The Senate on Wednesday agreed to pay $582 million in back dues to the United Nations, a dramatic turnaround after years of acrimony in which the United States chided the world body for being wasteful and, in turn, was portrayed as a billion-dollar deadbeat.
The 99-0 vote marked a vivid change in congressional relations toward the world body, especially among UN-wary Republicans.
The vote was the result of arduous labor by the Clinton administration in mollifying Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) , a staunch critic of what he deemed an inefficient, naive organization whose peacekeeping efforts relied too much on American largess.
The measure is expected to easily pass the House and become law.
Helms signed off on the payment, saying that “UN member states have come a long way on reforms and fairer assessment scales.”
Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations panel, said the resolution would not have been achieved were it not for Helms.
“Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Helms could fix the UN,” Biden said, referring to the linkage between U.S. payments and UN reforms.
At the United Nations in New York, spokesman Fred Eckhard praised the Senate for freeing up the money.
Founded after World War II, the United Nations runs an array of international health, nutrition, education and welfare organizations. It also takes on peacekeeping operations in far-flung troubled areas of the world, assessing its members for the cost according to a decades-old formula that some deem anachronistic.
Wednesday’s end to the long-running dispute represents a Republican Party coming to terms with an international organization it has typically distrusted as a forum for criticizing the West in general, and the United States in particular.
At his confirmation hearing last month, Secretary of State Colin Powell thanked Helms and Biden for solving the issue of U.S. dues before the Bush administration took over. And he praised the United Nations as ” a great organization” that is “deserving of our support.”
The legislation passed Wednesday was largely crafted by Helms and Biden in 1999.
It would require that the United States pay $926 million in dues if the organization tightens its bureaucracy and reduces America’s share of peacekeeping costs.
Late last year, the UN overhauled its financing and agreed that the U.S. portion of the administrative budget would drop to 22 percent from 25 percent and its share of the peacekeeping budget would be reduced gradually from 31 percent to 26.5 percent in 2003–still more than the 25 percent demanded by Congress.
According to Helms, the deal would save the U.S. about $170 million a year. Included in the agreement is a one-time gift of $34 million from media mogul Ted Turner to cover the UN budget shortfall due to the reduced U.S. payments.
In December 1999, the U.S. paid $100 million of the back dues to keep from losing its voting rights in the UN General Assembly. A final installment of $244 million is to be paid next year if the UN keeps its end of the agreement, which includes budgetary improvements at the World Health Organization, International Labor Organization and other UN groups.
Despite the deal, the United Nations says the $926 million still falls $500 million short of what the United States actually owes. And other UN member nations have frowned on reducing the United States’ share, fearing the U.S. could not be trusted to pay a lesser amount and predicting that the Americans would seek further cuts.
For several years, Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and his UN Ambasador, Richard Holbrooke, not only curried favor with Helms but sought to alter the UN’s position toward the financial role of the world’s richest nation. They were aided by Biden, a liberal. Together, Biden and Helms, his ideological nemesis, constituted a foreign relations odd couple.
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The emerging success in changing mutual suspicions was symbolized in two events.
First, Holbrooke arranged for Helms, in January of last year, to speak before the UN Security Council in New York City and thus gave him a platform to vent against the body. He lambasted the Security Council as a shining example of utopian visions that imposes UN authority on the U.S. He sought to justify the U.S. being able to pick and choose its UN involvements.
Two months later, Holbrooke arranged for the council to come to Washington to address, and take questions from, the foreign relations panel headed by Helms.
When the Washington session was over, a smiling Helms posed for a group photo with the entire UN Security Council. Ultimately, the showdowns proved a precursor to the negotiations in which Holbrooke led the way in fashioning the deal approved Wednesday.