Joseph J. Sisco was the Chairman of the American Academy of Diplomacy from 1999-2004. When he passed away in the fall of 2004, he requested that gifts in his honor be made to the Academy of Diplomacy. The Academy decided that the best use of the generous donations made by his friends and family was to stimulate public discussion on the foreign policy themes to which Dr. Sisco dedicated his career. Therefore, the Academy created the Sisco Memorial Forum, what will be a periodic series of events dedicated to discussion of pertinent themes in US Foreign Policy. As Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, and as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Dr. Sisco often played a leading role in American involvement in the work of the United Nations. The first Forum event continued that effort by generating awareness of and discussion on the problems that the United Nations faces today. It was held on June 30, 2005 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. Building upon the success of the first generous Sisco challenge grant made by Carol and Jane Sisco to the Academy in 2005, the Sisco family has again expressed their commitment to support diplomatic outreach events in honor of the late Joseph J. Sisco. Carol and Jane Sisco have announced that they will offer a $25,000 challenge grant in 2007, to be matched by Academy members to help finance a continuing series of diplomatic outreach activities. Read the 2007 Sisco Challenge Letter to Members

Panelist Ivo Daalder spoke on International Peace and Security Issues. Academy Chairman Thomas Pickering is pictured to his right, and Ambassador James Dobbins is to his left.

Below, (from left to right): Moderator Thomas Pickering, Panelsits Roderick Hills, William H. Luers, and A. Peter Burleigh spoke on Management and Accountability.

Carol Sisco read her father's, Joeseph J Sisco, thoughts on United Nations reform published over 40 years ago.

Academy Chairman Thomas Pickering Introduces the keynote speaker at the luncheon.

Mark Malloch Brown, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Chef de Cabinet, gave the luncheon keynote address.

Joseph J. Sisco Memorial Forum

To read the morming panel discussions, click here.

Luncheon Session
Moderator

Thomas R. Pickering
Academy Chairman
Remarks

Carol Sisco
Daughter of Joseph J. Sisco
Keynote Address

Mark Malloch Brown
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Chef de Cabinet

Thomas R. Pickering: As you all know, we're here today at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in the rotunda, and we're delighted to have this beautiful and important building at our disposal and we thank the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center for their help and cooperation in sponsorship.

In addition, I want to thank again James Dobbins, Ivo Daalder, Peter Burleigh, Rod Hills, and Bill Luers who constituted the panels which we have just wrapped up with a number of guests and whose results I think were extremely interesting. For those of you who were there I'll allow you to appreciate that in retrospect, and for those who were not I will tell you you missed a tremendously interesting series of sessions on UN reform.
I want to tell you all again that this is a memorial to Joseph J. Sisco who passed away in the fall of last year while serving as Chairman of this Academy's Board. Before Joe died he had requested that gifts be made to the Academy in his memory, and the Academy decided the best use of this generous donations by friends and by family was to stimulate discussion of foreign policy themes to which he was dedicated over his career and the United Nations is undoubtedly, preeminently, one of those particular questions. So today's forum continues the effort to memorialize and to remember Joe and his contributions by generating awareness of and discussion about the problems of the United Nations and those that it faces, particularly today, and particularly reform.

It's my special pleasure in that connection to introduce Carol Sisco, Joe's daughter, who would have a few words to tell us on behalf of Joe's family this afternoon before I then turn to our speaker. So Carol, without further ado I'll turn the platform over to you.
[Applause].

Carol Sisco: Good afternoon. I'm very honored to be here today. I know my father would have loved this morning, and not only the presentations but the comments and questions afterward. This really was an issue, the United Nations was a passion of his and I remember in our formative years spending many General Assemblies visiting our father in New York City and listening to his enthusiasm about the work of the UN.

I've got to say I've been in the fortunate and I'd say sad position in some ways of being the person who handles my parents' affairs and estate, but one thing that I came cross last week that I just had to share with you all, I am putting together my father's documents because the Library of Congress had requested his manuscripts. And I found a copy of the Congressional Record of March 10, 1965. Entered into the record, the Honorable Donald Fraser entered some comments that my father had made about the UN.

He said in the record, the question has been asked, will the UN survive. My father wrote, "This is not the first time this question has been asked in the 20 year history of the United Nations and it won't be the last." [Laughter].

"The United Nations has been sanctified and buried more times than any institution in history. Somehow we Americans seem to have an affinity for characterizing problems as crises. At the same time we tend to expect each problem and crisis to be resolved by some single convulsive act -- a summit meeting, some kind of a showdown with a yes or no, fish or cut bait answer. We tend to expect the UN to usher in perpetual peace or collapse to the ground."

"We oversold the UN at its birth, and today we tend to underestimate its resilience and adaptability as it faces new problems. But usually the world doesn't work that way. The showdown doesn't necessarily come. The fish or cut bait situation does not too often arise. We keep saying this or that situation can't continue any longer and somehow it manages to continue for quite a bit longer."

"The UN neither rises to the heights of greatness nor crumbles to ashes. In other words, it's a political organization."

"In the past 20 years the United Nations has faced a whole series of external and internal crises. It is a reflection of our times, and one way or another it has survived them all. And in the process, we have learned that neither the UN nor any other instrument of diplomacy can provide a quicky answer to our international problems. The job of peace is a hard, day by day, nuts and bolts process that requires patience and prudence, firmness and resolve."

I listened to the presentations this morning and I don't think too much has changed over the last 40 years.

So my father, as it relates to the Academy, and I know this is probably annoyance to many of his colleagues who have served in positions with the Academy, was always talking about sustaining. Sustaining the Academy. The viability of the Academy. And he wanted this great organization to continue and he worked very hard to do so.

So I would like to offer today, because this memorial lecture, this memorial fund that was established in memory of my father, was very very important to him and is very very important to us. That over $16,000 have been raised by you as members of the Academy and we really appreciate that vastly, my sister Jane and I, my Uncle Paul, my cousin Barnie Sisco. But our family would like this to continue. So to that goal my sister Jane and I would like to offer a challenge grant to members of the Academy. We would like to offer a matching grant of $25,000 for any contribution that is made to this lecture, to this memorial to my father, between now and the end of this year. So we would ask you to share in his vision and to sustain it and to continue what, if this is any inclination of what's to come, a marvelous event, and we thank you very much.

[Applause].

Thomas R. Pickering:Thank you, Carol, very much. On behalf of the Academy let me tell you that we accept your gracious gesture and the challenge, and we will all work hard to make sure that it's fulfilled and that it will take the Sisco Memorial Fund over $100,000 which I consider only the first of what I hope will be many challenging benchmarks for the future. But we appreciate you and your sister's generosity, and thank you very much for that. As well as for selecting from Joe's past probably the aptest quotation to fit the moment and the day that anyone could have found. So thank you too, for bring that to us.

I understand that Joe's brother Paul and his son, Joe's nephew are both here today, and I'd like to welcome you all and hope that we can ask the members to give you a round of applause. It's very nice to see you, and thank you for coming.

[Applause].

Now if I can I would like to turn to the next item, the presentation of his views by Mark Malloch Brown who was appointed in January 2005 by Secretary-General Kofi Annan as his Chef de Cabinet.
Since July of 1999 Mark Malloch Brown has served as the Administrator of the UN Development Program and in May 2003 the Secretary-General appointed him to a second four-year term in that job.
At the Secretary-General's request, Mark Malloch Brown is leading the UN system's efforts to help support the achievement of the millennium development goals, eight time-bound development targets with the overarching objective of cutting in half extreme poverty by 2015. He's also Chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of the heads of all UN funds and programs and departments that work on development issues, and during his tenure oversaw a comprehensive reform of the United Nations Development Program making it more focused and efficient and effective across the 166 countries in which it operates, and incidentally making it the target in one of the commission from the United States reform proposals for the future of the United Nations peacekeeping effort, the target model.

Mark Malloch Brown has also served as Vice President for External Affairs and Vice President for United Nations Affairs at the World Bank from 1996 and 1999. He chaired the Secretary-General's task force in 1997 on reform of United Nations communications, and between 1986 and 1994 he was the lead partner in a strategic communications management firm, the Sawyer Miller Group, where among other things he advised President Corazon Aquino in the Philippines as she ran against Ferdinand Marcos, as well as other presidential and political candidates in Latin America and beyond.
Mark helped to found The Economist Development Report, a monthly report on the aid community and the political economy for development and served as the report's editor from 1983 to 1986. Previous to that he'd been a political correspondent for The Economist.

We have with us this morning a well prepared, extremely knowledgeable, and very very important individual in the center of the United Nations system, and I can think of no better individual to talk to us about the UN reform agenda. And as I said, Mark will speak and then we'll open up the floor for your questions.

Thank you, Mark, very much for taking the time out to be with us, and welcome to the platform and to the Academy.

[Applause].

Mark Malloch Brown: Tom, thank you very very much for those very kind words.
Let me jump straight in because your people who knew a lot about the UN long before this morning but are now steeped in four hours worth of discussion by some of my most knowledgeable friends and colleagues and I am a little in awe of what I can add to what you've already heard.
But of course it is for the UN, while, I think we heard that wonderful quotation of how 40 years ago the UN was already in this grip of falling short of Americans' expectations and aspirations and therefore being constantly being put on pedestals and then knocked off them. That has continued for the next 40 years and hence the aptness of that quotation.

But I must say even by the standards of that circularity of swings and round-abouts that characterizes Washington's love/hate relationship with the United Nations, now is a particularly extreme moment when I really, words fail me exactly how to characterize the many strands of interest and views of the UN in this town at the moment.

But I certainly think that a lot of the sort of, the anger and the passions that got generated in the latter part of last year, and indeed since the Iraq war, have started to settle down into some potentially extremely constructive channels in terms of reform of the UN.

And the first such channel is the Gingrich/Mitchell Report of which several of its co-authors I see in the audience today, and most notably, Tom himself. But Rod Hills as well I know is here.
This is a remarkable piece of work. It's taken people of very different political views on almost everything and found agreement on the most unlikely subject for agreement, the United Nations, and has come out with a well argued, thoughtful set of proposals for reform.

We then have Congressman Henry Hyde's legislation which again has a lot of very good things in it, although from our point of view it has one overriding flaw, which is this reversion to unilateral withholding of American dues if reforms aren't done America's way. If like me you're in the business of trying to be a whip for 191 countries, that kind of throw it on the table, do it this way or we won't cooperate, doesn't encourage finding the solution you want to find and doesn't do justice to the fact that many of the proposals in the Hyde legislation would on their own enjoy a high degree of support and sympathy from other member states.

Then we have the Secretary of State who I think rather mournfully acknowledge last week that she'd spent more time on recent weeks on UN reform than on any other subject. I don't think that was at all her intention on taking office. There were plenty of old fashioned diplomatic problems to sort out out there without getting drawn into the intricacies of how many new members should be added to the Security Council.

But in a way this Administration a little bit brought UN reform on itself by the nomination of John Bolton as the Ambassador. That nomination, once in trouble, was turned by the political side of the White House, I think, into a referendum on reform. If you believe in reforming the UN you should vote for John Bolton.

Well that very powerful argument, although not yet one which has put the nomination over the top, certainly has created headaches for the diplomats because they're now more expert on UN reform than they ever meant to be and I think have been forced to think very hard and very thoughtfully about what is US interest today in the UN, what are the parts of the work for which there is a real US national interest in pushing and promoting, strengthening and reform.

But I think if those are the main strands or pressures or forces for reform in this town, it's enormous important to remind yourselves that elsewhere there's also a lot of incentive and momentum for reform.

First, reform has not been new in the term of this Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He came in on a wave of reform, undertook some major restructurings of the UN in 1997 when he took office, created the humanitarian structures which allowed the effective response to the tsunami this year, created an Office of Independent Oversight which has not been up to the challenge of catching those with their hand in the cookie jar of Oil for food, but which nevertheless was seen when it was created as a major step towards independent oversight of the institution. Indeed, it's been almost the only part of the UN in these years which has seen steady budget growth as Kofi Annan has sought to give it the resources it needs to do the job.

We've seen dramatic progress in the UN's effectiveness on development. We've pulled the development system together and started to build not just in developing countries a real push towards better government and the introduction of private markets and of a philosophy and strategy of development which relies on small, effective rule-based government combined with space from markets and the private sector to create jobs, growth and opportunity for people, but we've also, and I think we've been able to take the lead on that because that message from the UN is often a much more credible one than coming either from the United States or from the World Bank or others for whom it is perhaps a more predictable message. And we've had some real successes in pushing the effectiveness of our peace building operations where we have some 17 operations around the world now with between 70,000 and 80,000 troops at work on these operations and all for the costs of a couple of weeks of Iraq in that it's, I think as Jim Dobbins told you this morning, it's in any kind of unit cost comparison much more cost-effective than when the US is forced to do it alone.
So I think there's a lot that's been going on that perhaps doesn't get quite the notice it should get here.
And perhaps more critically in terms of a strategy for the US achieving reform at the UN, it's worth observing that the rest of the world also has great interest in reform.

The high-level panel which the Secretary-General commissioned to look at reforms in the security area with 16 individuals of whom only one, Brent Scowcroft, was an American, but which included his equivalents from every other region of the world and they agreed on a plan for reform which included a common universal definition of terrorism as doing harm to civilians for political purposes anywhere.
They agreed on a peace building commission to make sure that the troubling issue of failing and failed states was addressed in a much more coherent way in the political, security and economic reconstruction spheres. They agreed on the importance of improving the world's human rights machinery.

So don't believe that reform is only a Washington issue. It is an issue for our membership everywhere, as it is also on the development side where frankly much of the rest of the world I would argue is rather ahead of Washington with Tony Blair in the UK and President Chirac in France, but also some emerging new donors, having much more ambitious visions of what's achievable in the next ten years than perhaps that of the United States.

So together there is a lot of interest in UN reform. It overlaps at many points, it coincides in many places, and in some places certain groups of countries have passions that others don't. The Nordics are consumed with the idea of getting the UN development system to work together in a more effective way with a lower administrative overhead. They dreamt this up quite literally in a nunnery called Utstein and it's not called the Utstein Proposals because at that time all the development ministers of Northern Europe were women, so they didn't need to have a meeting in a place where men were allowed. [Laughter].

So don't think there's any monopoly on reform by the white men of Washington. [Laughter]. There's plenty of interest in reform in other parts of the world even as I say if it's not always exactly the same issue. There are a group of countries who are passionate, often for self-interested reasons, obviously, about Security Council enlargement. We could be sitting in Tokyo today at a meeting like this and there would be a huge interest in how the Security Council is made more legitimate and representative of the countries that contribute the financing and the troops that undertake these peacekeeping operations. Similarly, we could do the same thing in India, Brazil or Germany.
So there's a lot of interest out there about how we can build our common shared United Nations into an institution that we all consider more effective, more practical, more able to achieve the objectives we all share. And it's worth saying that not just to sort of say this isn't just America's business, but to help think out what is the right way of going about reform. Because if the rest of the world wants reform as well, then the Henry Hyde approach becomes even more dubious as a political strategy. How do you just slap your proposals on the table and say take it or leave it when there are a lot of other countries with their own think tanks and congressional interest behind it with visions and views of their own. In many ways, worth every bit as much as ours in this room today.

How do we bring that together into a common, shared set of objectives for changing the institution? That's what we've been working on in New York where coming out of proposals from the Secretary-General himself which drew on these different groups of experts we'd had on development and security, he prepared a report under a phrase borrowed from the original charter, "in larger freedom" which said that the areas where the UN really makes a difference and is recognized as such by people everywhere, Americans, Brazilians, people from sub-Saharan Africa or from Asia, is in the area first of development in a broad sense which includes humanitarian support after catastrophes, natural and man made.

Second, in the area of security where we all face new threats. Some of us in rich countries of nuclear terrorism, but those in poor countries of just the sheer danger of living in a failed state. The sheer danger of urban crime in modern Third World cities where there isn't an adequate police force or institutions of law and order to allow a child to go to school safely in the morning, a mother to leave home to work. These kinds of threats are every bit as relevant in other people's lives as the tragedy of 9/11 is in ours. So a big push on the security.

A third pillar to his vision of a new three-part or three-priority UN if you like, and that is human rights. A sense that without a complete makeover of the United Nations approach to human rights we will never rise above our origins as a strictly pragmatic bargaining place for interstate interests. It's through human rights that we reach the real visionary phrase of our charter, we the peoples. Because it's through using international institutions to equalize the rights of people everywhere, to the basic protection of the law and the right to achieve their social and economic opportunity that we give the United Nations back the vision, put it back on the pedestal of really making a difference in the quality of people's lives.

So the proposal which came from the Secretary-General, but which has been endorsed by the Gingrich-Mitchell panel of the USIP is for a human rights council, which would meet permanently during the year to take up human rights abuses as they occurred, which would be much more universal in its approach and not selective in the countries it chose to condemn or the countries it chose to turn a blind eye to. And that beyond human rights we would be even stronger in our promotion of democracy with a new democracy fund that President Bush proposed when he came to last year's General Assembly. And a big new push also on promoting the rule of law everywhere. The rule of law for individuals to secure their human rights and other protections as citizens, but also the rule of law for business, to ensure that the promise of private sector as an engine of growth in poor countries as well as rich meets its potential.

So a very exciting vision which member states are rallying around through now several months of negotiation, these basic elements have stood the test of 191 diplomatic representatives picking at them and trying to cut off bits they don't like, but the bargain has held together quite robustly. Elastically, as some people like some things and other s don't like others, but it's there. There are a few issues which are kind of we're not sure whether we're going to sustain into the final package which will be approved by the summit of world leaders that will take place in September to review progress since our millennium declaration of five years ago. There are a few issues, as I say, which are kind of tilting, they're kind of on the edge of the table and they may fall off. One particularly, or two I would like to draw your attention to. One is the NPT treaty, the non-proliferation treaty, which had a dismal review meeting a few weeks ago in New York, where there is absolutely no leadership anywhere, I'm afraid to say, including here, on getting this treaty back on its feet, getting it off a life support system.
I, Myself as a development person have a very simple explanation of its problem which is not so much Iran or North Korea, difficult though those issues are, but the unwillingness of political leaders everywhere to address this instrument to two new emerging changes in the political environment in which it operates. One is the rise of middle power states with nuclear ambitions of their own and the need to settle how we're going to deal with that, politically difficult though it is. But the pretense that it's just not happening that nuclear weapons are not being developed by more countries is I think a foolish blind spot for many countries.

The second issue, though, which intercuts with it, and again, there's just not enough willingness to deal with, and this is the development issue, is that nuclear energy is coming back strong as a major energy source for the world over the next 50 years. Whether it's the cost and insecurity of oil supplies, whether it's the difficulty of other non-renewable energy sources in terms of their environmental impact. Nuclear energy is back and for middle power countries developing that nuclear energy option, unless there is a renewed framework with strong insistence on transparency of those development plans and a strong system of incentives and punitive sticks against the temptation for a peaceful energy program to slip over into a hostile one with a military purpose; unless we can get this framework back on its feet and secure, we are going to allow the commingling of middle powers' ambitions to enjoy the power and privileges that they think nuclear weapons brings, together with this demand for nuclear energy as a safe energy source, are going to come together to create a very rich, volatile, dangerous cocktail of security and energy issues for us.

So we've got some issues of that kind that world leaders are not quite ready to kind of grip the nettle on, but which we hope in the next weeks we can get ready in time for the summit.
But behind all of them, and this is my final point I want to address is the management reform issue. The USIP report, the Hyde legislation, everybody's tough on the management of the UN and I think with some justice.

I'm lucky enough to have been running for the last six years what is generally considered a pretty well-run bit of the UN, the UN development program, and there are plenty of reasons why it's relatively easy to run it relatively well. Each year we get our money from voluntary sources which means I have a kind of bottom line. If our projects go badly awry and if we don't deliver, donors vote with their pocketbooks and give the money to somebody else and that's a tremendous discipline on performance.
Second, in one of these typical pieces of myopia, of intergovernmental architecture, the Secretary-General's program, the Secretariat, is micromanaged by endless levels of intergovernmental committees which approve the allocation of each post, professional and secretarial, and general service, in our organization through the most arcane bargaining process you can imagine.
While I report three times a year to a Board of slightly bored diplomats who frankly let me do what I want. And as long as the outcomes are there, as long as the development results are delivered in a way that developing countries, the client countries, commend and thank the donors for, and that is my level of real strategic oversight. I've often observed as administrator of UNDP that I'm actually more powerful than the CEO of a private company and that I have much less oversight than I would from a good Board with a strong audit committee.

I move over to the Secretariat aware that to be the chief of staff to the Secretary-General doesn't' give me the direct powers that I had as administrator of UNDP, but little unaware that the Secretary-General didn't have the powers that the administrator of UNDP had. [Laughter]. So I've taken two big steps down.

This is not a frivolous point because what it has meant is that the donors have voted with their pocketbooks. Because the other thing I found when I got to the Secretariat was that my organization, UNDP, has twice the budget ever year, of the Secretary-General's organization. UNDP has $4 billion a year raised out of the results we achieve. The Secretary-General, other than peacekeeping, which is part of his operation but I'm for these purposes putting on the side, has presided over an organization whose budget has not increased above the rate of inflation for a decade or more, so it's $2 billion a year. The only bit which has exploded is peacekeeping which is now something more than $5 billion a year.

So on development and peacekeeping the UN is just growing very very rapidly as a result of the need for these organizations to operate in this area and a relative contentment with their effectiveness and performance.

So a new UN is growing up, and what characterizes it is it's highly operational and field oriented. It's not the UN you all think of in the image when you're critical of us. It's not the endless conferences. It's not the endless reports. Those have become a legacy UN. They're, if you like, the General Motors of the UN. [Laughter]. I probably better not complete that metaphor in this audience. [Laughter].
The point is, something is happening. The money is going to where the action is in the organization.
But that doesn't mean we don't need to fix the legacy bit, and here I think there are a series of reforms that the USIP report promotes which I strongly concur in.

The first is, and the report doesn't put it as generously as I'm going to, but having worked now with my very old and dear friend Kofi Annan who I've known forever, but now seeing him every day I'm struck by the fact that he is the world's diplomat in chief. He is on the phone constantly dealing with crises that even an audience of diplomats has not always heard of.

Last week some renegade Nigerian platoon whipped across the border from Nigeria into Bekassi with which it's disputed with Cameroon. Well, there was almost a little war over it, and the Secretary-General spent hours persuading both leaders to let this dispute go back to arbitration and for President Obasanjo to find out what his renegade platoon or battalion was up to.

It never makes the headlines, but this kind of troubleshooting in a world where borders are pretty porous things and where internal disputes are at a level that we've never seen before means that it is impossible for this individual to also manage and run his organization in any kind of hands-on way. And therefore the call for a Chief Operating Officer is I think a very overdue reform. It was tried. There is a Deputy Secretary-General appointed by this Secretary-General to serve just such a function, but the General Assembly didn't give her the powers to be a Chief Operating Officer so there is something of a vacuum.

It is clear that our efforts to build up independent oversights failed spectacularly in the Oil for Food program, so again the need to create something more akin to the independent audit committee of a private organization is a key reform that we think is vital if people are to recover confidence in management, but so is much more open competition for the selection of senior officials, which is what we've started to do in recent months with my own successor at UNDP and a new High Commissioner for Refugees who were chosen in that way from around the world.

We've also done something which Gingrich/Mitchell called for us to do and nobody's yet noticed. I've used my role as Chief of Staff to slip a new clause into every senior official's contract which allows the Secretary-General to dismiss them, not for any due cause but just because they politically don't any more suit his needs. It was the absence of such a clause which led to a year-long embarrassment over the former High Commissioner for Refugees. The Secretary-General quite simply couldn't fire him, despite what many considered good grounds to do so in terms of incidents in the workplace in Geneva, because we would never have got it through our own internal administrative justice tribunals.
But ultimately, as we've discovered in America, a chief executive has to be held to a higher standard. Somebody becomes controversial in this way, fairly or unfairly, they have to step down. We're restored the right of the Secretary General to have that kind of ability to change his top team as needs require.

So I think we're moving on these management issues.

But if I could just in closing say two things. One is that the US which is always inclined from its own experience with Congress which chases the Administration in a similar tendency towards micromanagement, the US has got to sit on that slightly bad instinct of the American system of government and be a champion in New York of real independence of management, accountability of management, accountability to independent external oversight, but nevertheless a management empowered to deliver on a strategic work plan for the world and held to account for those results, but not one which is micro-managed through every single appointment and position of staff and budget. Whatever difficulties you've all encountered in your lives with Congress, you ain't seen anything until you've seen this infamous Fifth Committee in New York. I see Don Hays and others thinking back to their days when they fought the good fight in that committee. It's just a terrible way to run an organization.

But my final point is no reform, no focus on development, security and human rights in terms of the new UN and what we should do well, no improvement of management gets you there without what the President's father used to call "that vision thing". And I think that "that vision thing" is something that Americans understand very well. When Presidents Truman and Roosevelt at the end of the 2nd World War created the United Nations, it was at a moment when American military and economic power was relatively greater in the world than it is today, and they did it fully recognizing that, but understanding that that power brought with it huge challenges in a world where you were inevitably drawn into conflict management and promotion of different goals and issues globally, that you couldn't do it if you didn't have a multilateral framework designed to help and abet you in that process. Hence the United Nations.

If that is the practical bottom of the vision, the floor to the vision, the ceiling to the vision is that America is a land which has made democracy and human rights the organizing principle at home, has taken that vision global and it's done it under presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, and it's done it for a very long time. But as a global super power, as the global super power, it badly needs its partner, the United Nations to package and follow up on those goals for democracy and human rights in a way that secures buy-in, not resistance, from other countries and other cultures and other parts of the world.

So put us back on the pedestal, but make sure that up there above the pedestal is independent external oversight to make sure we do our job properly. But give us the means, the resources and the will to make the UN live up to that founding vision which is now 60 years and a few days old, because this last weekend was our 60th birthday.

Thank you very much.

[Applause].

Question: Thank you for an excellent presentation. I'm all for the UN. You did mention the economical, and I believe generally very efficient use of peacekeeping forces. I think there's nothing that could gain the enthusiastic support of Americans for the UN than for the UN to begin somehow to move into peacekeeping in Iraq. What are the chances?

Mark Malloch Brown: The UN when it comes to peacekeeping is the sum of our member states, and particularly those who will contribute troops and resources. So I think the chances of us doing peacekeeping any time soon are very constrained by the reluctance of any countries beyond those who are currently committed in the Coalition to put their forces in harm's way.
What we can do is a bunch of other things which we are doing. Support of the constitution, the main source of support on the elections which were just held, a reconstruction program which is of significant scope and it's got a similar rate of implementation as the American program and covers everything from electricity infrastructure to capacity building in different ministries. So I think there are a whole bunch of things we can do, and are doing and probably need to promote a bit more in terms of the role we're playing, but I think the peacekeeping one is some time off.

Question: Mr. Brown, you met every expectation of the Academy in our asking you to come down here. Thank you very much. You spoke with some confidence in the next week or so you said, of doing something in the area of the NPT. Were you speaking of Iran in that context? Would you have any comments on that problem?

Mark Malloch Brown: Let me say when I say confidence, no. But what we have done is I talked, well, the Secretary-General and I talked to both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister of Norway who are great NPT promoters and they are forming a group of member states who care about the NPT from different perspectives -- nuclear weapons holders, those who are not, north, south, medium power, small powers -- to see if we can get a ginger group together which becomes a lobby for some very hard work over the summer so that we have something on the NPT to attach to the coattails of the rest of this summit communiqué or declaration that heads of government will adopt.
Our worry is if we can't get heads of government to say something clear about what would be the sort of underpinning deal for an enhanced NPT framework for the future, there is a real risk that this treaty is just going to fall into utter disuse and irrelevance and we've lost our framework for controlling proliferation in this area.

On Iran, we're coming to a very, very, difficult moment and I keep on asking Europeans what's Plan B if this current negotiation fails? I don't want to speak against my home region, but I have a horrible feeling there is no Plan B. But again, we'll have to invent one because it's too much of a sort of finger in the eye of the international community for Iran not to engage around this issue. Obviously we talk a lot at the UN to the Russians who are providing a lot of the technology for the development of the nuclear energy facility. The Russians insist that any materials generated by that facility will be returned to Russia and that it will be a monitorable, controllable way of dealing with this issue. But they too warn that Iran could easily access the fissile materials it needs from other former Soviet states.

So this whole thing is crumbling fast and the elections in Iran where poverty and corruption were the main issues for the outcome, but where the successful presidential candidate's promotion of Iran's right to an independent nuclear policy of its own without being bullied by the West was definitely a vote winner, means that this is a real challenge. Our point is that the diplomacy of sanctions, cajoling, threats, incentives to get Iran away from the direction it may be embarking on, would be a lot easier if there was a strong, globally agreed NPT framework against which to negotiate.
Thomas R. Pickering: Mark, I promised that we would end on time. Thank you very much. I echo what Bruce had to say, that our faith in bringing you here was fully requited by what you had to say which was I thought fluent, articulate, candid, and certainly very much directed toward presenting us with your vision and your sense of where the UN needs to go in the future.

To borrow a metaphor which you just used I would say that we welcome you as a Ferrari and not a Fiat. [Laughter].

Thank you very much for being with us, and thank you all for coming.

[Applause].

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