In 2006, Annan's successor was effectively selected by China and the United States during the tenure of President George W. Bush, no friend of the U.N.; they found they could agree on Ban as a sort of human incarnation of the lowest common denominator. I actually fell asleep once listening to Ban deliver a sort of campaign speech, and when I woke up I thought, "Yes, he'll do." The secretary general must, above all, speak, and Ban was uncomfortable in English as well as every bit as cautious as you would expect a Korean bureaucrat to be. He would never move public opinion, as Annan had. Of course, he cares very much about some issues, for example global warming, but it doesn't matter, because nobody knows.
Ban is more secretary than general, as they say in Turtle Bay. He has made a determined effort to reform his obstinate Curia; but during his tenure the U.N. itself has slipped into the shadows. There are some structural reasons for that: the conventional model for many of the things the U.N. does -- including peacekeeping and development assistance -- may have run its course, and need to be reinvented; other actors, including NGOs, regional organizations, and emerging nations, have absorbed some of the U.N.'s role in peace-making and diplomacy. A new secretary general will have to think anew about the organization's place in the 21st century. But nobody will listen unless the secretary general has something of Hammarskjold's flair for commanding public attention.
I am not, of course, suggesting that when Ban's term concludes at the end of 2016 all 194 U.N. ambassadors gather in the General Assembly until they can produce a puff of white smoke. The great powers, including the United States, would abandon the U.N. if they could be outvoted on important questions, including the choice of the organization's chief executive. But the United States, which drives the process more than any of the orther veto-wielding states, could for once seek someone whose chief qualification for the job is that they'd be good at it.
This would be one of the last decisions of Barack Obama, a president who prominently enshrined in his national security strategy a commitment to "focus American engagement on strengthening international institutions and galvanizing the collective action that can serve common interests...." In his first few years in office, Obama placed the U.N. at the center of both his nuclear nonproliferation agenda and his approach to Iran. Since then, though, he seems to have lost interest, or perhaps hope of change. That may have more to do with Russian intransigence than with Ban's ineffectiveness. No new secretary general can solve that problem.
Sometime this year, Obama's U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, is expected to become his national security advisor; Samantha Power, who is probably at least in part responsible for Obama's faith in the U.N.(and in the responsibility to protect), is expected to take her place. If Obama really wants to strengthen international institutions, the stars will be aligned for him to do so. Power, Rice, Obama, and Secretary of State John Kerry can find someone with the voice and the vision to renew the institution and restore its relevance -- if they want to.
As it happens, Europe's "turn" comes up after Ban. Since the last European was Waldheim, the region has a lot to atone for. And of course nobody believes in the U.N. like the post-sovereign Europeans. As Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the Center for International Cooperation observes, "Rice, Kerry, and Power should tell the EU that they are head-hunting for a really good candidate to run the U.N., and send this signal soon. Otherwise a dozen over-the-hill European politicians will try to get in the running, and more impressive European figures will focus on EU jobs. It's a big question: Is secretary general of the U.N. a better job that EU Fisheries Commissioner?"
The U.N. already has a fisheries commissioner for a secretary general. The next one should be a secular pope.
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