s comments about the potential collapse of the U.N. as “greatly exaggerated.”

The U.N. is looking for “a Goldilocks candidate,” said Brett Schaefer, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who is in frequent contact with U.S. and U.N. officials. “Enough to please Trump, but not so much that it raises opposition from China, Russia or Europe.”

The candidate who can thread that needle may not be in the current pool, which also includes one ex-president (Macky Sall of Senegal) and former diplomats from Uganda and Ecuador.

And few, if any, are likely to shake up the system as much as Trump might want.

“The right candidate is the one who isn’t afraid to right-size a broken organization and call out the U.N.’s poor performance,” Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jim Risch (R-Idaho) said in an email. “So far, few, if any, of these candidates meet that bar.”

Still, they’ll all use the U.N. General Assembly to chase world leaders and press their case.

“There is going to be a lot of corridor talk and exchanges, especially among the Security Council members,” said María Fernanda Espinosa, an Ecuadorian diplomat and former foreign minister who is among those running for the post.

Safran-Hon, the former U.N. official, said Trump doesn’t seem to regard the U.N. with the same scorn that he projected onto NATO, despite saying last year it didn’t live up to its “tremendous potential.”

“He’s a New Yorker after all. He has a big property across the street from the headquarters, and many of the people who live in that building are U.N. diplomats or U.N. staff,” he said. “He has a complicated relationship with the U.N. He can be a bit nasty as it was last year. But it’s interesting for him to get involved.”

Candidates can continue to enter the fray, and that could leave an opening for a dark-horse option to come in after the General Assembly. If no one is selected by the end of December, the U.N. could choose to extend Guterres’ term by another year.

“It’s unusually uncertain for this point in the selection process,” said Gowan of ICG. “We had a much clearer picture of what was going on 10 years ago and also 20 years ago with Guterres and Ban Ki-moon.”

There are those who watch the latest calls for reform and predictions of the end of the world body and shrug. Calls for change at the U.N. are nearly as old as the organization itself.

“Fifty years of reforms make me immune to new reforms,” said Eric Alter, dean of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and a former U.N. staffer. He said the U.N. needs to focus on its original mission laid out in its charter of preventing war, and find ways to take an active role in resolving conflicts like Ukraine, Iran and Gaza.

Even though there are other venues to make deals, he said there is still a need for all those players to gather together, and “this is the only place.”

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories