Letter from the United Nations: A World of Problems
Canada Mission UN Twitter
Bob Rae
September 29th, 2022
The 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly began two weeks ago.
We are meeting at a time of major disruption in the global economy, geopolitics and politics, the sustainability of the planet, global public health, the pace of technological change, and the inevitable human consequences of all of the above. The situation does not lend itself to simple bumper stickers, but we have become used, here at the UN, to referring to “a cascade of crises”, that fall into and amplify each other, and continue to have powerful consequences for the world, and inevitably for all of us.
While I have been here as Canada’s Ambassador, this was my first UNGA high-level week, which is really ten days of nonstop speeches, side meetings, breakfasts, coffees, pull-asides, lunches, more coffees, dinners, and for the strongest among us, late night conclaves. After two years of Zooms, FaceTimes, Webexes, MS Teams and every imaginable platform, it was all in person and in your face. The world we faced was an even bigger mess than what we faced before the Great Distancing of March 2020. Canada more than held its own, but it was hectic.
The world is in us and we are very much in the world. Canada is — by virtue of its history, geography, demography, social makeup and economy — directly implicated in the world. We are an indigenous country, an Arctic country, a country of the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Americas, and thanks to our dramatically shifting demography because of immigration, a country that is tied to every other country, language, and history, in the world. We are a trading nation, a country whose GDP depends on our economic interdependence with the rest of the world. We are members of a multitude of alliances, agreements, and associations. There is no part of the world that is far away or remote from us. This is who we are.
Any attempt to ignore our global situation is bound to fail. The UN and multilateral agencies around the world are a critical place for us to do our business.
The most recent global disruption in a 21st-century series of them is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s illegal war has created havoc in Ukraine, but the effects are felt globally. In addition to the thousands who have been killed, millions have been physically displaced, both inside and outside Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of children have been illegally kidnapped. The war crimes and crimes against humanity accumulate. This week’s illegal annexation of eastern Ukraine is just the latest crime.
Canada made an immediate decision to attack the criminality of the invasion, and to support Ukraine militarily (invoking Article 51 of the Charter, Ukraine’s sovereign right to resist invasion and to request international assistance) and to pursue accountability in international courts. We have also provided billions in financial assistance to Ukraine and UN agencies helping the humanitarian situation. Russia’s aggression has also had major economic consequences for its neighbours, and because of inflation, energy disruption, and food shortages, has contributed to risks of famine, hunger and hardship around the world. Russia and its abettors have tried to blame the West for the war’s consequences because of our resistance to its aggression, and this remains a major diplomatic battleground.
It is readily apparent that President Putin cares no more about human life, human dignity, personal freedom, the rights of other peoples, than his spiritual and political ancestor Josef Stalin. As he has told us, we are all but gnats to him. The sheer brutality of what he says and what he does reflects that clearly. Just as the West had to come to terms, after 1945, with the fact that “Uncle Joe” was a vicious dictator (something that was naively ignored during the purges and famines of the 1930s), and that the Soviet Union’s views about the nature of the world had to be understood as incompatible with what liberal democracies could possibly stomach, so, too, we now have to face up to what President Putin and his apologists have in the way of “war aims”.
Putin has told us clearly what he wants. He doesn’t believe in any meaningful independence or sovereignty for his neighbours. He hates the dignity of difference. He wants compliance, he wants control, and he will kill, destroy and lay waste to get that. His first targets are those countries not covered by NATO’s security umbrella, but the appetite will grow with the eating. He swallowed Chechnya with scarcely a peep from anyone, moved on to Georgia, moved into Syria when the red lines evaporated, and maintained a steady attack on Eastern Ukraine until he occupied Crimea as his “just reward”. Putin has miscalculated the resistance and courage of the Ukrainian people and the West’s capacity for solidarity but he is now so soaked in blood that he will not turn back on his own steam. He must be forced back, and he must face accountability for his crimes. He may not care enough about the decision of the International Court of Justice on the measures he has to take to stop committing a genocide. He could care less about the Geneva Conventions, human rights commissions, or any of the myriad institutions steadily built to create a world based on the rule of law.
The issue for us is, how much do we care about these values and institutions? Four hundred years ago, Blaise Pascal wrote that “Justice without force is powerless, and force without justice is tyranny”. We cannot afford to be powerless in our response to aggression.
COVID19’s effects on the global south have been serious, on both the health and economic fronts. This will become a more serious issue this year and next, and we can expect continued pressure on global food and financial systems.
Conflict has been exacerbated, particularly in Africa, but elsewhere as well. This puts pressure on UN Peacekeeping and conflict prevention, but also on the global humanitarian situation, which is now more serious than at any point since the Second World War. There are more displaced people, internal migrants and refugees, than even before. The challenge of responding adequately to this crisis is great. Somalia and Pakistan are the immediate crises, but there are many others. Our development and humanitarian budgets will be stretched, and will test our global commitment.
Climate change will require greater efforts in mitigation (lowering emissions) and adaptation. The broad crisis in development is made even worse by climate change.
Since Kyoto, we have seen some progress in reducing the pace of the increase in emissions, but have consistently missed targets both at home and globally. The painful reality for Canada is that we are a large per capita emitter and a small global emitter. We can’t have much credibility without taking measures that will continue to be domestically challenging. The upcoming COP27 meeting at Sharm El Sheikh in November will focus as much on issues of adaptation and climate finance as on the reduction of global emissions. China and Russia will use the disruptive impact of the invasion of Ukraine to point out that Western rhetoric exceeds its delivery. The most important message on climate is that it is today’s issue and today’s crisis. It is not something that happens in 2050 if we fail to meet our targets. It is a crisis of today, not of tomorrow.
Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine has its parallels in other countries taking the law into their own hands, which puts international mechanisms of accountability under great pressure to deliver. China in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang, comes to mind as a particular challenge, but there are others.
We can no longer talk with any confidence of a “rules-based order” because the rules are being broken too often for those words to trip meaningfully off the tongue. The phrase that we have used since the Atlantic Charter was signed in Washington in January 1942, the war aims that united the Allies against the common foe, and underpinned the founding of the United Nations in 1945, is not respected by many governments. Any doubt about this has been swept away by Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the uneven response to this invasion from the rest of the world.
The autocracy/democracy debate is an important one about a significant divide, but it is not the only divide. China and Russia and others like Brazil and India emphasize the wealth/poverty divide, and there is much resonance for this. The “digital divide” in access to education is yet another, as is the climate change debate on “mitigation vs adaptation”, which will dominate the discussions at Sharm El Sheikh at COP 27.
China’s place on the world stage has been an ever-changing saga since the revolution of 1949. The consolidation of power under the Communist Party has been brutally effective (and effectively brutal). China is a dictatorship where surveillance is politically controlled. As we have seen in the treatment of Tibetans, the people of Hong Kong, and the people of Xinjiang, the regime will insist on unity and central rule no matter the cost. They are making the calculation that for all the global criticism, they do not believe other countries will do more than complain. The Chinese are increasingly self-confident that their power and influence can only grow, and that of the West will inevitably decline.
But with power and influence should also come responsibility. China should not follow Russia in becoming a rogue state. It can, and should, play a positive role in dealing with climate change, in creating a more resilient international public health system, in dealing with global conflict, and in establishing a more equitable and effective international financial system.
The world has never been an easy or languid place. It certainly isn’t now. Canada’s greatest orator, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, reminded his fellow Canadians in the debates on Confederation that “We are in the rapids, and there is no turning back”. It shall take all our skills to keep us on an even keel.
Bob Rae is Canada’s permanent representative to the United Nations and a regular contributor to Policy Magazine.