In short
The episode argues that the UN’s ability to prevent major war has declined not because the post-1940 “deeper architecture” is gone, but because the UN shifted away from interstate peacemaking and because great-power politics has changed. It focuses on what the next UN Secretary-General should do to reinforce the UN’s core mission: preventing a third world war, especially amid renewed great-power rivalry and nuclear risk.
Guest backgrounds
Thant Myint-U is a historian and former UN official; he is the grandson of U Thant (UN Secretary-General, 1961–1971). He wrote the book The Peacemaker and a Foreign Affairs essay, The Crumbling Pillars of Global Peace.
Key claims
The “liberal international order” framing is often confused with the broader Cold War/post-1940 architecture. The UN’s political peacemaking role was strongest mid-20th century, weakened after the 1990s as it pivoted to civil wars, development, and peacekeeping. The Secretary-General’s “good offices” are low-cost but can create diplomatic time and space.
Notable examples
U Thant’s mediation during the Cuban Missile Crisis (including consultations with non-aligned leaders and a missile-for-non-invasion framework). The episode also discusses what the UN Secretary-General could have done differently before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine (greater high-level presence and warnings).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Current Global Security Landscape
0:45 to 4:34
Discussion on the rising violence and the role of the UN in global peace.
“Thant Madhu, considered what it would take for the United Nations to regain a meaningful role in preventing and managing global conflict.”
The Historical Context of the UN
4:34 to 9:15
Exploration of the founding principles of the UN and its evolution over time.
“And they would set up an organization, not unlike the League of Nations, but strengthened, different, more muscular, more assertive in some ways.”
U Thant's Influence on the UN
9:15 to 14:00
Analysis of U Thant's role as Secretary General and his impact on international diplomacy.
“We think so much in recent decades of the United Nations as a body that does blue-helmeted peacekeeping.”
The UN as a Universal Institution
14:00 to 16:46
Explore the historical transformation of the UN into a global institution.
“And maybe just to say, I think with the, you know, what I said earlier about the support that he had from these newly decolonized states, that wasn't just a passive thing, it was an active thing.”
The Post-Empire Transition
16:46 to 19:13
Discuss the transition from empires to nearly 200 sovereign states and the UN's role.
“Because I think, you know, what's important is not the UN as an institution, but the UN as a reflection of this broader shift.”
UN's Evolution in the 20th Century
19:13 to 22:38
Learn about the ideological tensions and structural changes within the UN from the 1950s to 1980s.
“I think there was a much more basic structural change as well, because if we remember in 1955, you had Bandung, which brought these African and Asian countries together.”
The UN's Shift in the 1990s
22:38 to 28:00
Examine how the UN evolved in the 1990s and adapted to new geopolitical realities.
“We'll return to our conversation with Thadmaju after a short break.”
Assessing UN Leadership Before the Ukraine Invasion
28:00 to 30:18
Learn about the potential actions the UN Secretary General could have taken to prevent the war in Ukraine.
“If I could press you on that just a little, you know, say we're in 2022 and there's the sense in Washington and Brussels that Russia is about to invade Ukraine.”
The Risk of Great Power Rivalry Today
30:18 to 33:08
Explore the dangers of returning to a world of great power rivalry and its implications for global conflict.
“at least a potential player in whatever peacemaking may come.”
China's Role in the Changing International Landscape
33:08 to 35:25
Discuss China's position and intentions within the evolving international system and its relationship with the UN.
“I think the first-order question is, you know, 80 years on, with this whole history of the UN to look back on, where has it been successful in making peace?”
Show all 16 chapters
The UN's Potential in Conflict Scenarios
35:25 to 41:11
Examine how the UN can play a crucial role in de-escalating global crises, such as a conflict over Taiwan.
“back or change, I don't think we're going to go back to the world of 10, 20, 30 years ago.”
Addressing Internal Conflicts Through UN Action
41:11 to 42:04
Evaluate the challenges faced by the UN in addressing internal conflicts, using Myanmar as a case study.
“and the future, perhaps she, will be able to help.”
The Role of the UN in Internal Conflicts
42:04 to 45:34
Explore the challenges the UN faces in addressing internal civil wars and its effectiveness in countries like Myanmar.
“it's a confrontation in the Western Pacific, whether it's a confrontation in Eastern Europe, whether it's a confrontation in the Middle East, who can help.”
Selecting the Next UN Secretary General
45:34 to 48:10
Discuss the qualities necessary for the next UN Secretary General and the political context they must navigate.
“Though we see still peacekeeping operations in some countries, we haven't seen any new peacekeeping missions in quite a while.”
Reforming the UN Security Council
48:10 to 50:48
Delve into the complexities of potential reforms of the Security Council and how it impacts UN credibility.
“You described the questions of reform to UN structures as sort of second-order questions.”
Cultural Restoration for Global Peace
50:48 to 53:56
Examine the need for a cultural revival to address the absence of the historical memory of war and the vision for peace.
“And to close, let me turn to the first order questions.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00I'm Dan Kurtz-Felan, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. When we think about the future as well, we should be thinking, again, less about the UN as an institution and whether or not we're still committed to those principles on which the UN was founded and emerged in the 40s and 50s and 60s of a world of peace and a world without empire. The world today is more dangerous and more violent than it's been at any time since 1945. States everywhere have jettisoned commitments to cooperation and opted for aggression, and the so-called rules-based order seems to have come apart. Yet the international body founded after World War II with the charge of preventing World War III finds itself increasingly on the margins.
0:44In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the historian and former UN official, Thant Madhu, considered what it would take for the United Nations to regain a meaningful role in preventing and managing global conflict. That question is particularly relevant as the UN begins the process of picking its next Secretary General. Deputy Editor Kanesh Thoreau spoke with Thant about the past and future of the United Nations and about how the pillars of global peace can be reinforced before they collapse.
1:18Thant, thank you so much for joining us. The pleasure. Thank you, Kanesh. we're in the midst of what seems like an especially violent moment you know with wars in ukraine and sudan myanmar israel palestine lebanon and elsewhere and you know we're speaking on the morning of tuesday may 26th and it seems that despite many stops and starts that the u.s israeli war on iran is no closer to an end you know you recently published an essay in foreign affairs titled The Crumbling Pillars of Global Peace. And you observe in this essay that this disarray in the global system, the ballooning number of conflicts, the breakdown of norms, the growing danger of nuclear proliferation, and even the possible use of atomic weapons, all of this is often described as evidence of the waning of the U.S.-led liberal international order.
2:12But you say that assessment is wrong. Why is that the case? I think it's a couple of things, Kanish. I mean, first is we're often confused with the term. So people sometimes use the term rules-based order or liberal international order to mean everything since 1945. I think it's more correctly used to mean the international system that's grown up since the end of the Cold War, during that moment of U.S. unilateral supremacy that's extended over these past 30 years or so. And I think that is, in many ways, not just fraying, but coming apart with the U.S. stepping away from multilateral institutions that it's helped create, but also alliances and much else besides.
2:54And so I think that system or that world is indeed in retreat. But I think the more serious and, in a way more important rupture of the moment is the undoing of that world system that was actually created in the 1940s and 50s. It's a deeper architecture. It's what's created this unprecedented period, 80 years plus of a world without total war, without war between the big powers. And I think it's really important to see that distinction, but also look at ways in which we can protect and preserve that deeper architecture more than, I think, trying to rescue the liberal international order of the past three decades.
3:36Key to that world system was the United Nations, which was created in 1945 at the end of World War II. But when you look around at these hotspots that I mentioned, the UN is not really anywhere to be seen. And as you mentioned, this was not the case through much of the 20th century. In your recent essay for Foreign Affairs, you sketched how the UN succeeded in the first several decades after its creation and how it's not doing so now. At its inception, what were the decisions facing the founders of the UN and what kind of institution did they end up making? I think if we look at that long arc of UN history, we have to go back even a little bit before 1945, so the San Francisco signature of the UN charter, and go back to the couple of years during still the Second World War, when the United States in particular, but also the Soviet Union and the UK were thinking about what the post-war world could look like.
4:33And they decided that their military alliance would extend into the post-war period, or they hoped that that would be the case. And they would set up an organization, not unlike the League of Nations, but strengthened, different, more muscular, more assertive in some ways. And I think they hoped that it would be also much more successful, not just in preserving the peace, but also in creating a better world. And that's what their publics seem to be demanding or were demanding at the time. This is back in 1943, 44, 45. People thought that, you know, with the tens of millions of lives lost, that something different had to be there on the other side.
5:07And so the UN organization was born of this fear of another total war, but also this hope that a different world was possible. But because of the Cold War, that UN that was intended with the Security Council as a sort of executive committee of the organization, never fully materialized. And instead, what we saw from the 1950s was a very different set of norms, a different set of ways of working, which centered very much on the UN Secretary General. And these UN Secretaries General from around the mid-1950s through the late 1980s were mediators in chief in the world. They were the men, they were all men, who mediated conflicts, who prevented and ended wars.
5:49And that was the sort of classic UN of that Cold War period. And then the UN changed again in the 1990s to be much more focused on civil wars and on development and many of the other programs that we have today. But the cost of that third transition, if you will, from the 1990s onwards, was that the UN was much less involved because there were far fewer interstate wars in interstate war mediation. And now we see this reappearance of interstate conflict, tension, war in Ukraine, in the Middle East and elsewhere. And the UN has moved very far away from that earlier sort of role in mediating between states.
6:29So I think that's the discrepancy between the kind of world we have now and maybe the kind of need for the UN in the future and what the UN has become over these past few decades. Central to that early UN was your grandfather, U Thant, who was Secretary General from 1961 to 1971, and the subject of your recent book, The Peacemaker. Could you tell us a little bit about how U Thant changed the role of the Secretary General and how he used his position to play a really decisive role in preventing conflicts and preventing the outbreak of a really great war between the United States and the Soviet Union?
7:08I think he brought together two threads. So the first thread was the office of the UN Secretary General that was already moving in this direction quite decisively of being this sort of mediator in chief. His predecessor, Dag Hammarskjöld, in 1956 during the Suez crisis, really pioneered that role. And so over the late 1950s, the Secretary General came to be seen as someone who could mediate conflicts. And there was that expectation. And he became a figure on the global stage for the first time. The second and perhaps even more important thread, though, is something completely different, which is that by the late 1950s, dozens of countries had fought their way to independence and had decided to embrace the UN system.
7:52And they transformed it in the process. And they took this latent language in the UN charter about state sovereignty and basically said to the other members of the UN, the Western countries in particular, that that language around state sovereignty, human dignity, really had to apply to the whole world. That they had become independent. They were demanding that those countries that were not yet independent also become independent. And even more, they wanted to make sure that their new one sovereignty was not just defended, but really made meaningful that they had control over their own economies as well as their politics, and they would be free of interference from the ex-colonial powers.
8:34So he threaded these two things. He came from that world, Burma, his home country had just become independent a little more than a decade before. And he turned the UN not just into this institution for decolonization, if you will, for championing the rights of these newly decolonized states, but from that platform, he took that mediation role to new heights, and in particular during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in a whole series of other conflicts over the 1960s and even into the early 1970s. There are two strands here, as you've isolated, that I want to separate for a second. One is Thant's ability as a peacemaker.
9:18We think so much in recent decades of the United Nations as a body that does blue-helmeted peacekeeping. Not so much about peacemaking, but how did the UN keep the peace? I think some of the detail you have in your book and in your essay in Foreign Affairs might be surprising for readers now who are not familiar with that history. Yeah, I mean, to give you perhaps the best example, or one of the best examples, was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I mentioned. So we all know the broad outlines of that story. In 1962, the Soviets deployed missiles in Cuba. Kennedy instituted a blockade of offensive weapons into Cuba.
9:57There was a confrontation. The world seemed to be on the brink of a nuclear war. And eventually an agreement was reached whereby the Russians withdrew those missiles. And the Americans agreed not to invade the island, but also secretly to remove their missiles from Turkey as well, their medium-range missiles in Turkey. What's often missing from that story is this UN mediation. So Kennedy had gone on television that Sunday night, that was the 22nd of October. Uthant had already been informed, even before the British, by Washington, goes to show, you know, the relative standing of the UN in those days had been informed already by the Americans that this was coming.
10:35He spent the entire next day in deep consultation with leaders of the non-line movement of these newly decolonized countries in Asia and Africa, people like Pandit Nehru in India, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, their ambassadors in New York. And he decided even without a Security Council authorization, which he knew would never come because of the Cold War deadlock, he decided to intervene. And he was the one who actually put forward that proposal or that framework of a trade of missiles for an American non-invasion pledge. And over the following days, through a whole series of both public and private and secret messages to both sides, he tried to do what he thought was going to be the most essential thing, which was to create the time and the space for both men to reach a political, a diplomatic solution to what was becoming this military confrontation.
11:26And he used his good office as well to reach out to Fidel Castro, flying down to Havana at the height of the crisis, to make sure that Cuba was involved in that diplomatic dynamic in the right way as a sovereign country as well. I mean, there's much else to say about these very complicated few days of his diplomacy, but essentially he inserted himself so he was that neutral point of reference that, for example, from Khrushchev became indispensable so that when Khrushchev decided that he was going to begin to back down, he was backing down to an appeal for peace from a non-aligned UN secretary general rather than responding to a threat or an ultimatum from an American president.
12:06And for Castro, it was the same. Rather than responding to Khrushchev, who he was really upset with by the end of October, he responded directly to Uthant. So Uthant had to insert himself, play that role. So that's an example of the kind of diplomacy, very high level, front page of the New York Times every day and in media around the world that you really don't see in the UN or haven't seen from the UN in a long time. Was that relative success a function of Thant's personality or the force of his personality? Or can you attribute it to something more structural about the place of the United Nations in the international system at the time?
12:42I think like all things, it's a mix of a few things. I think he benefited from at least a couple of things. One is that wave of decolonization, the energy that came from that, the support that he had from these newly decolonized states, and the confidence and the political energy that that gave him to intervene in a crisis like the Cuban Missile crisis. I think on the U.S. side, there was already perhaps some hostility from some bits of the U.S. public and political life against the U.N., but also still a sense that this was their creation. So that initial big investment in the U.N. was still there, and the U.N.
13:17enjoyed a considerable amount of prestige in America. So I think that was something that he benefited from, and the public as a whole was still very supportive of this U.N. project. But then I think, you know, It was, to some extent, not just his own diplomatic skill, but his political willingness to take risks. I mean, he could have stayed on the sidelines. He could have said the Security Council hasn't taken up this issue. He could have said, you know, I'll wait to see what the member states want. But instead, he decided to take a risk because he felt the alternative was going to be a possible nuclear war.
13:49He had to do whatever he could. But he showed that willingness to take risks. And then I think he had the right temperament and was able to, in a way, through his different maneuvers and the language he used, appeal to all sides to use him as this neutral point of reference as well. And maybe just to say, I think with the, you know, what I said earlier about the support that he had from these newly decolonized states, that wasn't just a passive thing, it was an active thing. I think their willingness to be this coalition, if you will, supporting the UN, supporting the Secretary General's good offices, I think also made all of the difference too.
14:23And the second strand, as you mentioned, is the transformation of the UN into what you have called the first and only universal institution we've ever had. You know, it's sort of matter of fact, almost banal to think of it as a universal body now, given that its members constitute almost all, not all, but almost all the countries of the world. But what was really striking, maybe even revolutionary, about how and when the UN became truly universal? Yeah, I think we really have to take a big step back and look at the big picture history of the 20th century, where we're so accustomed in the UK or in the US to thinking history is the two world wars and then the Cold War and then the post-Cold War era.
15:06Whereas really in many ways for most of humanity, the big historical transition of the 20th century is a transition from a centuries-long age of Atlantic empires, you know, British, French, Dutch, and other empires circling the globe, dominating the entire world, to this world that we have now of nearly 200, at least nominally sovereign states. And that's an enormous thing. And everyone is part of a single institution, at least committed to peace. And that wasn't an accident. I think sometimes we think of the UN as being this organization where you have all of these nation states and they get together and they form the UN.
15:44But actually, the UN was a big part of making that world system and making that system of sovereign states possible. And you have to ask yourself, you know, why do these states, these new states, dozens and dozens from Asia and Africa, agree to join the UN or join this single international system? And I think it's because many of them were left in a weakened state after centuries or decades at least of colonial rule, very poor, relatively very poor to the West, with very arbitrary borders as well. The alternative would have been an international anarchy. And I think for them, the focus was on their internal nation-building projects, and they needed this bigger frame of the UN and to be sovereign states within that system so they could concentrate on what is still an unfinished project in any of these countries to build these nation-states from that transition out of empire.
16:37I mean, just to underline here, what you're posing in some respects is not just an argument about the United Nations, but actually one about the 20th century and how history appeared and appears to those outside the West. Yeah, absolutely. Because I think, you know, what's important is not the UN as an institution, but the UN as a reflection of this broader shift. And I think from a Western or especially from a US point of view, the UN is this institution that had, you know, big aspirations in 1945 and then, you know, proved useful to the US at different times, like during the Cuban Missile Crisis, less useful at other times, and then slowly had this kind of less relevance or became less relevant on mediation.
17:20had this new moment in the 90s with peacekeeping and everything else in many different countries, but then ultimately was a sideshow to the bigger sort of geopolitics of whichever era we're looking at. Whereas for most of the world, I mean, again, the essential transition was this post-Empire transition. And the UN is in many ways a kind of a reflection of that transition. And I think what is really the central dynamic in global history since the 1940s, which is not so much the Cold War East-West dynamic, but the North-South dynamic, and in particular, America's relations with what was called the Third World.
17:58And that played out in different ways at the UN, or the UN was front and center of that. Not so much a contest, but that set of relationships. What happens after the 1970s? You know, after we see the cresting of the high tide of Uthans, UN, one animated by certain convictions against empire, you know, against war, one, you know, charged by the energy of these countries that we call the Afro-Asian bloc. Where does that energy go and why does the UN sort of take a different direction? I think it's a few things. I mean, one, that energy was frustrated in the halls of the UN. So for the US, but also for many of the other Western countries, there was this constant tension with these third world countries that were pushing what seemed to the West as to be increasingly sort of radical agendas around the economy at exactly the same time that the West itself, especially the US and UK, were moving in a different direction away from state managed economies and towards a vision of an economic globalization that would be anchored in free markets that would be dominated by companies in the West.
19:08So I think there was that ideological tension that was fought out within the halls of the UN. I think there was a much more basic structural change as well, because if we remember in 1955, you had Bandung, which brought these African and Asian countries together. Many of these countries, you know, fresh from independence, were under fairly moderate leaders who wanted to be part of the rest of the world, who saw themselves as internationalists, who might have been socialists, but in general supported democracy as well at home. And over the 1960s, many of these regimes or governments were overthrown in right-wing military coups, some extremely bloody ones.
19:48And many of that Bandung generation was gone by the 1970s and replaced by new figures who were much less committed to that global UN-centered project. So I think there was that. I think by the 1980s, however, even though those two things had happened, the U.S. and the West kind of moving away from the U.N. to some extent, the Third World moving away for different reasons as well, the U.N. and its mediation capacity still remained intact. And in the 80s, you had a new Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, who was very different in some ways from Utham, but also wanted to act even if he didn't have a mandate and see what was possible in terms of peacemaking.
20:31And by the late 1980s, he was able to really untangle and move forward on a whole slew of different mediation initiatives from the Iran-Iraq war to Southern Africa, to Central America, to Cambodia. And so the UN was still doing very well and very important things in terms of peacemaking at the time. And it prevented great power war all the way until the end of the Cold War, at which point it undergoes a great transformation. Could you just sketch for us quickly what happens to the UN in the 1990s, when it seems to sort of grow in the range of its focuses and operations and becomes a somewhat different institution?
21:12I think when Paris de Cuellar achieved success in those peace agreements in the late 1980s, he really set the stage for the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, you had the defeat of the Soviet Union. You had far fewer wars. You had these peace agreements that needed to be realized through peacekeeping operations. But there were many fewer interstate tensions and conflicts and no real challengers to the U.S. And instead, you saw America sort of increase its dominance over the global economy, its military supremacy over any potential rival, and then seek to transform the U.N. into this adjunct, in a way, of this new unipolar order.
21:55And so the U.N. was felt not to be needed for that sort of mediation that it had done since the 1950s, and instead retooled to be the organization that could deploy peacekeepers to internal wars, to civil wars, focus on development, not so much in terms of remaking the global economic system the way the third world countries have wanted in the 60s and 70s, but as a donor delivery mechanism for aid coming from Western governments in the U.S., and to push a whole series of new agendas around human rights and democracy, for example. So the UN became much more active. It became successful in some ways, but it was a very different UN in the past and one that was much more detached from that earlier peacemaking focus.
22:38We'll return to our conversation with Thadmaju after a short break.
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24:17In the United States, at least, we seem to have now triumphant a line of critique of the UN that might have been evident for decades, but has really come to the fore now. One that sees it as irrelevant, ineffective, bloated. You know, a few months ago, we published an essay by Nadia Shadlow, who was a deputy national security advisor in the first Trump administration. And the essay was titled The Globalist Delusion. And it's a rather full-throated critique of the UN and other international institutions and their relative ineffectiveness, in her words, in recent decades. And I think it's representative of a fairly popular strand of thinking here in the United States.
25:00Indeed, even policy. The Trump administration has really retreated from the UN, its various agencies, its slashed funding. I'm sure there's lots of disagreement you could find with her position. But do you agree with her contention that the UN has overreached in some respects and lost sight of its original mission? I think it's at least really important to think about this carefully and to assess exactly what the UN is good for and not good for. And I think the UN is certainly not the answer to every problem in the world. I think it's about determining what sort of reckoning we need right now.
25:37I think in the public imagination, we see all of these wars in the Middle East, in Sudan, in Ukraine, and the UN is not present. So the UN is first and foremost in people's minds a peace organization. And when we feel that peace is unraveling, that there are more military conflicts and we don't see the UN, I think there's a very reasonable sense that the UN is failing in its core mission? I think there are a few different things that we have to kind of untangle. First is that the UN is composed of a lot of different specialized agencies like the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, UNESCO on education and culture, for example.
26:13I think that's different from the core UN based in New York, which is again, essentially a peace organization. And there, I think, you know, we have to think about the structure of politics globally right now, we're not in a time where you have that kind of American investment in the organization that goes back to 1945, where that's been declining in some ways almost every decade, except for maybe this slight upsurge again in the 1990s. You don't have that coalition of countries the way the third world countries and online states really boosted the UN in the 50s and the 60s. And so I think we have to be modest in terms of what we might expect now from that 80-year-old institution in New York.
26:54At the same time, I think, because we have an increase in war and an increase especially in interstate war, I think we have to look again at the role that the UN Secretary General played in the past. Because in many ways, I think it's exactly that role that could be played in the future. And that's not about budgets. You know, if we think about the UN's financial constraints right now, you have the cut in American funding, you have other financial pressures in terms of aid programs and everything else. When my grandfather was Secretary General in the 1960s, he performed his tasks, for instance, as mediation in the Cuban Missile Crisis with maybe three or four other people.
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27:30The political office of the UN through the 1970s and 80s was maybe a dozen professionals. I mean, that part of what the UN does, which is perhaps its most important part, costs almost essentially nothing. So I think we have to detach what the UN is politically useful for, which is when do we need, if we think of all the different wars now, when might it be useful to have someone called the UN Secretary General, who is this impartial mediator representing all the countries of the world, to try to help prevent or end conflict. And I think that's different, again, from that whole spectrum of different agencies and programs on development and all of these different issues, which all deserve their own accounting, many of which are doing excellent work, but many of which also may have a big problem in terms of spreading themselves too thin as well.
28:18If I could press you on that just a little, you know, say we're in 2022 and there's the sense in Washington and Brussels that Russia is about to invade Ukraine. Short of having the same kind of dynamism and energy and conviction as we thought, what should Secretary General Antonio Guterres have done differently at that time in a way that might have prevented, say, the war in Ukraine and dissuaded Russia from invading? I think the first and foremost thing is to be present and to be active and to show that dynamism. I think the Secretary General could have at that time, for instance, flown to Moscow.
28:56He could have flown to Kiev. He could have flown to Washington. He could have talked to people at the very highest levels. He could have warned that something like this could have happened. We all knew in the weeks leading up to the invasion that it was at least a possibility. So I think for the Secretary General, it was his job to play up rather than play down the possibility of a direct threat to the UN. charter and a direct threat to international peace and security. And who knows where those conversations may have led. They may have led nowhere, but at least the UN would have inserted itself into that dynamic at that time.
29:26I think having said that, I think it would have been difficult for the Secretary General in 2022 to play the kind of role that some of his predecessors had played because of that decades-long movement away from that role, because the prestige of that office, especially on peacemaking, was much lower than it had been in the past because he didn't have that access to the highest level people in the way that some of his predecessors had 30, 40, 50 years ago. And also because that coalition of states didn't exist that would boost him up and support him from the very start. So there were structural reasons, but I think even with those structural reasons, there was no reason that he, because it's his job, in that circumstance or other circumstances shouldn't try.
30:09And I think to some extent, by not trying, I think in that case, the public then feels that the UN is that much more irrelevant. And the flip side is true as well. If the UN tries, even if it fails, I think the public is much more willing to see the UN as at least a potential player in whatever peacemaking may come. Because I think for secretary generals, they don't have the power to stop war. They can't order countries to do different things. It's about searching for that intervention that might be useful when countries want to move to create that kind of time and space, as Uthana did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for diplomacy and for negotiation.
30:49You write in your recent essay in Foreign Affairs that the world that is emerging is one in which no single power can organize international politics around its own preferences. And that kind of world resembles more the world that followed World War II during the Cold War than the one that followed the end of the Cold War, you know, the one that we saw in the last few decades under what's often called American unipolarity. Is there a risk, however, that the parallel between our current moment and the past is not with the post-war order, but rather the pre-war order, the competition between great powers that produced World War in the first place?
31:26That's absolutely it. I mean, I think, you know, if you go back to the 1920s and 1930s, we had another international organization, the League of Nations. Then that led to, you know, we had a type of politics in the 1930s where the League of Nations wasn't able to constrain great power rivalry. And we had World War II and tens of millions of people dead. I think that, you know, for the United Nations, it's not the case that we should just sort of give up and think that because we may be going back to an age of great power rivalry, we abandon the UN. I think it's about thinking less about institutional fixes and thinking about what are the kinds of politics that might help us prevent exactly the kind of world war that we had in the 1940s, but also back in the 19-teens as well.
32:11Or to put it in another way, I think that the central idea when the UN was set up is that preventing a third world war should trump all other considerations. If we go back into an age of great power politics, of transactional deals around different local conflicts about tensions, trying to manage tensions between the superpowers or the biggest powers, I think the chances that we go back to a total war of some kind, this time using nuclear weapons, is not insignificant. Whether the UN as an institution, the way it's constructed, the way it's used right now, is the answer. I think that's a different question.
32:48I think we have to be laser-like focused on, again, preventing a third world war, thinking about what kinds of principles should underline a great power relations, and really be willing to mobilize politically in that direction. I think the question of whether the UN institutionally should be reformed or changed, or should we spend another$100 million here or there, these are second-order questions. I think the first-order question is, you know, 80 years on, with this whole history of the UN to look back on, where has it been successful in making peace? Where can it be successful in making peace in the future?
33:21And how can we support, reinforce its central role in preventing another total war? I want to ask about that necessary political mobilization in a moment. But first, you know, you're familiar with the many debates about international order today. Canadian Prime Prime Minister Mark Carney fomented some of these recently when he, in Davos in January, talked about a rupture in the international system and the fact that middle powers and smaller countries can no longer rely on the old sets of norms and assumptions and institutions that had protected them in prior decades. Some now, when they look at, say, the United Nations and its increasing weakness or seeming weakness.
34:08Some suggest that what we should do instead is focus on multilateral institutions and other sorts of bodies, whether it's the G20 or BRICS or so forth, and that together these sort of constellations of actors can form some kind of facsimile of order to replace the one that's been lost. Do you think there's any merit to that idea? I think it's a few things. I mean, One is when people talk about rupture, we have to be clear, going back to the beginning of our conversation, what is the rupture that we're talking about? You know, is it the American retreat from its role as the hegemon around the global, you know, sort of liberal international order that system created during the U.S.
34:52unipolar moment from the 1990s? And is it about different countries, middle powers, others, but essentially Western countries try to rescue what's left of that, even in the absence of U.S. leadership or the U.S. changing its set of policies? Is that the aim? Because that's a pretty narrow set of aims, and it's about rescuing something that seems kind of lost. And it's very difficult for me to see how that can be sustained without politics in America shifting in a very fundamental direction. And I think even if it did sort of snap back or change, I don't think we're going to go back to the world of 10, 20, 30 years ago.
35:30So I think there's that. In terms of looking to the future, it's very clear that China is the biggest rising power. It may not be the equal of the U.S., but it's certainly quite close in many different ways. And so then the question is, are we waiting simply for the U.S. and China to arrive at some sort of dynamic, some sort of understanding about what the future global system is going to be? And maybe that is the truth. I mean, maybe we do have to wait for some accommodation, some equilibrium emerging between these two countries. But, you know, then we risk not only more wars sort of unfolding over these coming years.
36:04But it's also very possible the relationship between these two superpowers will end in acrimony and confrontation and nuclear war as well, maybe not in the next few years, but in the next couple of decades. I think then when we think about the UN, what we have to think is, you know, is there this role still for this organization that's 80 years old? Not to, again, do everything. It's not going to be on its own the system or the thing or the institution that's going to fundamentally change global politics, but it can still provide, especially through the office of the Secretary General, the potential to de-escalate, even if not in every case, at least in some cases, prevent and end wars.
36:41And maybe that will still make a crucial difference in the years to come. I think that when we think about the future as well, we should be thinking, again, less about the UN as an institution and whether or not we're still committed to those principles on which the UN was founded and emerged in the 40s and 50s and 60s of a world of peace and a world without empire. Because the other things about multilateralism, about a commitment to multilateral institutions, that's really about process, whether it's the G7 or the G20 or some other sort of grouping of middle powers. The key is, what is it really for?
37:18What are we trying to defend? And in the 50s and 60s, it was very clear. It was about building a world where there was no more war and building a world where empire was the thing of the past. And is that still what we're committed to? Or do we have some other set of aims going forward? So I think the question of objectives and principles are actually far more important. And the questions of, you know, under what sort of set of countries or what institutional framework do we achieve these aims, I think is secondary. As the United States has retreated from the UN and other international institutions, China has tried to take a more assertive role.
37:53And indeed, it casts itself as a guardian of the international system. What do you make of China's professed commitment to that system and to its styling itself in this way? I think with the collapse of the liberal international order, at least this movement of America away from any of the roles that it undertook over the past 30 years and movement away from alliances, there's a vacuum. And I think China's rising power inevitably will try to fill some of that vacuum to protect its own national interests abroad. I don't see any other course of action that China will likely follow in the years and decade or so to come.
38:30But China, as you said, has also said that it wants to protect the UN charter, that it wants to protect the UN system, constantly mentions the UN as central to its foreign policy. And I guess for the Chinese, there is this question of to what extent should they move towards being more unilateralists themselves in asserting their national interests in creating their own set of alliances and institutions that will serve Chinese interests going forward that are different and new. Or, and I think this is more likely, to look at the UN, this institution that's worked in many ways over the past 80 years and see the best way in which that can be refurbished and revived to serve the kind of global system that will work for China.
39:15Or to put it another way, I'm not sure that China has completely thought through and has a long-term strategy for the future of the UN, but I'm fairly sure that the UN remains a sort of cornerstone of the way in which China wants to think about the future, where it doesn't want to be the empire that rules the entire world. I think that's very far from China's view. But China wants to be a very dominant player within a system like the UN. And in a way, the UN is, it's not a democratic system. It's an international hierarchy. And China's a P5 member. So it has almost this ready-made system, which the US was able to use much to its advantage for many decades, both to mediate in different crises that the Americans wanted mediation around, but also where America was able to use a lot of its soft power and influence throughout much of the world as well.
40:08If the UN's main purpose, as you see it, is preventing war between great powers, how do you see it serving in, for instance, the event of a Chinese move against Taiwan? What might the Secretary General do in such situation to lower temperatures? I think in any particular case, and Taiwan is a very special case because, of course, China sees it as part of China and wouldn't welcome, I think, any kind of UN involvement. But having said that, I think it's inevitable that any sort of Chinese move on Taiwan would become an international global crisis of the first order. And people would, like in Ukraine, like in the Middle East, turn and think, you know, why is the UN not present, not doing anything?
40:52So I think it will be really important, a big test of the UN to know how to act. I think looking at history, it's the office of the Secretary General, not the Security Council, which will be deadlocked. China will not want any kind of action by the Security Council, almost certainly, but some countries might, for the Secretary General to maneuver and to find the right way in which here and the future, perhaps she, will be able to help. But it's not a specific formula. I mean, you know, there are ingredients that have to go into this. The UN, if it's going to be revitalized in some way has to have not necessarily the U.S.
41:27or any other big power completely embracing it. And actually, if we look at history, when big powers like the U.S. have embraced the U.N., that hasn't usually been the U.N.'s best period. But it's usually when other countries, neutral countries, non-aligned countries have invested, that the U.N. has a little bit of clout and a little bit of energy behind it. So that has to be there. There has to be a degree of public expectation. There has to be a secretary general that already has a good relationship with key leaders around the world. I think it's only if we're willing to invest, willing to create those circumstances, then you have someone called the UN Secretary General that can help, whether it's a confrontation in the Western Pacific, whether it's a confrontation in Eastern Europe, whether it's a confrontation in the Middle East, who can help.
42:11And if we want that person to be in a situation where he or she can help, all of those ingredients, some of those dynamics already have to be in place. Beneath great power war, there are obviously many conflicts within countries happening today. How might a more robust or proactive UN handle a war like that in Myanmar, a country you know well, of course? You wrote five years ago a fairly prescient article for us about the looming collapse in Myanmar. What can the UN do to address conflicts inside countries more effectively? I think it's much more difficult to say. And I think the UN's track record in many ways is very mixed.
42:53So I think in the 1990s and even into the 2000s, you saw some interventions that were successful. But usually these were peace agreements that had been mediated, that had been agreed. And then the UN deploys peacekeepers to try to implement and to hold elections. I think when you have an active civil war, whether it's in Myanmar, whether it's in Mali, or whether it's DRC, we don't even have really a working theory of what kind of intervention from the outside could work. And I think the UN, despite decades of involvement in these civil wars, has some ideas of some things that they've tried in the past.
43:26But in general, how do you move these complex societies of, you know, millions, tens of millions of people from war to peace? I don't think anyone has a clear answer for. I think that's one problem. I think the second problem is even if we had some idea of what might work, you know, you have in the UN still an institution that's dominated by a few countries. It's a hierarchy. It's still dominated a lot of its programs by donor funding. And so that's very much tilted towards certain ideas and values and agendas of these Western donors, even though that's declining or the aid that's being given is declining.
44:01And so you don't necessarily have a neutral intervention as well in these countries. We have developed since the 1990s, a whole way of thinking about change in these countries that is very much built around a whole set of mainly Western values. And I think that's problematic in some ways and hasn't really been that effective. So, I mean, the sad answer is, whether it's in Myanmar or again, some of these other countries, I'm not sure. And I think part of the answer has to be to zoom out and think not just of, you know, what might be possible in that particular country in terms of what the UN can do, but what are the circumstances that are helping to create and keep some of these conflicts going in terms of things like the international arms trade, in terms of international economic conditions that keep these countries relatively poor, in terms of unilateral sanctions that sometimes might make the situation worse rather than better, in terms of other forms of external interference that also might be making the situation worse rather than better.
45:02So I think we need to think about the global and regional environment in which these conflicts are happening, rather than being confident that we as foreigners can go into somebody else's country and understand how to transition from war to peace and thinking that those ideas plus the deployment of a few thousand peacekeepers is going to be the solution. And is that, you know, is that shift in focus something that you think the UN should be responsible for or trying to encourage? I think it's happening anyway, because I think the fact that the UN hasn't been able to solve a lot of these civil wars mean that the appetite in countries for welcoming UN peacekeepers as the answer to the civil wars has been in decline.
45:44Though we see still peacekeeping operations in some countries, we haven't seen any new peacekeeping missions in quite a while. So there is this decline anyway because of that perceived, at least, lack of effectiveness. And I think that doesn't mean the UN should turn its back on thinking about these conflicts, because oftentimes they mean millions, if not many more people displaced in need of humanitarian assistance. But I think we need a pretty fundamental rethink about how the world in general, but the world through the UN responds to these internal conflicts. And I think we have to be not just respectful of the sovereignty of these countries, but again, understand that these are not happening in isolation, but they're happening because of a set of dynamics globally, regionally, economically, especially, that feed into these conflicts too.
46:33But at the same time, as we're thinking that, I think we have to look at that role that the UN can play in interstate conflicts, which require a different set of capacities that doesn't cost very much in financial terms and around which UN secretaries general in the past have shown great effectiveness, especially up until the 1990s. So the process to pick the next secretary general is now underway. This would be the successor to Antonio Guterres. What do you want to see from the next Secretary General? I think I want to see, in terms of the person, someone who is of the right temperament. I think that's really important because the UN Secretary General is always going to be the person who, even though he or she has no power, might be scapegoated, has to deal with lots of criticisms and unfair criticisms.
47:24I think the person has to be able to keep their cool. I think the person has to have great empathy and moral imagination to understand the points of view of, you know, a dozen different countries or more at the same time around each conflict. I think the person has to be the right person in terms of character. The person has to have political courage and a willingness to take risks. I think that's important as well. But I think, you know, even if we had exactly the right person, unless we have those added ingredients that I mentioned before, which is a group of countries that's willing to really politically reinvest in the institution and the office of the Secretary General, it's going to be very difficult for that person to make the difference that we would want that person to make, especially in war and peace situations.
48:10You described the questions of reform to UN structures as sort of second-order questions. But just if I may ask you those second-order questions, you know, people have been talking about fixing the Security Council for ages. It now seems like an increasingly dusty relic of the end of World War II. You acknowledge that reform is a tough task, but what do you think is feasible? I think on the one hand, it's incredibly important because if people look at the Security Council and it looks like a relative 1945, it reduces the credibility of the UN full stop. And I think for the UN to have credibility and to be able to support the Secretary General or to intervene in different conflicts, it has to have a cast of characters that look much more like the 2020s than the 1940s.
49:00But having said that, I think how do we get from here to there, I think is a huge question. It's like a Rubik's Cube of politics in terms of different countries may be willing to accept one country as a new permanent member, but not willing to accept another. But then I think more practically, we also have to ask ourselves, you know, we know the wars that we have today, the biggest wars. We have a sense of maybe the wars that might be coming over the next five, ten years, the things that we have to be worried about. How does adding these countries actually make a difference? How does adding more countries with a veto on the Security Council make the Security Council more dynamic or more active?
49:38And I think we have to make a distinction between the Security Council as this kind of executive committee of the UN that might be able to discuss different matters, and the Office of the Secretary General, which has actually been effective over many decades in the past. So I think when we talk about UN reform, again, we have to take it apart, right? Do we mean reform of this extended UN system of many different agencies and funds and programs? And I think this financial crisis, at least for some, is a good opportunity in some ways to think strategically about what do we want from these agencies?
50:12What can be funded? What should their futures be? It's different from the Security Council. That's different from the General Assembly and the role that it might play in the future. And I think with the political oxygen that we have now, I don't think there's an enormous kind of appetite for grand UN restructuring in any capital, let alone the capitals of the biggest powers. I think with the political oxygen that we have, I think the one thing that makes sense to try to revive, revitalize and make as effective as we can, partly because it costs nothing and because we're going to have to make a decision around the officeholder imminently, is around the office of the UN Secretary General.
50:49And to close, let me turn to the first order questions. In your essay in Foreign Affairs, you ended your essay by calling for a kind of cultural restoration. That is, a return to the ideas that animated the United Nations in its first decades. And these were a sort of conviction about the end of empire and dismantling empires and one about preventing World War III. how do we recover those convictions if indeed these ideas are so important to not just the functioning of the United Nations, but to the underpinnings of global peace? I think that's really important because I think in the very short term, choosing the right Secretary General, making sure that he or she has a degree of political support is maybe the most that we can do.
51:43And we can hope that in at least one or two wars that that will make a big difference. But I think more generally, it's exactly what you said. It's about these convictions around a world without war and a world without empire. It's about restoring or making up for the absence of lived memory around the horrors of total war and the humiliation of empire. And what I mean is this, I mean, when I was writing my book, which is centered on the 1960s, we had war then. We had many wars. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead in these wars. We had nuclear confrontation around the Cuban Missile Crisis.
52:17We had lots of people thinking that, you know, the world was facing lots of new global challenges. The thing that, you know, listening to the audio tapes, going over these transcripts, looking at people's private correspondence and everything else over those 10 years, the thing that seemed different to me, though, was the proximity to the Second World War. And that feeling that almost everyone had because they had lived through total war, that whatever happened, total war, World War III, had to be avoided at all costs. I think that added to a certain sense of restraint that was there that I don't feel now.
52:53And then I think at the same time, because so many countries and peoples had come out of empire, there was this energy and this ambition to create a different world as well. And I think those ingredients are not there. And the question is, how do we make up for those ingredients? We don't have to go through another world war. We don't have to go through more colonial humiliation, though there are many countries now at war and many countries where they're facing occupation. But in general, the world isn't. How do we make up for that? And that is a cultural issue. I think there's been a failure of cultural transmission.
53:24We all grow up with so many films about heroic successes in war, very few films about heroic successes in mediation, for example. And maybe that's asking too much in some way, but I think that's essential. I think whether it's through education, whether it's through media, whether it's through publishing, whether it's through other forms of cultural transmission, I think something has to make up for that loss of that fear of total war and that sense of ambition of our ability to create a different world. And in the end of the day, it's about political mobilization. And I think unless we have that political mobilization, that willingness to kind of create a different culture in politics, I think the rest is important.
54:06But I don't think it's going to make up for that difference and that loss of that lived memory of total war and empire that we had before. That was a big part of making the UN successful. Well, if there are any Hollywood directors listening, I hope you now have your motivation to go make a biopic of U Thant. but Thant thank you so much for your time and for talking to us it was a pleasure thanks thanks very much Kanish
54:35thank you for listening you can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreign affairs.com this episode of the foreign affairs interview was produced by Mary Kate Godfrey and Kanesh Therroer our audio engineer is Christopher Cook original music is by Robin Hilton special thanks as well to Arena Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.
55:24We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview. Don't forget to visit foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight to sign up for Dan Kurtz-Valen's free weekly newsletter featuring more of the clear-headed analysis that you enjoy here on the podcast. Sign up today at foreignaffairs.com slash spotlight.
From the publisher
The world today is more dangerous and more violent than it’s been at any time since 1945. States everywhere have jettisoned commitments to cooperation and opted for aggression. The so-called rules-based order seems to have come apart. Yet the international body founded after World War II with the charge of preventing World War III finds itself increasingly on the margins.
In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the historian and former UN official Thant Myint-U considered what it would take for the United Nations to regain a meaningful role in preventing and managing global conflict. That question is particularly relevant as the UN begins the process of picking its next secretary-general. Deputy Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with Thant about the past and future of the United Nations, and about how the pillars of global peace can be reinforced before they collapse.
You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.