Topic: United Nations

Ban Ki-moon, the Foreign Minister of South Korea, is coming to the United States next week for a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (previous meeting pictured). He'll also be swinging through New York next Tuesday and Wednesday for a meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose term ends on December 31.

The race to be the next Secretary-General is on, and though Minister Ban is not yet shortlisted, he's beginning to position himself as an alternative to the Sri Lankan and Thai frontrunners, about whom no one is especially enthusiastic. (According to the geographical rotation system, the next SG should come from Asia, though the US has suggested that the rotation is less important than finding a worthy candidate.) Earlier this week, I was asked to edit talking points for Minister Ban to use at the Davos Forum, which involved a lot of "If I were Secretary-General" hypotheticals and answers to questions about multilateralism and UN reform.

It will be interesting to see how this race plays out over the next year, and to watch what becomes of Minister Ban's bid.

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Topic: United Nations

This is a bit out of date, but that General Assembly resolution I was working on passed. The text of the resolution is still not available on the UN website, but I'll post it once it's up.

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Topic: United Nations

The New York Times today devotes its lead editorial to bitch-slapping John Bolton, claiming that his bluster and bullying are derailing a reform process that the United States actually supports and giving ammo to those who oppose serious change. In my view, the Times is pretty much right on.

(Oh, and I just got a call from one of the diplomats asking me what is meant by the sentence, "America's most successful U.N. ambassadors ... have known how to harness American power to patient, skillful diplomacy." I had to admit that this one threw me a bit as well. Are we using patient, skillful diplomacy to drive American power or vice versa? The language supports the first interpretation, but that doesn't make much sense conceptually. Anyway, an odd sentence, but a forceful editorial.)

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Topic: United Nations

Slate has an article about the conflict over top-level domain names on the Internet. It's an abstruse subject, but essentially it comes down to this: there's a group called ICANN that administers top-level domain names (that is, the URLs we type to go to web addresses, including .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov, and country codes such as .us, .cn, .kr, and so on). ICANN is a California-based nonprofit, and this is what makes the rest of the world nervous. Countries like Iran and China worry that leaving the top-level domain system under US control puts them at risk of having their web traffic meddled with, and they would like to have greater control of that traffic themselves.

The latest round of chatter on this subject has been generated by a recent summit in Tunis, at which the idea was floated that the UN should take over ICANN's job. Enthusiasm for this notion was reportedly low.

There are two interesting concepts in the Slate article, and I would love to hear from readers who know more about this subject than me whether either one makes sense.

The first is that top-level domains could be administered by some kind of distributed peer-to-peer system like BitTorrent:

Countries that choose to house Torrent servers would receive a random piece of the DNS pie over a closed P2P network, with mirrors set up to correct data by consensus in the case of corruption or unauthorized modification. No one country would actually physically host the entire database.

Is this actually plausible?

Secondly, the article argues that top-level domains are headed for eventual obsolescence. How realistic is this idea? Will other modes of communication make .com irrelevant? If so, how soon will this happen?

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Topic: United Nations

Demonstrating his fine leadership skills, John Bolton is once again charging in to declare that everyone else's work is totally worthless. Wonkette has a little rant about his latest shenanigans.

I suppose that bullying and browbeating have worked so well on Iraq, Iran, North Korea and the Security Council that the Bush administration couldn't possibly choose a different tactic for the UN, where there's an opportunity to browbeat the entire world at once. Too bad you can't browbeat hurricanes, though.

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Topic: United Nations

Secretary-General Kofi Annan is asking for $1.6 billion for renovations to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. According to the Daily News, this will involve building a temporary conference center (or centre, in UN-speak) on the North Lawn.

The current price tag is 55 percent higher than the original estimate because lawmakers in Albany are pissed off about the Oil-for-Food scandal, so they've been sitting on permit applications for a cheaper renovation. Considering that the United States provides 22 percent of the UN's regular budget, Albany's delaying tactics will ultimately cost the American taxpayers more money while doing nothing for New York City or State except spreading the word that we're less hospitable than we could be.

Meanwhile, it seems like the rumored temporary relocation of the United Nations to Brooklyn is not a going concern.

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Topic: United Nations

Yesterday I took our new speechwriter over to the UN cafeteria and was happily waylaid by an international food fair being held in the lobby of the Secretariat Building, which featured dishes from all over the world: Carribean pastries, Ukranian dumplings, Chinese mixed platters, ANZAC cookies from New Zealand. The Iranian pulao platters were selling like the proverbial hotcakes, but what caught my eye was the Nepali delegation's chafing dish full of momo (dumplings).

I asked how much for just the momos, and the woman said she'd give me three for $2, a mix of veg and chicken momos. Deal. "This will bring back happy memories of my visits to Kathmandu," I said.

"Oh, you have been?"

"Yes, I've visited Nepal twice and I loved it."

"Here, let me give you some more vegetable momo, this one has different taste."

Your intrepid reporter did not refuse. Hot sauce was also proffered, and it was good — almost as good as the hot sauce at the now-defunct Tibet Shambala.

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Topic: United Nations

So the UN simultaneous translation system was designed by Brähler ICS, a German firm, as you can see here, and was installed by Conference Systems, Inc. Knowing this will help you ... um ... er ... Okay, I admit, it's just full-on UN geeky.

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Topic: United Nations

Sean Penn among the diplmats

If you saw The Interpreter (I didn't), you probably saw those weird white thingies hanging off the ears of exotically dressed dignitaries.

I have now worn one. Two, in fact, at informal consultations on the draft resolution that South Korea is pushing in the General Assembly. I won't go into too much detail on the technicalities, both because they're boring and because I'm not sure it wouldn't be some sort of diplomatic no-no, but I will say that I have thoroughly enjoyed my exposure to the process of negotiating and hashing out a text at the UN.

My responsibility has been to type changes to the draft text into a laptop, on the fly, so the delegates can squint at the changes projected on the screen at the front of the room. This is sometimes challenging when the delegates mutter in accents, but that's where the ear thingies come in handy. I always thought of them as being for translation, but they're also handy just to amplify speech, and I'm sure it will satisfy the budget hawks among my readers to know that there's a sound person in a booth at every single meeting in every single conference room at the UN whose job it is to switch people's mics on and off when they forget. And the efficiency experts among you will likewise be thrilled to discover that conference room reservations and sound are handled by one department, projectors by another.

In any case, working in the conference rooms at the UN feels weirdly like being in a well-funded middle school circa the late 1970s. Except the crowd in the cafeteria is cooler.

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Topic: United Nations

The 2005 World Summit began yesterday, with speeches by President Bush (webcast here), Kofi Annan, Tony Blair and others, including President Roh Moo-hyun of Korea.

President Roh's speech, delivered in Korean, was short and to the point (English PDF here), emphasizing the importance of letting middle powers share in shaping the world order. In a thinly veiled jab at Japan, Roh warned that "vigilance against a resurgence of major-power centrism in certain circles is also in order. The leading nations of contemporary international politics should be more forthcoming in their introspection of the past and future and also exercise greater self-restraint." Turning to Security Council reform, he insisted "that any reform plan we
arrive at should serve to facilitate harmony among nations, rather than presage another variant of great power politics."

This effort to hold its own among the great powers surrounding it — China, Japan, and Russia, and the United States by regional influence — has been the story of Korea throughout the modern era, and it has mostly been a tragic story for Koreans. It is small wonder, then, that President Roh would devote his speech to defending against a creeping return to the great-power machinations that defined the international political order at the beginning of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, the president's visit has turned out to be an unusually quiet time for me. The bulk of the Mission staff is over at the Waldorf-Astoria, at the president's command center, or racing over to the UN to assist in various bilateral meetings, and there isn't much in the way of speechwriting going on. And sadly, I don't expect to have an opportunity to meet President Roh.

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