The negotiator

James Traub's examination of Kofi Annan reveals a patient and wily leader who managed to outwit John Bolton and elevate the United Nations.

By Matt Steinglass

Read more: Books, United Nations, Kofi Annan, Reviews, Book reviews

Dec. 21, 2006 | When I landed in Togo in mid-2000, I shared a ride with a young Congolese woman who had just arrived to work on a poverty alleviation initiative at the United Nations Development Program. When I left Togo two and a half years later, the program had still not managed to spend any of its allocated $2 million on poverty alleviation projects, but the young lady had managed to embark on an affair with a son of the country's brutal dictator. The UNDP office in Togo was divided between lackadaisical, corrupt staff and dedicated, energetic ones; the country representative, a brilliant and sincere woman, directed promising programs toward the more proactive staff, while carefully placating the sluggards. The office was, in other words, like much of the U.N.: Making it work demanded someone of enormous diplomatic talent and patience. Someone like Kofi Annan.

James Traub's inside account of several years in the life of the retiring U.N. secretary-general is a chronicle of diplomatic talent and patience, and it makes for a fascinating, if sometimes exasperating, read. In Traub's telling, Annan, a sympathetic but meek hero, is repeatedly abused by powerful agents posing as benefactors or suitors, escaping only to be again beset by disaster. It's a picaresque adventure in the mold of "Candide" or "Great Expectations," as the title, "Best Intentions," suggests; though "A Series of Unfortunate Events" might have been equally apt. The book works, not just as a portrait of Annan but as one of the U.N. itself, in part because Annan personally encapsulates many characteristics of that inspiring but maddening organization.

Annan is a quiet man, tolerant to a fault, committed to the highest ideals of humanitarianism, but resigned to the constrictions of his office. He is a wily politician, but his caution sometimes shades into paralysis. Where Annan and the U.N. can act, it is because the United States and other member nations demand it; where he fails, it is because the members don't demand it, or they disagree among themselves. The great powers take credit for the actions, and blame the failures on Annan and the U.N. It demands a particular kind of character to serve as the world's scapegoat for two consecutive five-year terms, and the book poses the question of whether the U.N. has a future, or whether the Bush administration's repeated warnings of its impending irrelevance are, in part self-fulfillingly, correct.

Traub takes a minimally optimistic view: The U.N., though diminished in stature, is not irrelevant. But some readers may come away from the book more sanguine than the author himself about the U.N.'s chances. The organization's existential crisis in early 2003, when its bitter divisions in the face of U.S. demands for an authorization to invade Iraq seemed to portend collapse, looks far better in retrospect, as that invasion has been revealed as a colossal error. And U.N. involvement on a variety of fronts over the past several months, including North Korea, Darfur, Congo and global warming, suggests that while the organization may often be ineffective, it remains indispensable.

As Traub recounts, this is hardly the first time the U.N. has faced a crisis of relevance. It has never lived up to its founders' vision of a proactive international security organization. The Cold War froze the Security Council, and the first few secretary-generals were inoffensive creatures. The exception, the maverick Dag Hammarskjöld, pushed through an aggressive 1960 U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Congo that, while arguably successful, was so bloody that it scared the U.N.'s member states away from such ventures for a generation. Hammarskjöld, killed in a plane crash during the fighting, was succeeded by ineffectual figureheads.

Meanwhile, decolonization transformed the General Assembly into a body dominated by the Third World, especially the non-aligned "G77" countries. The G.A. was thus frequently at odds with the Security Council and its mainly European and American permanent members. And the U.N. gave birth to a series of agencies -- the U.N. Development Program, the U.N. Population Fund, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, etc. -- that attempted to accomplish humanitarian and development goals while being yanked this way and that by the political demands of the member countries. Poor countries treated U.N. agency staff positions as sinecures for their elites. Rich countries, especially the U.S., threatened to withhold funding unless the agencies adhered to their ideological agenda.

The end of the Cold War ushered in a new optimism. With Russia and China now amenable to cooperation with the West, the Security Council seemed capable of fulfilling its original mandate of forceful intervention. Such hopes were dashed by the disastrous U.N. peacekeeping experiences in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. The failure in Somalia was blamed on excessive adventurism; those in Bosnia and Rwanda, on excessive timidity. Liberal internationalists in Europe and America were furious with U.N. headquarters for refusing, in Rwanda and Bosnia, to authorize their blue-helmeted peacekeepers to use force to protect civilians. But third-world governments opposed any non-consensual interventions as a violation of sovereignty. With the Dayton Accords, the Clinton administration turned decisively toward humanitarian intervention, and against Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a Francophone Egyptian who had vetoed airstrikes in Bosnia. When his first term expired, the U.S. maneuvered Boutros-Ghali out in favor of the less prickly Annan, the Anglophone head of the U.N.'s peacekeeping operation, whom it expected would be more amenable to American wishes.

Traub thinks the Americans were unprepared for what they got. Annan turned out to be a quiet but methodical advocate for the U.N. with an unexpected kind of star power. When he was elevated to secretary-general, the far-right isolationist wing of the Republican Party was reaching the apogee of its opposition to the U.N., complete with myths about "black helicopters." In concert with Clinton administration U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Annan reached out to then-Sen. Jesse Helms, who had been leading an effort to slash the U.S.'s contribution to the U.N. if it failed to undertake a range of practical and ideological changes. Annan and Holbrooke ultimately won Helms over, and neutralized the anti-U.N. faction in Congress -- for a while.

Meanwhile, Annan was pushing the U.N. toward a rethinking of its doctrine on intervention. Here, he found himself caught between the interests of the powerful Euro-American bloc, which wanted U.N. approval for its interventions in places like Kosovo, and the G77, which considered sovereignty rights absolute. Annan carefully edged toward a stance supporting human rights over sovereignty rights, tipping his hand with his September 1999 opening speech to the General Assembly. At the time, third-world nations roundly denounced Annan's speech. But by 2005 every U.N. member endorsed the so-called Responsibility to Protect: the principle that the international community had a duty to protect people against their own murderous governments. Traub cites U.N. official John Ruggie's characterization of Annan as a "norm entrepreneur," gradually shifting the terms of global debate, not through direct confrontation, but by subtly reshaping the moral landscape.

Annan pursued the same strategy in the field of development with the "Millennium Goals," which emerged from the 2000 Millennium Summit of world leaders. The summit won, among other things, commitments from the world's wealthy nations to increase foreign aid to 0.7 percent of their countries' GDPs, while slashing poor countries' foreign debt. And poor countries committed to meeting concrete development goals of their own by 2010, an incentive for their governments to improve fields like education and health or face public embarrassment. But the fact that, six years on, most of these goals are nowhere near being met points out the weakness of Annan's norm entrepreneurship: Such norms can quickly come to resemble so much hot air if there is no real political will behind them.

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