During the recent United Nations campaign that ended with the nomination of South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon as the organization's next Secretary General, US ambassador John Bolton several times took pains to describe the competition as one to become the UN's "chief administrative officer." He and previous US representatives have also quipped that they want "more secretary and less general" occupying the offices on the thirty-eighth floor of UN headquarters in New York.

Of course, no UN Secretary General has ever, outside the hyperbole of American unilateralists, aspired to generalhood. The position has often been compared to the papacy, but the SG does not have the Swiss Guard to back him up, and even his best friends would not say he was infallible.

It is true that the "We the peoples of the United Nations" mentioned in the Charter expect a Secretary General to have moral authority and to represent the best principles of the organization. And in fact Ban has expressed a strong commitment to human rights and to the International Criminal Court--hardly Bolton's most popular cause--as well as to the concept of the "responsibility to protect," not exactly China's or Russia's top priority either.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.