Guns and Silliness at the U.N. in 2021

At the 2021 U.N. Programme of Action on Small Arms Meeting, the U.S. Should Get Real, Heritage Foundation Backgrounder #3613, May 4, 2021. "The last meeting of the U.N.’s Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects (PoA), held in 2018, violated the PoA’s principle of working by unanimous consent. The PoA has few, if any, achievements. U.S. participation in it merely lends it a credibility it does not deserve: The only reason for the U.S. to participate is to prevent the PoA from making bad decisions. Now that the PoA has abandoned the principle of unanimity that allowed the U.S. to prevent bad outcomes, the U.S should not participate in the 2021 meeting of the PoA unless the PoA is reoriented to focus on specific, realistic, and relevant goals."

The U.S. As Muscle-Bound Giant

Why The U.S. Struggles to Come to Grips with the U.N.’s Gun Control Program, Forbes, July 12, 2018. "The most fundamental U.S. difficulty is that, in most U.N. venues, the U.S. is permanently on the defensive: the best we can do is to limit our losses. I would love to take the offensive, to come up with proposals that we can back and to force others to react to them, instead of us being forced to always react to the idiotic proposals of others."

The PoA's Little Inanities

The Little Inanities of the U.N.’s Gun Control Program, Forbes, July 12, 2018. "During the last two weeks of June, I was in New York, watching the Third Review Conference of the U.N.’s Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, usually abbreviated as the Programme of Action, or just the PoA. For the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal, I’ve explained how the U.S. was cheated by a last minute rule change. But spending a fortnight at the PoA also occasions a few broader thoughts on the dysfunctions of the PoA, and the way the U.S. deals with dysfunctional international institutions. In this column, I’ll look at some of those dysfunctions. In the next, I’ll focus on how the U.S. tries — and sometimes fails — to come to grips with them.

Yes, Get Out of the Human Rights Council

U.S Right to Quit Human Rights Panel, Newsday, June 24, 2018. "The UN Human Rights Council is a disgrace. No democracy should listen to the council, much less participate in it. The Trump administration’s decision to quit this rotten body was not merely right. It embodies the way we should treat failed international institutions."

The UN: A Club for Nations

Why United Nations Membership Means Little, Newsday, September 24, 2017. "The UN today is a club for nations. Every widely recognized nation is in it, and if you’re not a nation, you’re excluded. As such, the UN has no serious membership standards: If you’re a nation, you’re in. But that was not how it was meant to be. When the UN was founded in 1945, it was a society for the nations that had won the Second World War. The losers — Germany, Italy and Japan — were excluded. As such, the UN was supposed to embody the values America had fought to defend."

The Other Half Smuggled the Gun

At the U.N., Lather, Rinse, and Repeat for Gun Control, National Review Online, June 14, 2016, "The more time you spend at the U.N., the more its activities fall into a pattern. There are big promises, followed by failure and complete unwillingness to look that failure in the face. The affair invariably concludes with the piling up of yet more promises. Like a naughty child, the U.N. responds to evidence of past underperformance with pledges of future overachievement."

Freedom, Not Goals, Brings Development

The UN Has Yet to Learn Its Lesson, Newsday, October 18, 2015. "The announcement last week that Angus Deaton of Princeton University won the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics offers an opportunity to celebrate the gains the world has made, and to reflect on how we can do better. Unfortunately, the United Nations has not taken that opportunity."

Wait, Hypocrisy at the U.N.? I Never!

The U.N.’s Unique Species of Hypocrisy, Arms-Trafficking Edition, National Review Online, June 18, 2014. "It would be a wearying task to catalog every kind of hypocrisy on display at this week’s meeting of the U.N.’s Programme of Action on Small Arms — the PoA, where the main issues I set out for the Corner yesterday continue to be a focus of discussion. But the main principal species of lies, evasions, and question-begging at Turtle Bay are worth recording, precisely because they are so dominant."

Samatha Powers and the Hypocrisy of the Atrocities Prevention Board

Atrocities Prevention Board, One Year Later, Contentions, April 23, 2013. "It’s about as likely that the U.S. will develop the ability to predict atrocities before they happen as it is that we’ll develop the ability to predict events like the Arab Spring before they happen. It’s all too easy to make a list of places where bad things are more likely to happen: any place where government is either really strong or really weak is a contender to head the list. Nor is there any secret about where the world’s atrocities are happening today: Syria, North Korea, Iran, the DRC, and Sudan, among others. The usual suspects. The problem is not that we lack the administrative tools to recognize this. It’s not even that this administration has in practice been more interested in cozying up to Russia, downplaying radical Islamism, and kicking the can down the road in Syria and Iran, though all of that will feature heavily in the work of a future Samantha Power. It’s that these are, in Power’s own words, problems from hell, and you don’t address problems from hell with a nice, well-mannered, invisible inter-agency board."

The ATT: Bad Treaty, Worse Precedent

Arms Trade Treaty: Problems with Substance and Process, Heritage Foundation Issue Brief #3892, April 4, 2013. "The concept of the ATT is inherently flawed, and the treaty as adopted contains significant defects. Because of these flaws, the U.S. should neither sign nor ratify the ATT. But the process by which it was adopted is even more damaging. The U.S. should in the future uphold consensus as a negotiating red line, stop supporting the transfer of failed consensus-based negotiations to the majority-rule GA, and recognize that the GA vote on the ATT is only the beginning of the process of treaty interpretation and amendment."

How the Dictators Hang Together

A Falkland Islands Coda, Contentions, March 21, 2013. "Spurred on by James Kirchick’s superb piece on why the Falkland Islands matter, and by my on-going visit to the UN, it’s worth pointing out how the Falklands illustrate one more thing: how the autocracies, in hanging together at the UN, all too often organize around their shared hatred of Israel."

A Fog of UN Code Words

On the Rhetoric of the United Nations and the United States, Contentions, March 20, 2013. "Sitting in the back of the room as the UN’s member states negotiate the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is a disorientating experience. That’s partly because it’s not a negotiation as Americans understand the term: it’s a series of more or less unconnected national interventions on particular points of interest, while the actual drafting happens out of sight. It’s also because Iran and North Korea are treated with at least as much formal respect as the United States and South Korea."

John Stuart Mill, the ATT, and Syria

Multilateralism and the Arms Trade Treaty, Contentions, March 18, 2013. "The negotiation of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which I am observing at the U.N., offers a wonderful environment in which to observe the various species of hypocrisy. But like any zoo, you pretty well know what’s in the cage. Iran will be smoothly menacing, Syria will spit venom, and every developing nation will demand “implementation assistance,” i.e. more foreign aid. In the U.N., the dangers and the silliness are somewhat mitigated by their predictability."

The Programme of Action is Ineffective and Dangerous

The U.S. Should Withdraw from the U.N.’s ‘Programme of Action’ on Small Arms, Heritage Foundation Issue Brief #3714, August 31, 2012. "The PoA contains a range of commitments on which participating nations have agreed to report biennially. It is not a treaty process: it is, in theory, a mechanism for encouraging voluntary cooperation. In practice, it has achieved little. On August 29, the U.N. released its International Small Arms Control Standards (ISACS), which epitomizes the PoA’s promotion of gun control norms. Since the PoA is ineffective and seeks to constrain freedoms protected by the Constitution, the time has come for the U.S. to withdraw from it."

Stopping the Arms Trade Treaty, Again

U.S. Should Act to Stop Renewed Rush to Arms Trade Treaty, Heritage Foundation issue Brief #3690, August 2, 2012. "The U.N. negotiating conference on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) ended on July 27 without reaching consensus on a treaty, but the ATT is far from dead. The conference was only one step in the process. When the U.N. General Assembly (GA) meets in September, it will have before it the report of the negotiating conference and the draft treaty text. The ATT’s proponents plan to vote it through the GA. The U.S. should act now to stop this renewed rush to adopt the ATT."

How to Solve the Crime Problem: Ban It!

The United Nations Drafts a Law Banning Crime, National Review Online, July 25, 2012. "If the nations of the world wanted higher standards on their arms imports and exports, they could have them today. If they wanted to respect U.N. Security Council sanctions and embargos, they could do so today. But they don’t, and they don’t. In spite of the complexities of drafting a text that satisfies everyone’s hypocrisy, the July conference may end up producing a treaty. But it won’t matter to the people of Syria or Somalia — never mind Iran or North Korea. And it won’t stop the NGOs from blaming the U.S. and, sooner or later, demanding yet another treaty. The only thing it will do is give Harold Koh a bit more to chew on, and add another layer of legal complexity to U.S. commercial interests and foreign and security policy. At the U.N., they call that a good day’s work."

My Statement to the UN ATT Conference

Heritage Analyst Speaks to U.N. Arms Trade Treaty Conference, Heritage Foundation Foundry, July 11, 2012. "I hope the democracies at this conference will reject the naive beliefs on which the ATT is founded and instead craft a treaty that recognizes that abuses in the arms trade stem ultimately from the member states of the United Nations itself."

UN ATT Conference: First Week Roundup

A First-Week Roundup from the U.N.’s Arms Trade Treaty Conference, Heritage Foundation Foundry, July 9, 2012. "My own view is that the conference is likely to produce a treaty. But it’s quite clear that all the treaties in the world cannot come close to making up for the insincerity, the incapacity, and a few actually honest differences of opinion on display daily at the United Nations."

UN ATT Conference, Day Four: Venezuela Wins!

Day Four: As ATT Conference Work Begins, Venezuela Wins the Crazy Prize, Heritage Foundation Foundry, July 6, 2012. "In previous sessions, Cuba, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia had all put in strong showings with speeches that were unprincipled and autocrat-friendly, but when it came to crazy, Venezuela lapped the field with a speech that will be tough to beat. In a lengthy rant attacking the “maturity” of the assembled nations, it denounced the “imperial powers” for arming the Libyan rebels who overthrew Muammar Qadhafi, demanded that the world look seriously at controlling the “imperialists” (i.e., the U.S.) who had nuclear weapons, condemned foreign aid providers for insisting on the “downsizing” of governments, and stated that it needed arms to deal with internal threats (i.e., to continue to oppress its own population."

UN ATT Conference, Day Two: More Palestinians

Day Two: Palestinian Issue Continues to Vex Arms Trade Treaty Conference, Heritage Foundation Foundry, July 5, 2012. "By agreeing to treat the Holy See and the Palestinians as equivalents at the ATT conference, the U.S. has given tacit support to a future Palestinian bid for non-member state observer status. It is unlikely that maintaining a U.S. presence in the room is worth giving the Palestinians this benefit, especially since the final treaty is almost certainly to be ineffective at best, counterproductive at worst."