After four years of degradation and withdrawal by the Trump administration, the United Nations is filled with expectations that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will restore much of what his predecessor dismantled.
Mr Biden has promised to re-accede to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change immediately after taking office on January 20, and to revive US participation in a United Nations-led, UN-led cooperation to combat global warming.
The president-elect has vowed to reverse widely criticized Mr Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization, the arm of the United Nations public health, amid the coronavirus pandemic. He has pledged to restore the funding ended by Mr Trump for the United Nations Population Fund, a leading provider of family planning and women reproduction services. This cut was part of a conservatively led policy of punishing groups that offer abortion counseling.
Mr Biden’s decision to join UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a seasoned American diplomat with extensive experience in Africa, and his plan to return that position to cabinet rank, yet another reversal of Trump administrative policy, also send strong signals sent via the president. Views of the elect towards the United Nations.
“The overall picture is hugely encouraging and a great relief for many UN members,” said Richard Gowan, a former United Nations advisor who leads the UN advocacy work for the International Crisis Group, an independent organization that promotes peaceful conflict resolution.
“People were pretty tired of the prospect of another four years of Trump,” said Gowan. “Biden faces a very difficult world, but a very easy way to get political goodwill at the United Nations. Biden and his UN ambassador just have to be humans and they will be treated as victorious heroes. “
Even diplomats from American rivals such as China have privately expressed the hope that, if confirmed, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield will speak and negotiate with an authoritative voice. Some said Mr Trump’s unpredictability had undermined the effectiveness of his UN envoy Nikki R. Haley and her successor Kelly Craft, neither of whom had extensive diplomatic experience.
In contrast, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield served for decades in the Foreign Service of the State Department and was the top official for African affairs during the 2014-16 Ebola crisis. Before the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, she was threatened with death and excused herself, she once explained in a TED lecture. She was the Ambassador to Liberia from 2008 to 2012 and was made a first honorary citizen by Liberia’s first president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
The election of Mr. Biden to Ms. Thomas-Greenfield, announced on November 24, was welcomed by American diplomatic veterans. Madeleine K. Albright, the first undersecretary and chairwoman of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm hired by Ms. Thomas-Greenfield, said on Twitter that she was “a valued colleague and veterans diplomat who will restore US leadership and collaboration. “
Mrs. Thomas-Greenfield
is a senior black member of Mr. Biden’s team and has a seat on the National Security Council. Your nomination was widely viewed as a token of Mr. Biden’s respect for professional diplomats and his commitment to the selection of a racially diverse leadership team.
Still, it may not be easy for Mr. Biden or Ms. Thomas-Greenfield to quickly undo the isolation that the United States faced in the Trump era.
Mr Biden’s plan to reverse Mr Trump’s rejection of the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, an agreement approved in a UN Security Council resolution, may prove impossible. The prospect of improving US-Iran relations may have been poisoned last Friday when the leading Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated in an Israeli operation that the US has labeled Israeli.
Mr Biden’s goals remain unclear in relation to some other United Nations organizations and agreements that were abandoned during the Trump years – the Human Rights Council, UNESCO, the Palestinian Refugee Agency, and agreements on global migration and arms trafficking. Nor has Mr Biden specified how he will deal with the International Criminal Court, which was created two decades ago through UN diplomacy to prosecute monstrous crimes such as genocide.
The United States is not a member of the court, but has worked with it until the Trump administration sanctioned its Attorney General Fatou Bensouda and other court officials for efforts to investigate possible American crimes in the war in Afghanistan and possible crimes committed by Israelis in the Occupied Palestinian Areas.
Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch, said the sanctions ordinance rocked the court, with sentences usually reserved for “drug queens and terrorists.” Mr Biden, he said, should overturn the order “as part of re-entering the community of nations that support the rule of law”.
The transition of the president
Updated
Apr. 3, 2020, 6:57 pm ET
Others hope that Mr Biden’s stated positions on human rights and international cooperation will have far-reaching implications.
“Under Joe Biden, the international human rights community and beyond will breathe a sigh of relief,” said Agnès Callamard, the UN Human Rights Council’s special investigator on extrajudicial killings.
Ms. Callamard expressed hope that the Biden administration would try to regain the seat on the Human Rights Council, which was given up by Mr. Trump in 2018 because Ms. Haley, the then UN ambassador, cited her strong prejudices against Israel.
“The US ‘absence in some of the Council’s difficult debates and problems has weakened those advocacy positions that support human rights protection,” said Ms. Callamard. In the absence of any action from other countries, the Council’s discussions are now “largely conducted by countries whose main interest is to weaken international control over their human rights records”.
Some diplomats have privately criticized Secretary General António Guterres for refusing to face Mr Trump, also because the United States remains the largest single donor of the UN budget despite all of Mr Trump’s disregard for international cooperation. For one thing, Mr. Gowan rejected this view.
“Now he has the chance to work with a far more personable Biden team, and there are signs that Guterres will advance much more ambitious plans to tackle inequality and climate change than he could risk before,” said Gowan. “Guterres has been accused of being too cautious about Trump, but he can say that Biden’s victory confirms his strategy.”
Mr Guterres tried to maintain the semblance of impartiality throughout the 2020 presidential campaign and after the aftermath, despite being among the international figures who congratulated Mr Biden in the days immediately following major news organizations’ declaration of the winner.
The Secretary General’s spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, recently gave a diplomatic response when asked if Mr Guterres “is cycling in his office” because of Mr Biden’s election of Ms. Thomas-Greenfield as Ambassador.
“I never knew and I can never imagine the secretary general cycling in his office or anywhere else,” he said. “What I can tell you is that the Secretary-General has always worked very closely with every US Permanent Representative that Washington has sent and will do in the future.”
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