"Jeremic’s proposals could give UN way to bridge chasm"

"Jeremic’s proposals could give UN way to bridge chasm"

The article, published on the website under the headline, "A Different Kind of UN Secretary General" and penned by Nikolas K. Gvosdev, describes the platform of the former Serbian foreign minister and former president of the UN General Assembly - “Strengthening the United Nations in the 21st Century" - as "a detailed 53-point program of action."

The document is available here as a PDF file hosted on a UN website.

"Jeremic’s proposals offer a way forward for the United Nations to bridge the chasm that the Obama and Lavrov speeches illuminated," the author wrote - referring to this month's UN General Assembly addresses delivered by the U.S. president and the Russian foreign minister - and added:

"A greater refocus of the United Nations as a non-ideological, technocratic provider of solutions to discrete problems avoids forcing the UN having to arbitrate between fundamentally different visions of the international political order. Russia, China, the United States and the principal European powers may fundamentally disagree on the big political picture, but they all see the negative impacts of climate change, migration flows, the spread of pandemics, and so on."

"The dirty little secret in Washington is that while politicians love to bash the United Nations as wasteful, the national-security establishment absolutely depends on the UN to deal with many regional problems that the United States is unable or unwilling to deal with. Jeremic’s proposals to make the UN more deployable in the field and to institute comprehensive fiscal controls would also find a welcome response from those in the State and Defense Departments who want a more capable UN as a 'force multiplier' for U.S. theater security policy. Thus, the Wall Street Journal concluded that Jeremic would be the 'best chance for reform' at the UN," the Gvosdev said.

The author further "sees the core of the Jeremic proposals as an ambitious effort to redefine what collective security means for the 21st century, and what the role of the United Nations ought to be as a collective security organization, not as any sort of embryonic world government."

"Is this a vision that the members of the UN Security Council can endorse? Given the new north/west and east/south divides in the world, the next secretary-general must be able to navigate those divisions. Otherwise, the paralysis made most manifest this past week on the rostrum will further erode efforts to pursue global solutions," the article concludes.