Global Policy Forum

By Warren Hoge

Secretary General Kofi Annan's deputy assailed the United States on Tuesday for withholding support from the United Nations, encouraging its harshest detractors and undermining an institution that he said Washington needed more than it would admit.

"The prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable," said the deputy, Mark Malloch Brown. "You will lose the U.N. one way or another."

In a highly unusual instance of a United Nations official singling out an individual country for criticism, Mr. Malloch Brown said that although the United States was constructively engaged with the United Nations in many areas, the American public was shielded from knowledge of that by Washington's tolerance of what he called "too much unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping." "Much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," he said.

Richard A. Grenell, the spokesman for John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador, said Mr. Bolton had not had time to read the speech to react to it fully on Tuesday evening. "Mr. Malloch Brown did not extend to us the courtesy of a copy of the speech," Mr. Grenell said. "We need to read it and will certainly have to respond."

Mr. Malloch Brown is a Briton who became deputy secretary general in March and will leave office when Mr. Annan's term ends on Dec. 31. He made his remarks in a lunch speech at a Midtown hotel to a conference on global leadership co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation.

The speech reflected frustration in Mr. Annan's office with a looming crisis over the United Nations budget, which, under a six-month gap agreed to under pressure from Washington in December, will pay the bills only until the end of June. The deal was struck to link budget approval with achievement of significant management reforms, and Mr. Bolton made frequent mention of Congressional impatience with the United Nations and legislation that would authorize Washington to start withholding its dues. The United States is the largest contributor to the United Nations, paying 22 percent of its budget.

"In recent years the enormously divisive issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have come to define an unhappy marriage," Mr. Malloch Brown said. He noted that the United Nations was fielding 18 peacekeeping operations abroad at lower cost and higher effectiveness than "comparable U.S. operations." Yet, he said, that fact has been ignored or underplayed by policy makers and opinion shapers in Washington.

"To acknowledge an America reliant on international institutions is not perceived to be good politics at home," he said. Mr. Malloch Brown did not mention Mr. Bolton by name, but he criticized the working strategy that many diplomats have associated with Mr. Bolton since his arrival last August. "Exacerbating matters is the widely held perception, even among many U.S. allies, that the U.S. tends to hold on to maximalist positions when it could be finding middle ground," Mr. Malloch Brown said.

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