Why the United Nations has been reduced to a technical support role

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

There’s lots to say about the excellent interview that Quartz did with former UN deputy secretary general Mark Malloch-Brown on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, but mainly the sense that even if multilateralism isn’t dead, its tool — the United Nations — is a bit blunt.

Click here to read the Quartz piece, but if you don’t, here are some takeaways.

Mr Malloch-Brown’s career is a paean to multilateralism. He was at the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, the UN Foundation and is now president of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. So his comments are especially interesting in their realism.

Mr Malloch-Brown acknowledged the significance of the UN secretary-general’s grain deal and the fact that IAEA inspectors were present at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. But multilateral institutions have been “good on consequences [and] completely absent on causes,” he said, noting that inescapable reality: “they don’t have the consent in the Se…