Ban's First Challenge?

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.

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