 Fy ffordd. Mae hi, Dan Plash. Fy ffordd y directaeth, Fy ffordd y Cymru, Rwy'n ddechrau'r digud. Fy ffordd, I am y cyfnod, Mae'r coleg a'r cradwch yn ddiweddol yng nghymru ,'r ffwrdd yng Nghymru, yng Nghymru, fel yng Nghymru, yn ymgyrchio'r Cymraeg Felly, mae'r rai'r bwysig yn ddod i'r llwyddiadol ar gyfer ar gyfer'i bwysig, ond mae'r rai'r bwysig, rydyn ni'n bwysig o'r bwysig. Rydyn ni'n gweithio bod rydyn ni'n gweithio'r bwysig yn ddod i'r hollau. Mae'n gweithio i'r bwysig, ond mae'n gweithio'r bwysig yn ddod i'r bwysig. Mae'r bwysig yn gweithio'r bwysig ar gyfer y Uned, a'r bwysig ar Gwyrdd Brown. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r bwysig yn ddod i'r Gradwyr Institution. Mae'r bwysig yn gweithio'r brown bwysig yn ddod i'r bwysig, ac mae'r bwysig yn gweithio'r brown bwysig, ond mae'r Uned yn gyflwyngig cyfleoedd yw'r ddod i'r brown, lle mae'r bwysig yw'r llwyddiadol yn gweithio'r llwyddiadol ar gyfer y Uned. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r bwysig yw'r llwyddiadol ar gyfer y Uned, He has continued to write on the UN system, the UN development programme in particular. The great Brian Urquhart, who was a UN undersecretary and founder and architect of UN peacekeeping, introduced us because Brian took a shine to one of my books. As a result, Tom and I had a partnership bringing him to SOAS for several years, looking together at lessons from the forgotten UN before the UN, and that had a number of fun publications. Since then we've continued to work in parallel, and his most recent work is, would the world be better without the UN? Well, clearly Mr Trump and Mr Bolton think so, although nevertheless they turn up, or at least Mr Trump turns up, and maybe that's Bolton did too, so there's a story there, as we've discussed a little in class. The foreword is by the late and very much lamented cofiannan with whom Tom worked a good deal, and I think Tom will talk with us for half an hour, 40 minutes, about his work and findings and so on, and then we've got a chance to have a good half an hour's, at least discussion and interaction, and the two of us will then in the modern form sit in the comfy chairs with the microphones and bring you all into the discussion. So, without more ado, I will vacate the platform and ask you to welcome Tom. Thank you. Thanks Dan for the excessively kind words of introduction. I frequently ask myself how one of my two irreverent daughters would introduce me and undoubtedly would be somewhat different. In fact, many years ago when the older one, an economic consultant was about 12 years old and she was in her room and I had forgotten something. I was leaving for the airport and I ran back upstairs to pick up the papers and I hear this voice behind the door. She was with a friend. I really don't know what he does and I have no idea why anyone would pay him to say anything. I would pay him to keep quiet. So we'll see. It's a nice question. Would the world be better without the UN? This is actually for me a fairly existential question. I started in preparing the first time I gave a similar talk. I started mathematically challenged but I started counting backwards and I figured out that actually I was conceived while a San Francisco conference was in session in 1945 and I was actually born early in 1946 when the first sessions of the GA in the Security Council were meeting here in London. My entire career, both as a professional and a secretariat and then as the head of an NGO doing work on UN issues and then as a fuzzy headed academic for about the last 30 years is revolved around the behavior and misbehavior of the UN. So to accompany this question this evening I thought I'd add a second one. Would the world be better without Donald Trump? Now the answers to the two questions actually are related and the information that I try to put in this book, the stories I try to tell, I'd like to think of a modest way of answering the second one to which the answer is an unequivocal yes. And it's not just an onslaught against the UN. It's against anything multilateral. So I'll be going back and forth between the two. So and we do have this modest thing called an election next Tuesday which I'm feeling a tad optimistic but nonetheless uneasy about. We can talk about that later. But Trump's remarks frequently disparage the UN as mostly a waste of money. But this is accompanied by his aversion frankly to collaborative decision making in any format. So what I'd like to try to do is provide a short summary of the book but then put Trump's comments in September of 2017 and September of 2018 and from the General Assembly in a bit of a context referring to the work that Dan and I did together on the wartime of the United Nations when there was a different kind of threat and certainly a different kind of US leadership. And then I'll end up with a few words about what I think may be happening on First Avenue in New York. Well, answering this question actually frankly it should have been done at any time in the last almost three quarters of a century but it really, really is much more critical in the age of Trump or the age of Brexit and the age of a lot of other people. And it's particularly important now that the third national security adviser John Bolton is appointed who made quite a well-earned reputation for being an enfant terrible in New York when he served for not quite two years as the unapproved by the Senate permanent representative of the United States in New York. Both of them sneer at international institutions at any time. Allies and partnerships are irrelevant in a zero-sum world and my argument will be frankly that the approach is not only ahistorical it's also wrong. So as I said I'm going to concentrate on the UN but this is really a much broader gage attack on international institutions, multilateralism, whatever form. Security organizations, NATO was obsolete or cost too much and they don't fare much better than cooperative arrangements of any time, economic ones, so disparages the European Union, tears up the Trans-Pacific Partnership, disparages NAFTA, the World Trade Organization is next on the horizon and these efforts are actually proceeding either without the United States or under active attack by the United States but the discrete cooperative actions, the Paris Agreement or the global compact on migration withdraw from those and informal arrangements, the group of seven, the group of 20 another group of seven minus one or the group of 20 minus one and in fact the minimal definition of a multilateral effort would be three and NAFTA actually wasn't even that, it was two sets of bilateral negotiations. So in case you, apparently the book will be sold later but in case you're not going to read it this evening the answer is on page 190 and the answer actually as I said is considered no but I ask an honest question and what I try to do in the two parts of the book is generate some not alternative facts but uncomfortable facts for both foes and friends of the UN. This book and the class tomorrow morning I try to focus on the two main outputs of the UN the universal body that sets standards, ideas, norms and then an operational one which is in a lot of countries I think in too many countries but it's important to keep those two sets of products outputs distinct and the book tries to do that but in there is a two by three matrix so you've got the ideas and operations and across the top are the three main kinds of activities international peace and security human rights and humanitarian action and the third one being sustainable development. So part one of the book consists of really specific illustrations on how the world would have been a much worse place at several junctures over the last seven decades without the UN system. This part of my argument is designed certainly for the administration or the heritage foundation the American Enterprise Institute a host of other people who attack the rules-based order that the US helped put together and has nourished frankly over the last seven decades. So I say kind of what's the evidence there's lots in there but let me just take off a few that without the first UN of member states without the second UN of leaders and international civil servants where would it be without the campaign in 1977 to eliminate smallpox or the current ones getting worm and polio? The efforts over the years to formulate women's rights or at least getting them on the agenda in San Francisco and subsequently in the Universal Declaration and elsewhere or to deliver humanitarian assistance in the DRC or Sudan kept the peace on the Golan Heights or Cyprus actually in the early years to facilitate decolonization and a whole set of development norms and ideas to make a stab at protecting cultural heritage and war zones, prosecuting war criminals and the list goes on. So that's the first part of the book but the second part of the book the parallel structure involves a second counterfactual and this is for cheerleaders with blue pom-poms in UN associations across the planet because the debits on the UN's ledger are also substantial. So the planet could have been a whole lot better on numerous occasions as well with a little better behavior in the United States and international civil service. You know if the security household had not been quite as hypocritical in 1994 in Rwanda or at present in Syria and Yemen and Myanmar and the list goes on or if peacekeepers had maybe rape fewer kids in Central Africa or spread less cholera and Haiti if more competent and dedicated staff had actually performed better or even in research had monitored far more objectively and occasionally called a spate of shovel on the performance of member states. If there were fewer inter-organizational turf battles over resources and this operation actually operated more cohesively in short the second counterfactual explores what would have happened if the 193 currently member states had behaved a little more responsibly and 100,000 or so civil servants and about the same number of soldiers and police had been more creative, more competent, more courageous. So when I wrote the proposal to write this book to the Carnegie Corporation which has generously supported it I really was aiming at a book coming out next year for the 75th anniversary 220 and after the elections I simply felt I had to write it more quickly and still in the United States there are lots of criticism genophobia, racism, corruption tax benefits for the rich, tax on the environment tax on the constitution. Multilateralism still doesn't actually fit on anyone's list and not that this book is necessarily going to get it anywhere but this is a traditional problem in the United States that it's hard to get multilateral issues on anyone's agenda. If you go back and look at the debates between Clinton and Trump the word UN never appeared and it appeared once in the previous debates when Obama was on a stage. So it seems to me that if you take a look at the first year 2017 it began with cutting completely the funds for the population fund part of the UN that works on women and girls reproductive health it ended the year with the official withdrawal from UNESCO and in between we saw pulling out of the Paris agreements and reneging on the commitment to the Green Climate Fund pulling out of the global compact on migration and then at the end of the year just for good measure in the Security Council of the US we saw a contribution that suggested that maybe moving the capital to Jerusalem was not the greatest of ideas and then when the General Assembly said the same thing the initial reaction was to get rid of the final contribution for 2017 to the relief and works agency for Palestine and then 2018 has hardly been a better vintage as I mentioned the the bi-assess pool of the UN of the Human Rights Council that's Nick Haley's description pull out of that rip up the P5 plus one agreement on Iran now going to zero for UNRA from 360 million to zero and we still have a couple of months to go so stay tuned so my modest hope here is that some of what's in this book will contribute to a conversation about the importance of multilateralism in the United States because my sense is that the shots across the bow in 2017 and 2018 could become broad sides in a much more serious way and certainly if you think about the G7 or NATO summits from last year and the tantrums that were thrown there and if any ruling of the World Trade Organization goes against the United States so the UN is not a four letter word it's merely a two letter invective so with that as a bit of an introduction to what's in the book I thought I'd try to put in context Trump's first two presentations Dan, you mentioned Brian Urachart, dear guy and when I was interviewing him for the intellectual history somewhere toward the end of it I said, well, you've been in this bloody thing for 40 years what is the real problem? and Brian said Tom, my friend the UN is the last bastion of state sovereignty and this year as we look at the 40th anniversary of the Declaration on Human Rights there's been a bit of erosion to Brian that is the usual presidents prime ministers and princes who claim that whatever they do at home is okay behind borders we've begun to at least on occasion make inroads on that the responsibility to protect which I had something to do with on occasion we removed the permission slip for sovereign thugs and one should keep in mind that there are almost 600 treaties international treaties that are on deposit at the UN and in any case countries whether we're talking about financial transfers, technology, information certain kinds of invasions are a little difficult to resist so sovereignty ain't what it used to be we go back to the first speech that Trump gave to UN he's a redundant speaker but 21 times he used the word state sovereignty sacrosanct state sovereignty now if you had been there the biggest applause actually came from Russia and China and Myanmar and Venezuela and Sudan and the list goes on because these countries in the past have used state sovereignty as a way to fend off criticisms from Washington that's no longer necessary and you don't actually happen I'm not one that happened to have to be an Obama groupie to go back and read any of his speeches his first speech to the UN he mentioned the word sovereignty once and that was in the context of saying how US national interest could be served by utilizing international organizations in particular the UN so I'm reminded of a quote by Samuel Johnson who says it's kind of wrapping yourself in the flag as the last refuge of scoundrels and it also flies in the face of problem solving of virtually any important issue from terrorism to weapons of mass destruction and the list goes on so the power of one to do much about that is truly limited hence I'm hoping the contents of this book will be of some significance now I'm not the first person to point this out but it's interesting to go back and look at the origins of America first actually the shortest lived best financed anti-war movement of all time happened to be have led by three proto fascist Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford and Father Coughlin who established this group to keep the US out of World War II that committee lasted about 11 months it collapsed after Pearl Harbor Trump's version has not as yet it will and I hope without the equivalent of December 1941 that said I try to point out that the organizations limitations only its sovereignty bound constitution but also the atomized nature of and wasteful nature of many of its operations should be as obvious to anyone else so before getting to the secretary generals what he's trying to do in New York I wanted to take a minute to go back to the wartime history because as I said Trump and Bolton have never met an ally or an organization that they liked but history has other lessons for us here and so for me it's important to think about the conditions under which US interests were served by a different approach in the face of a different kind of existential threat namely fascism so as we point out in this book on the wartime origins of the organization the origins were actually on 1 January 1942 not June of 1945 or the conferences leading up to it when 26 allies later 44 pooled efforts to crush Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan but along with that commitment military commitment came a longer term commitment to international cooperation collaboration as the best way to guarantee post war peace and stability and prosperity so what we tried to do in this book and the reason I'm returning to it is that one has to keep in mind that the UN was not simply a way to put in evidence military might in North Africa and Europe and Asia but it was a commitment to follow up with international obligations so this powerful mixture of realism and a lot of things we call it idealism was really important and in looking through the documents and looking at what was happening in Washington and Whitehall and lots of other places it wasn't simply crushing fascism I mean that was the primary purpose but lots of other issues were on the table decolonization international criminal justice post war reconstruction refugee assistance international development regulating the world economy agriculture and educational policy and the list goes on so those war time planners unlike the current gang rejected unilateral military might and diplomacy and lawlessness as policy options so to make a long story short San Francisco was not peripheral but central to U.S. decision making and so while we said in this book that one might have expected the fact that the league fell flat on its face to have led to realism hubs on steroids it didn't it led to the rule of law not going it alone and not the law of the jungle but multilateralism and the rule of law so the solution was not 1914 minus but 1918 plus to build on the successes and there were some of the league and try to do it better the next time so while normally speaking one says ah that's those that's those Canada's and Korea's it's the middle powers of the world that are really really interested in multilateral cooperation unilateralism there are times at which in fact when the conditions are right and the leadership is right collaboration is actually the best way to go and my argument is in fact we are and have been for some time a spot in which many not all but many problems that are dear to the United States need to be approached in a multilateral fashion so what are the implications of America first on first avenue the place to begin of course is that alas Trump is not alone on this stage you folks have your brexit but we can it's also the age of Putin and Erdogan and Xi and Modi and Duterte recently on and on so there is actually an unfortunate and ugly shift to the right but the United States has a unusual ability to wreak political and financial havoc in the UN and so we need to pay attention to the actions of the Trump administration so as always there is an argument about saving money so the population fund $70 million the U.S. said well we got to save a billion dollars on peacekeeping and ended up being about 600 million so the U.S. portion of that is about 170 million and even if you throw in all of UNRAM you are talking about a rounding error in a U.S. budget but this really has legs domestically and of course the implications of this are that how what of Moscow and Beijing think about saving money well the best way to save money for peacekeeping is get rid of any human rights dimensions and peacekeeping operations which is what they are not proposing it may in fact be some of the parallel efforts kind of outside the UN that may be the most toxic on trade and not just the TPP and threatening NAFTA but steel tariffs and aluminum tariffs and et cetera really really played directly into the hands of China and Russia I mean their foreign policy for years have been to divide the west they no longer have to do this for themselves they have somebody in Washington doing that work for them I think it's Beijing that's made the most of this opportunity to date presented somewhat on a silver platter they can better dictate the standards of investment and production on Asia they pick up new trading partners and you know they now become the voice for reason and stability somewhat counterintuitively and if you look at the Paris agreement really China has been the direct beneficiary of this myopia leading advocate for controlling climate change ironically as they become the biggest producer of greenhouse gases in several cities if you visit there you're not supposed to breathe in them so but they're controlling the world market three quarters of the solar panels they've actually made some huge steps on urban pollution meanwhile a dear President Trump is getting rid of environmental regulations and talking about jobs in coal mines so this is certainly not going to make America great again it's likely to make it more polluted again I think there is some hope next week and certainly in the 220 elections in the sense that the next election presidential elections occur a few days before the US could legally pull out of the Paris agreement and there is lots of activity US cities, US states, US corporations who have committed themselves to respecting the commitments on the Paris agreement so I'm somewhat hopeful that this thing will still be intact when a different administration comes on board so what are the prospects that the UN will not become a relic well reform has been a topic that has been discussed since the ink was drying on the charter in June of 1945 so the efforts to make it more inclusive more transparent, more accountable to pull together the atomized parts of the system have been going on forever my own evaluation is that the results are far more modest than they should be but the decimal the decimal levels of criticism are increasing and it's not just in Washington last year I did an evaluation of Swedish funding to the United Nations system there was no UN project that wasn't likely to get their favor that has changed there's a far more cost benefit transactional approach even in Stockholm among the parliamentarians, journalists and the public and it seems to me that the multilateral narrative if it has less traction in Stockholm it has much less traction in Washington so I think it needs to ask the kinds of questions I'm asking in this book to think about what would the world look like without the UN and you can do lots of transactional analyses of the UN just to take a couple if you go back to the Cuban Missile Crisis and you look at the documents both Kennedy and Khrushchev see Utahns diplomacy as a crucial variable in the conversation to end that crisis that wasn't the only variable of course but I'm sort of do we really want to test the proposition that having this kind of capacity around is a bad idea and if you want to be transactional the record breaking $8 billion of peacekeeping operations last year that was about two weeks of the Iraq war in the middle of the last decade or what about the smallpox if you go back and look the total cost of the smallpox eradication program run by W.H.L. was $300 million actually only $100 million of that was W.H.O. money of that only about 35 million was U.S. money and over the years the 40 years since that time it would be I don't quite know how to do this but one could come up with a rather large positive balance sheet in terms of savings of administration alone let alone vaccines let alone the people not marred by it so I think we need to emphasize the value for money of UN operations so in comes Antonio Guterres I frankly have and have written such have been disappointed to date he's 40% into his mandate of five years I think some hard questions about the UN's comparative advantage need to be asked is definitely a role for the UN in structuring conversations about global problems being operational in only a few places I think really conflict prone countries so fewer operations with more concentration on the operational side doing the universal side for standards, norms and conversations about global comments it's the waste here I always get into trouble think that I'm coming from there the waste the overlap the lack of synergy in the UN and the system of organizations is substantial and my initial hope was that Guterres who had actually run a pretty tight shop as high commissioner for refugees and Geneva had slimmed things down and earned a reputation I thought he was going to do some of the same at least at the new in New York I have not lost total hope that somebody who understands the structural flaws the way he does and staffing shortcomings will attack this problem head on and in fact here may be the silver lining I think he could actually use the Trump administration's tightening of screws to actually do things that everyone or everyone commissions, academics and journalists have said needed to be done for a very long period of time so I'm going to end and I'm now with the frequently cited remark of that the UN was not created to get humanity to heaven but to save it from hell and I try to keep in mind and I like you guys to keep in mind as well that one of the reasons we're not in the netherworld already have been the positive contributions of this institution but a world without the UN is not unimaginable and political conditions continue or worsen and in fact I think one of the perhaps more insidious threats is that the UN has become so embedded that it's taken for granted and Kevin Wright, the former Australian Prime Minister wrote a while back he said we're barely conscious of the continuing stabilizing role that the UN plays in setting the broad parameters for the conduct of international relations and he says if the UN one day disappears or more likely slides into neglect which is I think what's happening it is only then that we become fully aware of the gaping hole this would leave in what remained of the post World War II order so my argument is warts and all I guess I present to you all the warts in part one and part two go to the last line of Trump's 217 remarks to the GA and he said we are calling for a great reawakening of nations he somehow overlooked the fact that the organization was created to curb the demonstrated barriers of nations and of nationalism run amach so I don't think he'll say it but somebody else will say it soon that we really need a great reawakening of the United Nations so let me stop there and hope that this will stimulate a few questions