The Red Line: Could China Conquer Taiwan?

 Xi has thrown down the gauntlet and stated that Taiwan will return to the Peoples Republic of China by 2049, whether Taiwan wants it or not. So now a countdown timer has started, and Taiwan scrambles to prepare for what Beijing may throw at it. Should they build a large navy? Should they try and push the Chinese back into sea fighting on the beaches? Should the Taiwanese retreat to the jungles and fight a bloody insurgency from there? We ask our expert panel what strategy Taiwan is likely to take, and whether or not it is likely to be effective against the entire PLA. This weeks panel Eric Gomez (CATO Institute) Sheena Chestnut Greitens (University of Texas) Robert D Kaplan (Geopolitics Author) More info at - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus

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WorldAffairs: Is the United Nations Still Relevant at 75?

Seventy-five years ago, delegates from 50 countries met in San Francisco to sign the UN Charter. Initially, the purpose of the United Nations was to maintain peace and security through international cooperation and to essentially prevent another world war. Today’s UN has 193 member countries and is facing a time of uncertainty and open disdain from US President Donald Trump, who has cut funding to the world body and declared, “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.” On this week’s episode, we look at the UN’s achievements, its shortcomings and what the future holds for international cooperation with journalist James Traub. Then Ray Suarez talks with former Prime Minister of Canada The Rt. Hon Kim Campbell and former Foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge Castañeda about how the United States is viewed by its neighbors.

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Politico: U.N. vote deals Trudeau embarrassing defeat on world stage

Despite being a founding U.N. member and part of the G-7 and G-20, Canada’s size and history once again counted for little: the government of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was defeated by Portugal in 2010, even as the former colonial power was in the midst of the humiliating EU bailout. [...]

With Norway, Ireland and Canada all taking similar approaches to such core global issues as climate change, multilateralism and peacekeeping, Canada’s relatively late entry into the race — as well as stumbles like Trudeau’s brownface scandal — hurt Canada’s ability to stand apart and make its case.[...]

The Canadian government shelled out roughly $1.7 million and employed 13 full-time campaign staff, compared to Norway’s $2.8 million budget and Ireland on $1 million. Ireland splurged on U2 and Riverdance tickets for diplomats, and Canada on Céline Dion tickets, BBC reported, in addition to giveaways such as greeting cards, chocolates and Canada-branded facemasks.

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statista: Venezuela Is Fast Becoming World's Biggest Refugee Crisis

According to UN data, Venezuela is fast becoming the world's biggest refugee crisis. By the end of 2020, 6.5 million Venezuelans are expected to have been forcibly displaced outside of their home country. This is up from just 300,000 in 2017. Syria, the biggest global refugee crisis to date, reached its height in 2018 with 6.7 million displaced people. With resettlement programs ongoing, that number is expected to have been reduced to 5.6 by the end of 2019 and might further fall in 2020.

While the number of Syrian refugees and those in a refugee-like situation had been rising since 2011, Venezuelan refugee numbers jumped up quickly, testing the preparedness of humanitarian organizations in the region.

Brookings Institution, which analyzed the data, notes that compared to the Syrian crisis, the Venezuela refugee situation is severely underfunded, putting the lives of hundred thousands of people at risk because of the lack of food and medical assistance.

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Associated Press: Russian minister: West out of step, can’t accept its decline

He pointedly scorned much of the “West,” a term Russian officials typically use to refer to the United States and its traditional allies in Europe. He accused them of manipulating their citizens, disseminating false information, and preventing journalists from doing their work — all charges that the West has long lobbed at the Russian government and its predecessor, the Soviet Union.

“It is hard for the West to accept seeing its centuries-long dominance in world affairs diminishing,” Lavrov said. “Leading Western countries are trying to impede the development of the polycentric world, to recover their privileged positions, to impose standards of conduct based on the narrow Western interpretation of liberalism on others.” [...]

Lavrov accused the West of maintaining a double standard: promoting liberal values where they’re convenient but discarding them when they’re not. “When it is advantageous, the right of the peoples to self-determination has significance. And when it is not, it is declared ‘illegal’,” he said.

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The Conversation: How many humans tomorrow? The United Nations revises its projections

These new projections replace those that the United Nations published in 2017. The calculations have been revised upwards or downwards according to the countries or regions. For example, in the medium scenario, the figure for China in 2100 is 44 million higher than that in the 2017 projections (4% more). In contrast, for India, it is down 66 million (4% less). The same goes for Africa as a whole, whose projected population in 2100 is reduced by 187 million (-4%). For the planet as a whole, the upward and downward revisions offset each other, but only partly. According to the medium scenario, the global total for 2050 is projected to be 37 million fewer people than in the previous projections (-0.4%) and 309 million fewer in 2100 (-3%). [...]

The first time the United Nations published population projections up to 2100 was in 1981, and their medium scenario predicted then that the world population would reach 10.5 billion that year. The June 2019 projections suggest a figure of 10.9 billion – 0.4 billion higher. While the world total is slightly higher, it conceals a radical change in population distribution across the different continents. In 1981, the population of Asia was projected to reach 5.9 billion by 2100, but in 2019 the figure was revised downward to 4.7 billion (20% less). Likewise, for Latin America, the figure of 1,187 million in 2100 was lowered to 680 million (a decrease of about 43%). For Africa, on the other hand, the 1981 projections were 2.2 billion for 2100, while the 2019 projections have nearly doubled this figure to 4.3 billion (see Figure 2 below).

Where do these changes come from? The population of a country or continent changes because of fertility and mortality. Migration is also a factor, but to a lesser extent for many countries and with zero effect worldwide. It is therefore the assumptions on mortality and fertility that affect projections. For mortality, it declined faster than imagined 40 years ago, especially for children, which led to more rapid growth. The AIDS epidemic was certainly not anticipated at the time, and Africa has paid the heaviest cost. But the excess mortality it has caused will have lasted only one-time, and life expectancy has begun to increase again in recent years and relatively quickly. AIDS has had little effect on the demographic vitality of Africa.

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The New York Review of Books: Sierra Leone, 2000: A Case History in Successful Interventionism

A paradox of this claim is that the scope and success of the intervention depended less on deliberate policy and careful planning in Downing Street or Whitehall than on a daring degree of improvisation by the commanding officer on the ground. “Operation Palliser,” which began in May 2000, was led by General Sir David Richards, then a brigadier, later appointed chief of the British general staff and NATO commander in Afghanistan. Without official sanction from London, Richards protected the capital Freetown from rebel attacks and prevented it from falling. In so doing, he made a remarkable unilateral decision to go beyond his mandate in order to save a civilian population from the overwhelming likelihood of an all-out slaughter. The military historian David Ucko, writing in the Journal of Strategic Studies in 2015, calls Richards’s action “A rare success story, but… a poorly understood and little studied case.” [...]

The carnage they inflicted was unspeakable. In these raids on villages, according to interviews I did later, pieced together with testimonies from human rights investigators, soldiers forced parents to choose which of their children would be taken as fighters and which would be killed on the spot. Teenagers in gangsta-style baggy pants raped and plundered, taking girls as young as nine as their “bush wives.” Rebel soldiers asked adult villagers whether they wanted “long sleeves” or “short sleeves,” then hacked off their limbs with machetes. [...]

From their headquarters at Lungi Airport, Richards’s force quickly retook the road that the RUF had earlier cut, and then established a good intelligence network. A few days later, using tips from locals, British soldiers with support from a government commander who went by the name Spider succeeded in capturing Sankoh. It was a significant win—not only boosting the morale of government forces and securing popular support for Richards’s presence, but also opening the way for negotiations to secure the release of the Jordanian UN soldiers being held hostage (all eleven of them were later freed).[...]

Having watched the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda in the early 1990s—and the failures of intervention—Blair himself became an advocate for humanitarian intervention on principled grounds. In 1999, during the seventy-eight-day NATO-led military operation in Kosovo—a short, sharp war that drove Bosnian Serbs out of Albanian Kosovar territory—he delivered a speech at the Chicago Economic Club. In this “Doctrine of the International Community,” he spoke of the need to balance national interests with “moral purpose” in foreign affairs.

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Vox: Ghana is adopting a data-driven approach to fighting poverty

Recognizing this, Ghana wants its new census data to be more accurate, comprehensive, and granular than in the past. In addition to switching to digital tablets, it’s using satellite imagery to make sure households in rural areas don’t go undiscovered and uncounted, and disaggregating the data it collects at the district level.

The government is now seriously committed to a “leave no one behind” ethic, which means counting every single person in the population. That includes people who are sometimes called “the invisible” — those who live in slums, who are homeless, or who are institutionalized. [...]

Sometimes called West Africa’s “golden child,” Ghana was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to cut its poverty rate in half, thereby achieving the first of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, a list of eight targets that world leaders pledged to meet by 2015. [...]

That sounds impressive, but when researchers disaggregated the data they found that in some regions, over 70 percent of people were still below the poverty line, Seidu said. In two districts in a particularly poor region, it was as many as nine out of 10 people. [...]

One of the major critiques of the Millennium Development Goals was that some countries saw improved conditions for people who were just below the poverty line, but the extremely poor weren’t better off. So when the UN formulated a new list of targets in 2015, dubbed the Sustainable Development Goals, it emphasized the motto “leave no one behind” as a guiding principle. Those words have become a popular development slogan.

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The World Economic Forum: The UN went to one of the world's richest countries to look at poverty – this is what it found

Picture a country where a fifth of the population lives in poverty. People have to choose between eating or heating their homes and children go to school hungry. Homelessness is rising. And basic services are in crisis, leaving many struggling to cope.

This is the damning indictment, delivered by a UN official, not of a developing economy or war-torn nation but of the UK – the world’s fifth biggest economy. [...]

A fundamental overhaul of the benefits system and widespread cutbacks have placed increasing pressure on already stretched and underfunded services including the police and doctors, the report says. The “punitive, mean-spirited and often callous” approach taken by government to supporting society’s most in need has driven further inequalities. [...]

In response, the government pointed to the UN’s own data that the UK comes 15th on the list of the happiest places in the world to live. [...]

It ranked 21st overall, falling near the bottom on many of the key indicators including healthy life expectancy and income inequality.

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The New Yorker: John Bolton on the Warpath

A former American official who worked closely with Bolton suggested that Yale had inspired Bolton’s lifelong contempt for “élites,” whom he regularly lambastes in his writing and on Fox News: “I think John looked around at Yale and said to himself, ‘This is the soft élite. They’ve always had it easy. Mommy and Daddy took care of them. These guys are weak. They’re always looking down on me.’ He has a chip on his shoulder.” His classmates went to hear Muhammad Ali speak about resisting the draft; they argued that the Black Panthers were being unfairly persecuted and inveighed against Richard Nixon. Bolton spent a summer as an intern for Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, whom he later described as “a kind and humorous man, a real Middle American.” (Agnew, after years of corruption allegations, resigned in 1973 and pleaded no contest to tax evasion.) [...]

Bolton’s immersion in the arcana of weapons of mass destruction encouraged an absolutist view. “The first thing he thinks about in the morning is protecting Americans from nuclear weapons,” Sarah Tinsley, who has worked as an aide to Bolton since the eighties, told me. In 2003, as he prepared testimony for an appearance before Congress, he described Syria’s efforts to produce nuclear and biological weapons as an urgent threat—an assessment that intelligence agencies thought was exaggerated. A bitter internal debate ensued; the accusations endangered the Syrian government’s coöperation in hunting suspected terrorists. “We were getting some of our best, if not our best, intelligence on Al Qaeda from Damascus,” Lawrence Wilkerson told me. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, took Bolton aside and “told him to shut up,” Wilkerson said. Before Bolton testified to Congress, much of his language was diluted. Armitage reached out to a team of intelligence officers who vetted public statements made by State Department officials, and asked them to give special scrutiny to Bolton’s. “Nothing Bolton said could leave the building until I O.K.’d it,” Thomas Fingar, who led the team at the time, told me. [...]

In March, 2005, Bush nominated Bolton to be the Ambassador to the United Nations, a move that was widely seen as an expression of contempt for the institution. Bolton had a history of deriding the U.N., once saying that if the headquarters “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” Still, Democrats in the Senate anticipated a routine hearing; they were the minority party and could do little to resist. Tony Blinken, who was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me that the members began to reconsider as they examined Bolton’s work in the State Department. “We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views,” Blinken told me. “If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn’t support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it.” After several days of testimony, Senator George Voinovich, a Republican from Ohio, declared, “John Bolton is the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be.” [...]

Colleagues from other countries struggled to accommodate him. “On a personal basis, you can joke with him,” the Western diplomat who knows Bolton told me. Working with him was a different story: “Coöperation was possible, but very much on his conditions.” Bolton had spent decades refining an argument that multilateral institutions and international agreements often did more harm than good—that each one represented a loss of American sovereignty. “Bolton has a Hobbesian view of the universe—life is nasty, brutish, and short,” the former American official who worked with Bolton told me. “There are a lot of nasty people out there who want to do us harm. If our country’s interests align with another’s, it’s a fleeting phenomenon, and the moment our interests diverge they will sell us down the river.” Bolton doesn’t ordinarily concern himself with the internal affairs of other nations, or with trying to democratize them, the former official said: “The U.S. has values domestically, but he doesn’t give a shit about the values of others. If it advances your interests to work with another country, then do it.”

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Foreign Policy: Defenders of Human Rights Are Making a Comeback

Yet there was also considerable pushback against authoritarianism. Malaysian voters ousted their corrupt prime minister, Najib Razak, the latest representative of a ruling coalition that had been in power for almost six decades, in favor of a coalition running on an agenda of human rights reform. In the Maldives, voters rejected their autocratic president, Abdulla Yameen. In Armenia, whose government was mired in corruption, Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan had to step down amid massive protests. Ethiopia, under popular pressure, replaced a long-abusive government with a new one led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who has embarked on an impressive reform agenda. And, of course, U.S. voters in the midterm elections for the House of Representatives seemed to rebuke Trump’s divisive policies.

In many cases, particularly in Central Europe, the public led the resistance in the streets. protested Orban’s moves to shut Central European University, an academic bastion of liberal inquiry and thought, and to impose a “slave law” to compensate for workers fleeing Large crowds in Budapest Orban’s “illiberal democracy” by authorizing extended overtime with pay delayed up to three years. Tens of thousands of Poles repeatedly took to the streets to defend their courts from the ruling party’s attempts to undermine their independence. Czech and Romanian leaders also faced large anti-corruption protests. [...]

The Human Rights Council made some major advances. For example, the possibility of a Chinese, Russian, or even American veto at the U.N. Security Council appeared to doom any effort to refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court for its army’s crimes against humanity that sent 700,000 Rohingya fleeing for their lives to Bangladesh. In response, the Human Rights Council, where there is no veto, stepped in to create an investigative mechanism to preserve evidence, identify those responsible, and build cases for prosecution once a tribunal becomes available. That effort won overwhelmingly, with 35 countries in favor and only three against (seven abstained), sending the signal that these atrocities cannot be committed with impunity.[...]

For the first time, the Human Rights Council condemned the severe repression in Venezuela under President Nicolás Maduro. A resolution led by a group of Latin American nations won by a vote of 23 to seven with 17 abstentions. The U.S. government’s departure from the council made it easier for resolution sponsors to show they were addressing Venezuela as a matter of principle rather than as a tool of Washington’s ideology. A group of Latin American governments led by Argentina also organized in the context of the Human Rights Council the first joint statement, signed by 47 countries, on the worsening repression in Nicaragua, as President Daniel Ortega responded with violence to growing protests against his repressive rule.

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The Guardian: ‘Brought to Jesus’: the evangelical grip on the Trump administration

The secretary of state’s primary message in Cairo was that the US was ready once more to embrace conservative Middle Eastern regimes, no matter how repressive, if they made common cause against Iran.

His second message was religious. In his visit to Egypt, he came across as much as a preacher as a diplomat. He talked about “America’s innate goodness” and marveled at a newly built cathedral as “a stunning testament to the Lord’s hand”. [...]

The gravitational pull of white evangelicals has been less visible. But it could have far-reaching policy consequences. Vice President Mike Pence and Pompeo both cite evangelical theology as a powerful motivating force. [...]

For many US evangelical Christians, one of the key preconditions for such a moment is the gathering of the world’s Jews in a greater Israel between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It is a belief, known as premillenial dispensationalism or Christian Zionism – and it has very real potential consequences for US foreign policy. [...]

The comparison is made explicitly in The Trump Prophecy, a religious film screened in 1,200 cinemas around the country in October, depicting a retired firefighter who claims to have heard God’s voice, saying: “I’ve chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this.”

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Foreign Affairs: The Crisis of Peacekeeping

Part of the reason for this failure is a lack of resources. It is hard to fault the UN for that, since it relies on contributions from its members. The larger problem, however, is a fundamental misunderstanding about what makes for a sustained peace. The UN’s strategy favors top-down deals struck with elites and fixates on elections. But that neglects what should be the other main component of their approach: embracing bottom-up strategies that draw on local knowledge and letting the people themselves determine how best to promote peace. [...]

The possibility of a veto meant that intervention was limited to places not caught up in the East-West rivalry, and as a result, peacekeeping missions were rare during the Cold War. Only 13 were set up between 1948 and 1978, and none at all between 1979 and 1987. The missions that did exist were fairly unintrusive. A small number of unarmed observers would monitor cease-fire lines and troop withdrawals, as in Kashmir in 1949, or lightly armed soldiers would try to insert themselves between national armies, as in Lebanon in 1978. Sometimes, the presence of UN soldiers helped prevent further conflict, while at other times, it did not. The 1973 Yom Kippur War embodied this mixed track record: UN peacekeepers succeeded in enforcing the cease-fire along the Egyptian-Israeli border in the Sinai, but they failed to do the same at the Israeli-Syrian border in the Golan Heights. Even though the UN peacekeeping forces were awarded the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize, their global impact remained limited. [...]

Despite all these supposed improvements, today, just like 20 years ago, peacekeepers often fail to meet the high expectations set for them. Experts all use different definitions of success and thus arrive at different conclusions, so whether or not a UN mission can be considered a failure is a matter of interpretation. Some scholars have arrived at positive assessments. Michael Gilligan and Ernest Sergenti, for instance, have calculated that 85 percent of UN operations have resulted in prolonged periods of peace or shortened periods of war. Page Fortna has determined that, all else being equal, the presence of peacekeepers decreases the risk of another war breaking out by 55–62 percent. Lisa Hultman, Jacob Kathman, and Megan Shannon have shown that the deployment of UN troops reduces both battlefield deaths and civilian killings. Other scholars have come to more dispiriting conclusions. Jeremy Weinstein discovered that 75 percent of the civil wars in which the UN intervened resumed within ten years of stopping. Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis studied 138 peace processes and found that roughly half of those that had peacekeepers failed to decrease the violence or further democracy. Roland Paris analyzed 11 UN missions in depth and found that only two were able to build a sustainable peace.

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The Atlantic: A Nonbinding Migration Pact Is Roiling Politics in Europe

The United Nations Global Migration Compact, signed this week by 164 countries, has been years in the making, and includes relatively uncontroversial goals like improving data collection. In a sign of its import, German Chancellor Angela Merkel—whose legacy will likely be defined by her decision to allow more than 1 million refugees into her country in 2015 and 2016—flew in to Marrakech, Morocco, for the signing ceremony, arguing that it was “worth it to fight for this pact.” [...]

More than half a dozen other European countries have also questioned whether to join the pact in the lead-up to this week’s UN gathering. The first domino to fall was Austria, which pulled out of the agreement in October despite negotiating it on behalf of all European Union countries (except Hungary). The country’s chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, leads a coalition government with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) and has shifted his country sharply to the right on migration since taking office a year ago. Since then, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia have all said they will not sign it, either. [...]

Why is the UN compact, which is non-binding, so controversial? Arguments against it include the idea that it will ultimately lead to a “human right to migration” and that domestic courts could use it in deciding immigration cases. That it explicitly states that it upholds national sovereignty and has no legal standing has done little to assuage those concerns. [...]

As the debate in Germany shows, rhetorical pressure from the far right has forced mainstream parties to talk differently about migration issues—and to debate things like this compact that previously might have been taken for granted.

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openDemocracy: Attacks on women's ministries are a threat to democracy

This experience is not unique to Brazil. Many countries with women’s ministries face right-wing and religious attempts to eliminate or downgrade their influence – and in some cases, to change their mandates altogether. When this happens, it’s a strong signal that other democratic structures may also be at risk.[...]

Protecting women’s human rights was an issue for new democracies, and more established ones. The United States had legalised abortion in 1973, yet marital rape was exempt from the criminal code, women could be fired for being pregnant, and they couldn’t apply for a credit card. Irish women weren’t allowed to sit in pubs; women In Nigeria didn’t have the right to vote; divorce was illegal in Brazil, Chile, and South Africa.[...]

This was a groundbreaking step and a critical necessity to ensure the health, security, and basic human rights of women and girls. It was also well-received by countries internationally. At the end of the World Decade for Women in 1985, 127 UN member states had some kind of national institution focused on women. By 2010, all but four countries had an office like this.[...]

Rising populist movements with regressive social agendas are widely seen as threats to democracy. They are often defined by their anti-free press, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim positions, but they also share an open hostility to women’s human rights.

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Financial Times: Why Donald Trump will likely have the last laugh

FT chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman explains why the US president may go down as a leader who changed the course of history and embodied the spirit of an age.

Politico: The world America made — and Trump wants to unmake

The initial efforts to create this liberal world order preceded the Cold War. And the key pillars on which the order was established had little to do with the Soviet Union. The central element was the transformation of the two great originators of conflict, the autocracies of Germany and Japan, into peaceful, democratic nations. Through force and coercion, but also with financial support and political encouragement, they were led to abandon the geopolitical ambitions that had produced two world wars and adopt instead ambitions for peace, greater prosperity and social welfare. Their large and talented populations gave up the geopolitical competition and entered the competition for economic success. They were in a sense liberated to prosper in peace. [...]

The success of the order did depend on the United States abiding by some basic rules. Chief among these was that it not exploit the system it dominated to gain lasting economic advantages at the expense of the other powers in the order. It could not treat the economic competition as a zero-sum game that it insisted on always winning. It also meant taking part in imperfect institutions, such as the United Nations, that other nations might value more than American policymakers did. America’s willing involvement helped knit the members of the liberal order into what they could regard as a common international community. This proved to be a key advantage in the Cold War confrontation. A major weakness of the Soviet empire was that important members of the Warsaw Pact were not content with the Soviet order, and as soon as they had a chance to defect, they took it. [...]

Yet for all the shortcomings and despite America’s often high-handed and hypocritical behavior, none of the members of the liberal order — not one — ever sought to leave it. For America’s allies in Europe and Asia and elsewhere, even a flawed American world order was preferable to the alternative, and not just the Soviet alternative but the old European alternative. The Europeans never feared American aggression against them, despite America’s overwhelming military power. They trusted the United States not to exploit its superior power at their expense. Although Americans were selfish, like any people, the Europeans recognized that they were acting on a more complex and expansive definition of self-interest, that the United States was invested in preserving an order that, to work, had to enjoy some degree of voluntary acceptance by its members. Flawed as this system might be — flawed as the Americans were — in the real world this was as good as it was likely to get. The order held together because the other members regarded American hegemony, by any realistic standards, as relatively benign, and superior to the alternatives.

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Quartz: Do we still need the United Nations?

As is often the case with bureaucracies, the rules-heavy system was set up to guarantee fairness, fight nepotism and block corruption—but it has ended up protecting and empowering the few who know how to navigate protocol. UN career officials are hard to fire, while the short-term contractors who work for them have little job security. This has contributed to a culture of impunity in which responsibility for mistakes, harassment and abuses of power is passed “from desk to desk, inbox to inbox” without resolution. In 2016 alone, there were over 300 reported episodes of violence by UN peacekeeping staff against minors. [...]

John Weiss, a professor of history at University of Cornell, argues that the UN still has the power to get things done through “good old diplomacy.” While the UN may never overcome the veto of China or the other Security Council permanent members on resolutions targeting them or their allies, it can still raise awareness of bad behavior.

To return to the example of China: While UN sanctions were never imposed, the UN Commission on Human Rights did publicly condemn Beijing’s violent suppression of protests in 1989, drawing international attention. That ultimately prompted individual sanctions from the US and embargoes from European Union states. [...]

Ironically, losing the financial support of the US (as Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened) could bolster the UN’s credibility in the rest of the world. As Weiss points out, though the financial loss would limit the UN’s activities, it would be an opportunity to reform the organization so that it represents member states more democratically.

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The Atlantic: The World’s Failure in Rwanda Changed Kofi Annan’s Worldview

Prime among those failures was his perceived inaction to stop the genocide of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994 when he ran the UN’s peacekeeping operations, and, a year later, the Srebrenica massacre in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces. As Samantha Power, later the U.S. ambassador to the UN, wrote in Chasing the Flame, her biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN diplomat who was killed in Iraq, Annan’s “name would appear in the history books beside the two defining genocidal crimes of the second half of the twentieth century.”

An independent investigation in 1999 into the 1994 genocide found the UN had failed Rwanda. Annan, by that time secretary-general of the UN, said: “All of us must bitterly regret that we did not do more to prevent it.” He said the UN force in Rwanda at the time “was neither mandated nor equipped for the kind of forceful action” needed to prevent the genocide. But he added: “On behalf of the United Nations, I acknowledge this failure and express my deep remorse.” Five years later, in a speech marking the 10th anniversary of the genocide, Annan said that if the UN, various governments, and the media had paid more attention to what was unfolding in Rwanda, the massacres might have been averted. [...]

At the UN, Annan, a Ghanian who spent his entire career at the institution, oversaw a period of reform, outlined an ambitious agenda to reduce global poverty, and set up a global fund to combat HIV/AIDS. But the experiences of Rwanda and Srebrenica prompted Annan in 1999 to question the role of the international community in protecting civilian populations.

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Haaretz: Hamas Stands to Emerge Dominant From Possible Gaza Deal – at Abbas' Expense

Two main proposals are under discussion – one presented by Egypt and the other by United Nations special Mideast envoy Nickolay Mladenov. The Egyptian proposal gives high priority to internal Palestinian reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah; to exchanges of prisoners and of bodies of soldiers, with Israel; and to an agreement for a long-term cease-fire, to last from five to seven years, with the first step being a cease-fire within days of signing the accord. [...]

Mladenov’s proposal stresses economic factors and prioritizes the prisoner exchanges. According to this scheme, Israel will allow goods to enter the Strip on a large scale; inject about half-a-billion dollars into its development; establish desalination plants; boost the Strip’s electrical supply; and issue numerous work visas to residents there. [...]

Egypt wants the Palestinian Authority to accept this proposal and move ahead quickly on reconciliation. However, PA President Mahmoud Abbas has presented 14 objections that could derail the whole process. Moreover, Abbas recently appointed Nabil Abu Rudeineh deputy prime minister, which Hamas sees as a step showing the president's opposition to a new, unified government. Without such a government, there can be no reconciliation, and without reconciliation, Cairo will have to decide whether it will disregard the PA and become an even more active partner in an accord. [...]

If this is indeed the outcome of the current talks, it will be a turning point in ties between Israel and Hamas. Israel will have to allow Hamas to conduct extensive business ties with manufacturers in Israel and the West Bank; give more work permits to Gazans, who will also receive permits from Hamas; and redefine the closure on the Strip, which will gradually disintegrate. But more than this: Israel will have to accept the possibility that the new Palestinian government that will be established (if it is established), and will consist of Hamas and the PA, will be granted international legitimacy.

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