Richard V. Gowan

Ban Ki-moon, the first South Korean secretary-general of the United Nations, stepped down on December 31, 2016, after ten years in office. He will be succeeded by former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres, who will inherit a complex portfolio of global and institutional challenges facing the UN in 2017 and beyond. What legacy does Ban leave behind at the UN and how did his leadership help shape the world’s paramount international organization during his tenure? For insight on these questions and more, The Diplomat’s Ankit Panda spoke to Richard V. Gowan, a non-resident fellow at New York University’s Center for International Cooperation and expert on the United Nations. In this interview, Gowan discusses the evolving role of the UN, Ban’s leadership style, his attempts to manage superpower tensions within the Security Council, and his attempts to address nuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.

The United Nations has been around for more than 70 years now. How has its role in the world evolved?

The UN only really took off in the 1990s. The organization never fulfilled its potential during the Cold War because of East-West splits, although it played a significant role in regulating superpower tensions in cases such as the Arab-Israeli wars. At the end of the Cold War, the UN suddenly took on a much greater role in managing conflicts and peace deals from Cambodia to Central America. But this was a very short honeymoon. Peacekeeping forces overreached in the Balkans and failed disastrously in Somalia and Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

Since then, the UN has played a more limited role in international peace and security, but it has played a very important function in managing peacekeeping and stabilization operations in Africa in particular. There are currently more than 100,000 blue helmet peacekeepers worldwide, but most are still in sub-Saharan Africa. The UN also maintains a unique diplomatic role in the Middle East, mediating in conflicts such as those in Syria and Yemen – although its track record in these cases is bad, and has really hurt the institution’s credibility.

If you look around the rest of the world, the UN is mainly notable by its absence. It makes only very marginal contributions to European, Latin American, or Asian security, although there are a few exceptions. In the Asia-Pacific, the Security Council provides a mechanism for Chinese-American deals over the North Korean nuclear program, but has no similar role over the South China and East China Seas. There is a tacit agreement between Beijing and Washington to avoid getting these regional tensions tangled up in UN diplomacy, which is probably for the best: It is hard to see what the UN could really do to resolve the disputes.

Ban Ki-moon’s tenure as secretary-general, from 2007 through the end of 2016, stretched over a decade which saw North Korea’s nuclear program progress significantly in the face of UN condemnation and sanctions. How effective has the UN been in dealing with nuclear proliferation, especially in regard to North Korea? Has Ban’s approach, given his South Korean citizenship, been noticeably different from his predecessors?

I think Ban has been frustrated by the limits of the UN’s role in Asia. From early in his first term, Ban indicated that he would love to use his position to ease tensions with the DPRK. He even wanted to make a trip to Pyongyang before leaving office. But in reality, the secretary-general has very little leverage over Korean affairs. The Chinese and Americans dominate discussions of the nuclear file in the Security Council, and they don’t want the UN secretariat taking independent initiatives that could complicate their fragile cooperation. Kofi Annan and his team had looked at taking a more prominent role in diplomacy with the DPRK, but their efforts never really went anywhere. On replacing Annan, Ban clearly hoped his own background and networks would put him in a stronger position, but this always remained a pipedream.

It is worth keeping in mind that the North Koreans see the UN as an American-run institution (after all, the U.S. still manages the UN-flagged force in South Korea) and Ban was widely perceived as a personally very pro-American secretary-general. It was also always common knowledge that he harbored ambitions to return to Seoul and run for the presidency, meaning that he could never really present himself as an objective envoy for the Koreas.

More broadly, the secretary-general has much less independent authority over nuclear issues than he does on matters such as peacekeeping. Ban often indicated that he would like to play a greater role in nuclear issues, but in a period in which the Non-Proliferation Treaty is in markedly poor shape and the Security Council is increasingly reverting to Cold War-style tensions, there was never all that much that he could do individually in this field.

Core members of the UN Security Council -- Russia, China, and the United States -- have often been at odds, over Syria in recent years but in other areas as well. How successful was Ban in promoting unified action among these various players?

Ban is a very traditional diplomat, and he was initially wary of offending the permanent five members of the Security Council (P5). He grew bolder over time, but never entirely threw off his sense of caution. At times, his quiet diplomacy was genuinely useful: He found ways to bridge divides between China and the U.S. over deploying peacekeepers to Darfur in his first term, for example, and also helped Moscow and the West settle on a deliberately vague compromise response to Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008. So while UN officials wished that Ban could be a more firm leader, he did hit on useful fudges now and then.

Ironically, one of the few occasions that Ban really felt moved to take a strong stance during his first term was early in the Arab revolutions in 2011, but this badly backfired. Ban was commendably forthright in defending the rights of Egyptians, Libyans, and Syrians to protest, and got a lot of praise for doing so. But his public stance meant that he was not well positioned to undertake private diplomacy with the likes of Gaddafi and Assad. On Syria in particular, Ban basically handed over real diplomatic work to other mediators – starting with Kofi Annan in 2012 – and confined himself to being a sort of moral commentator on the war.

Moreover, Ban was actually one of the first leaders to suggest that the UN could defuse the 2013 Syrian weapons crisis by helping to dismantle Assad’s chemical stockpile, but it was Vladimir Putin who made that deal possible. After Russian forces became directly involved in the Syrian war in 2015, Ban’s position became more and more difficult. He did criticize the Russian air campaign but had to modify his position when Moscow reacted angrily. I have criticized Ban for his caution on many occasions, but, to be honest, I think that he was put in an impossible situation over Syria. He didn’t handle it brilliantly but few could have done better.

What were Ban’s strengths and weaknesses, compared to the leadership styles of other secretaries-general?

Ban has admitted that he joined the UN as an “outsider” and to be honest this was painfully obvious in his first term in particular. He never understood the nuts and bolts of the organization’s big peace operations and humanitarian efforts, and a lot of veteran UN officials felt that he didn’t really appreciate their work. Equally, Ban felt that a lot of his staff did not respect him, and found the UN work ethic inferior to that of the foreign ministry in Seoul.

This was in glaring contrast to Annan, who was a consummate UN insider who commanded a lot of loyalty inside the institution. Ban always seemed to resent Annan’s popularity among the staff, and implied that it had led to ethical lapses in the organization, although there was sufficient rapprochement between the two for Ban to turn to Annan for help on Syria.

So Ban got off to a bad start with the UN system, and morale never really recovered. It is striking that Ban performed best when it came to issues, such as the long slog of climate change negotiations leading to the 2015 Paris agreement, that centred on inter-governmental negotiations rather than tinkering with the UN’s operational machinery. When it came to what you might call “retail diplomacy” over things like climate change, Ban knew what to do. He has a Herculean capacity for turning up to conferences, making routine political addresses and so forth. That is not very sexy, but his ability to grind away like this meant that he was able to keep up pressure for a deal on global warming after the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen summit. He was just one cog in the diplomatic process leading from Copenhagen to Paris, and the final climate deal can ultimately be ascribed the Obama administration’s willingness to coax Beijing into a bargain, but Ban’s efforts deserve credit.

What will Ban Ki-moon be remembered for, with regard to his term as secretary-general? And what’s next for Ban?

Most UN secretaries-general get forgotten quite quickly. Can you remember anything about Kurt Waldheim, for example, other than the fact that it turned out that he had once been a Nazi? I suspect not. When Boutros Boutros-Ghali died early in 2016, most international commentators struggled to recall his time at the helm of the UN in the early 1990s, although that was a dramatic time. I suspect that Ban Ki-moon will similarly fade into history quite quickly, unless he finally succeeds in securing the South Korean presidency this year.

I do not necessarily mean that as a criticism. It fits with his leadership style and political philosophy. Ban suspected that Annan had succumbed to a sort of personality cult, and tried to play a lower-key role. As he admitted, he didn’t really have the charisma to be a cult figure anyway. He understood that a lot of politics is, in Max Weber’s words, “a long and slow boring of hard boards.” That was his approach to climate diplomacy, and it paid off.

So Ban may be remembered as solid functionary, if a rather stolid one. Equally, he may be marked down as the last leader of the UN before the deluge -- by which I mean the Trump administration. Ban was lucky to spend most of his time at the UN working with the broadly constructive Obama administration. His successor, Antonio Guterres, will have to navigate a far harsher environment if Trump follows through on his campaign promises to overturn the climate change deal and constrain the UN on many other fronts. If the Trump era is as nasty as many UN officials expect, a lot of Ban’s contributions to multilateral cooperation may be erased in the next few years. We may even look back on his tenure with unexpected nostalgia.