One of the difficulties of commenting intelligently on the annual United Nations meetings is that there appears to be simultaneously too much to address and too little. Dozens of heads of state are circulating, giving speeches, and arranging quick bilaterals on the side. Surely there is important work being done! But in fact it's often impossible to point to much of substance that comes out of the meetings, certainly not enough to justify the massive impact on New York traffic.

The invaluable Richard Gowan has two pieces out that shed some light on this year's diplomatic extravaganza. Helpfully, he tackles separately two key aspects of the UN's work: the process of generating international standards and norms and the management of specific security threats.

On the norm-generation front, he notes that there is a broad, seismic debate underway at the United Nations about human rights, sovereignty, and intervention. In one form or another, of course, this debate has run for decades. But several factors have combined to give the current version of the debate particular salience. First, the United Nations is, historically speaking, still in an intensely activist phase. Occasional vetos notwithstanding, the organization is quite busy. It conducts lots of peacekeeping operations, imposes and monitors multiple sanctions regimes, and is generally involved in a way it wasn't for most of its existence. Moreover, this activism is happening in the midst of an important, if still very incomplete, power shift. To varying degrees, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Turkey now see themselves as part of the international power structure.  Together, these trends mean that powers with mixed and often fluid worldviews are wrestling with a host of global problems and finding themselves compelled to articulate how the international community should involve itself in the domestic affairs of states. 

The choices they make could have lasting consequences; votes at the General Assembly and the UN's Human Rights Council may have no legal force but they help shape international standards. One of the real accomplishments of the Obama administration at the UN has been taking the Human Rights Council seriously and fighting hard there for its conception of human rights. There's evidence that this struggle is having an impact. For several years now, Gowan and others at the European Council on Foreign Relations have tracked how UN members vote on human rights issues, and they see some signs that the West is prevailing in a long-running battle of ideas:

The evidence suggests that there is a genuine shift towards Western human rights positions in UN forums, extending beyond the Syrian case, but that this is built on fragile foundations....Overwhelming numbers of countries have backed General Assembly resolutions concerning Syria. In February, the Assembly passed two resolutions on Syria – the first calling for a political transition and for Ban Ki-moon to appoint an envoy for the crisis, the second specifically condemning human rights abuses – by margins of 137 votes in favor to 12 against and 133 to 11 respectively.

But if there are reasons for optimism about the UN as a norm-generating body, its value as a tool for managing specific security threats is in serious doubt. The General Assembly meetings take place against the backdrop of the bloody Syria conflict and the continuing stalemate over Iran's nuclear program. Both crises provide ample ammunition for those who argue that the organization is irrelevant--or even counterproductive--on today's key security challenges.

Gowan argues that a UN failure on Iran, in particular, would have a long-term impact on the organization's perceived utility as a crisis managent tool, at least in Washington:

The consequences of the U.N. failing to play a meaningful role in resolving the Iran nuclear standoff, however, would be deeper and long-lasting, for it would severely damage U.S. perceptions of the U.N. as a crisis-management mechanism. If the U.N. fails to contain Iran’s nuclear program, no American president will be able to turn to the organization to manage major threats for many years to come, whoever wins in November’s elections.

Here I respectfully part ways. The truth is that failure doesn't really stick to the United Nations, at least not in the way that Gowan suggests. Only a few years after the catastrophes in Srebrenica and Rwanda, the Security Council launched what became a huge peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The UN's crackup over Iraq in 2003 did not prevent the Bush administration from making the organization a centerpiece of its Iran and North Korea policies. In short, I see no reason that the United Nations might not, in the wake of the collapse of its Iran strategy, become a lead actor in some future security challenge.

Broad debates about the United Nations tend to be highly ideological. For good or ill, world leaders and diplomats have a much more pragmatic outlook. If the shifting diplomatic sands make the United Nations a convenient forum for addressing some future crisis, the organization's past failures won't get in the way.   

This post was contributed by Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist who blogs at Dart-Throwing Chimp.

Yesterday David discussed an article in the April 2012 issue of World Politics claiming, among other things, that new democracies can reduce their risk of backsliding to authoritarian rule by ratifying arms-control treaties. As author Isabella Alcañiz sees it, elected officials in new democracies want democracy to survive, but they are worried that the military or remnants of the old regime will oust them in a coup.

To deter those reactionary forces from trying to usurp power, newly elected leaders can increase the costs of a coup by ratifying the international arms-control agreements that other, more powerful countries support. According to Alcañiz,

The logic behind this is simple: by strengthening diplomatic ties in a high-value policy area, new democrats expect domestic conspirators to anticipate possible diplomatic and economic sanctions if they were to attempt a coup.

I think that’s a plausible story, but it’s hardly the only reason we might expect to see an association between treaty ratification and the survival of newly democratic regimes. Alternatively, it could be that governments in most new democracies would like to ratify these agreements because of the international benefits they convey, but the more resilient new democracies are also the ones that are more capable of pulling it off. If treaty ratification is politically controversial, then it’s more likely to happen in cases where partisan rivals are more amenable to compromise, or where the incumbent party enjoys a strong electoral advantage. Both of these features are also things that should make a new democracy more durable, whether or not it ratifies any arms-control agreements. In this version of the story, pre-existing characteristics of the new regime turn out to be a common cause of treaty ratification and democratic survival, and the correlation between those two outcomes is spurious.

So, which is it? Do the treaties create resilience, or are resilient regimes more likely to sign the treaties? In Alcañiz’s story, ratification is like an inoculation; by taking this medicine, new democracies are said to reduce their risk of catching a coup. To see if this inoculation is effective, we need to compare new democracies that take it with similar ones that don’t.

That’s not what Alcañiz does. Instead of comparing outcomes across new democracies that did or didn’t sign these treaties, she models the risk of regime breakdown across all countries, whatever their regime type. Alcañiz’s results do show that democracies which have ratified these treaties are less susceptible to breakdown than autocracies that have done likewise, but that’s not the comparison her theory makes.

Alcañiz’s paper is worth a read for the rich theoretical discussion of why states sign treaties and what effects those decisions might have on their politics, not just internationally but also at home. What it definitely does not give us, though, is convincing evidence that new democracies can improve their prospects for survival by ratifying international arms-control agreements.

It's an open secret that United Nations headquarters in New York is a hive of intelligence activity. During the Cold War, intelligence agents sometimes planted themselves in interpreters' booths, hoping to snap photos of classified documents in the hands of incautious diplomats. As Colum Lynch documents here, Moscow has been a particularly active player in the UN spy game, but certainly not the only one. In the late 1970s, the CIA helped engineer the defection of a senior Soviet UN employee. And in the run-up to the Iraq war, the United States and the United Kingdom apparently snooped on private meetings of states opposed to the war.

But Belgium's intelligence chief makes the case in this interview with the EUObserver that Brussels, home to the European Union and NATO, bids fair to be the world's spy capital:

I have said several times, and we are very well placed here in Belgium and particularly here in Brussels to say it, that the level of espionage is the same if not even higher than in the days of the Cold War. Some services thought that with the coming down of the Berlin wall the Cold War was over and espionage was somethig of the past. But we can state that in Belgium, espionage, Russian espionage and from other countries, like the Chinese, but also others, we are at the same level as the Cold War, which is not surprising given where we are. We are a country with an enormous concentration of diplomats, businessmen, international institutions, Nato, European institutions. So for an intelligence officer, for a spy, this is a kindergarten. It's the place to be. You have people here who have commercial and political information, people whom you can try to recruit, people you can try to influence. You have governments where you can try to lobby. And the border between allowed lobbying and not-allowed interference - influence and espionage - is sometimes very hard to identify. Given the special context we have here, I think you can safely say that Brussels is one of the big spy capitals of the world.

EUObserver has compiled this list of recent espionage operations in Brussels.

An interesting report from the Guardian examines a new program to build English-language skills among ASEAN diplomats:

Brunei and the US will this month start delivering the first of a series of intensive 11-week English-language courses for teacher trainers and government officials in southeast Asia, where consolidated language skills are expected to help unify the region before it becomes a single economic zone in 2015.

The courses are part of a five-year, $25m Brunei-US English Language Enrichment Project for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), aimed at linguistically unifying the 10 members – all of which speak their own languages – and strengthening diplomatic, educational and teaching opportunities across the region.

Some 70 teacher trainers and government officials will take part in the programme, which is funded entirely by the Brunei government and run jointly by the University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD) and the Honolulu-based East-West Centre. Courses begin with a seven-week module in English proficiency at UBD and continue in Hawaii with a four-week course in culture and leadership, says Terance Bigalke, director of education at the East-West Centre....

While English was chosen as the official lingua franca of Asean in 2009, its adaptation has proved particularly challenging for certain member states – notably Burma, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – that don't have a history of English language usage and which have therefore been targeted by officials at UBD as "most in need".

The ASEAN charter stipulates that English is the organization's official working language.

The question of whether democracies have different foreign policies than other kinds of regime has intrigued international relations scholars for years. Realists often insist that regime type doesn't matter much; scholars from other intellectual traditions are more receptive to the idea that democracies act differently. Whole forests have been felled exploring the question of whether, when, and against whom democracies will fight.

Writing in the April issue of World Politics, Isabella Alcañiz pursues a different twist on that venerable question. She begins by noting that newly democratic governments sign international arms control agreements at a significantly higher rate than non-democratic governments and established democracies. She hypothesizes that they do so largely for reputational reasons:

A positive reputation accomplishes two objectives. First, it signals to the international community that regime change effectively entailed a cahnge of country tape away from the past autocracy. Second, and more importantly, it exposes potential conspirators to the possibility of diplomatic and economic sanctions if they were to attempt to reverse the transition.

In effect, leaders of new and fragile democracies seek to enmesh their states in a web of multilateral agreements in order to make political mischief at home less likely. Alcañiz acknowledges that new and fragile autocratic leaders may attempt a similar strategy, particularly with human rights treaties, which are easy to sign and usually have no enforcement mechanisms. But she argues that arms control and security treaties are particularly attractive for new democracies precisely because noncompliance does carry significant risks. 

Alcañiz's survey of treaty ratification patterns and the evolution of democratic transitions strongly suggests that this strategy is effective.  "[T]he more a new democracy commits to arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament treaties," she concludes, "the less likely it is to experience a regime reversal."

Close observers of NATO have for many years worried that the vast discrepancy in defense spending between the United States and its partners might mean that the alliance can no longer fight together. After the 1999 Kosovo conflict, for example, a number of voices noted that U.S. pilots sometimes had difficulty operating jointly with less advanced NATO air forces. In 2002, NATO formally identified this capabilities gap as a critical challenge. The Libya operation, and recent European austerity measures, have intensified concerns about an alliance growing apart militarily. 

Tom Parker of Amnesty International (and formerly of British intelligence) has a related but different concern: that alliance members are not only increasingly divided in terms of how they can fight, but also over how they should fight:

Britain, Poland, Italy and Germany are among America’s closest military partners. Troops from all four countries are currently serving alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but they are now operating within a very different set of constraints than their U.S. counterparts.

The European Court of Human Rights established its jurisdiction over stabilization operations in Iraq, and by implication its writ extends to Afghanistan as well. The British government has lost a series of cases before the court relating to its operations in southern Iraq. This means that concepts such as the right to life, protection from arbitrary punishment, remedy and due process apply in areas under the effective control of European forces. Furthermore, the possibility that intelligence provided by any of America’s European allies could be used to target a terrorism suspect in Somalia or the Philippines for a lethal drone strike now raises serious criminal liability issues for the Europeans.

The United States conducts such operations under the legal theory that it is in an international armed conflict with Al Qaeda and its affiliates that can be pursued anywhere on the globe where armed force may be required. But not one other member of NATO shares this legal analysis, which flies in the face of established international legal norms. The United States may have taken issue with the traditional idea that wars are fought between states and not between states and criminal gangs, but its allies have not...

NATO cannot conduct military operations under two competing legal regimes for long. Something has to give—and it may just be the Atlantic alliance.

Read the whole piece here.

The NATO Defense College has just published the conclusions of a summer confab that assessed NATO's evolving role in Afghanistan and examined how the alliance can help ensure stabilityafter its combat role there ends.

The conference drew on the perspectives of a group of uniformed officers, policy analysts, and academics from a variety of NATO countries.  The report that resulted uses calm language but paints a dark picture of the alliance's committment after its current mission--the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)--ends in December 2014. "It is clear that ISAF as an organization will end on December 31, 2014. But the contours of a new NATO mission have yet to take form."

The report is skeptical that NATO will be able to continue advising Afghan military and security forces at the level of individual units. "Advisers at the tactical level...will require force protection, medical evaluation, quick reaction forces, tactical logistics and other support that would translate into a level of resource that may not be supportable." Instead, it's likely that NATO will advise Afghan security forces only at the headquarters and ministry levels.

There's no doubt that bolstering the Afghan government after ISAF ends will involve bucketfuls of cash; the report predicts that Kabul won't be able to count on major revenue of its own until 2020 at the earliest. Given this, the Afghan authorities will need at least $3-4 billion annually, and that's not even counting security. It's not at all clear that the political will to sustain that level of support exists:

[N]ations will struggle to justify continued support to Afghanistan as other domestic, financial and security issues compete for priority. It remains to be seen how much political leadership will be demonstrated to continue the new NATO mission in Afghanistan and how much funding will be provided during the continuing economic crisis.

Officially, NATO is on a glide path toward handing authority to a strengthened and capable Afghan government with whom the alliance will maintain an "enduring partnership."  The reality, this report suggests, is far less reassuring.

The Afghanistan operation may be in trouble, but NATO officials think the campaign against Somali pirates--launched in 2008-- is going quite well. Via Reuters:

[I]n the first half of 2012 there were just 69 incidents involving Somali pirates, compared with 163 in the same period last year, International Maritime Bureau data showed.

"We are expecting the activity rate to be lower than last year at this time ... that is based on the lack of activity in the past six months," said Commodore Bruce Belliveau, NATO's Deputy Chief of Staff Operations.

"We are not seeing the buildup of logistic supplies that they would have had in the past for outfitting fishing vessels or dhows to use as motherships," he told Reuters on the sidelines of a shipping conference in London on Wednesday.