When I tracked down Richard Holbrooke in the Grand Canyon last week, he seemed so taken aback by my news that he gladly stalled a Western vacation for several minutes.
On the Senate floor Wednesday, a clearly weakened Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) sat in a chair, rather than stand as is the custom, and concluded a pitch for a Senate bill to pay much of the long-overdue dues to the United Nations.
“Mr. President,” Helms told the session’s presiding officer, “the Foreign Relations Committee and, I believe, the American taxpayers are grateful to Ambassador Holbrooke for a job well done.” These words actually came from a Darth Vader of both U.S. involvement overseas and participation in international organizations.
“My goodness,” responded Holbrooke, President Bill Clinton’s last UN ambassador, when I passed that sentiment along. “One goes from confirmation limbo to a standing ovation in 1 1/2 years. That feels quite good.”
The Washington Post relegated news of the unanimous Senate passage of the bill, freeing an immediate $582 million in back dues, to Page 17 (the Tribune and The New York Times placed it on their front pages). Too bad. There was nothing in the capital that day more noteworthy.
This was not about the latest nebulous White House policy initiative or fleeting mini-melodrama about a Clinton pardon. It was about a belated rapprochement between the last superpower and a world that saw it as an arrogant deadbeat.
The story behind the story of the United States’ agreeing to pay a huge chunk of its arguably $1.5 billion in overdue dues is yet to be told. A small band exhaustively confronted, and altered, suspicions of U.S.-wary nations and a UN-bashing Congress, notably Republicans led by Helms.
The genesis might be traced to a testy standoff between Foreign Relations Chairman Helms and Holbrooke over his 1999 nomination by Clinton to be our UN ambassador.
Holbrooke was not a vanilla choice. He had a big ego, bigger intellect and headstrong tendencies, and he played a high-profile role as mediator with President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and architect of the 1995 Dayton peace accords for Bosnia-Herzegovina. That all raised doubts in certain quarters.
His nomination was stalled, then passed, with Helms not voting as 14 Republican senators spurned Holbrooke.
Holbrooke knew that the U.S. dues arrears was his biggest challenge. Despite the caricature of limousine diplomats carousing about Manhattan, our money largely paid for critical humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts and met our global interests through international coalitions whose existence lowered our costs.
But Capitol Hill deemed the UN a sinkhole, while the UN’s 188 other members tended to view us as an arrogant deadbeat, withholding money since the 1990s. We had forced streamlining, but our megadebt led to declining credibility and clout.
In 1999, a bill authored by Helms and Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) demanded reductions in our percentage of the overall operating (to 22 percent from 25 percent) and peacekeeping budgets (to 25 percent from 31 percent). It also insisted on many internal reforms.
Interviews with Holbrooke and others, notably career Foreign Service officer Don Hayes, tagged by Holbrooke to be our ambassador for management and reform, outlined the labor preceding last week’s Helms-Biden lovefest on the Senate floor.
First they did a historical analysis of the budget, as well as U.S. and world positions toward UN funding. For 50 years we had been consistent in calling for change, while the rest largely wanted us to foot the bill. The peacekeeping budget dated to a temporary arrangement involving Sinai Desert peacekeeping in 1973, but hadn’t changed, meaning only 20 countries pay the bulk, the rest little.
Incredibly, most of the 189 nations did not know how the budgets worked and how much each paid. The UN would not provide data. Thus, France did not necessarily know what Germany paid.
Holbrooke and Hayes hired Arthur Andersen to investigate and create software so the U.S. would have a handy laptop modeling system to show UN members. Over time, it ferreted out what everybody paid and showed the ramifications for others if the U.S. percentages went down.
“This was the first time in the UN’s history people knew what everybody paid,” explained Hayes.
This was important because many nations hated any change. Methodically, Holbrooke or Hayes would meet with six UN delegations a day starting in November 1999. They found the world resenting our not paying up while placing conditions on them via the Helms-Biden bill.
“Everybody told us that the [UN] charter obligations were for everybody to pay, without conditions,” recalled Hayes.
The U.S. team created a laminated card with everybody’s payments. It turned heads. Western European nations “were stunned,” said Hayes, to learn how little Eastern European colleagues paid for peacekeeping, while the Persian Gulf states paid zilch.
For example, South Korea paid a measly 1.01 percent of the regular budget, or $11 million, and .2012 of the peacekeeping budget, or $400,000. That compared to our 25 percent and $272 million and 30.28 percent and $600 million, respectively. Many others were paying an absurd pittance: Israel, Bahrain and Singapore.
Holbrooke and Hayes held over 300 and 500 meetings, respectively, on this subject, sometimes at the ambassador’s swank pad at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. They put on PowerPoint briefings, factoring in a nation’s gross domestic product, underscoring economic realities but also relations between those countries and the U.S. The clear message, especially for those whom we assist, was, “Hey, cut us some slack on this one.”
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They made sure that every foreign leader who met with Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright or National Security Adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger got a smaller pitch. They traveled to twist arms of leaders in China, Russia, Japan and Brazil, among others They dispatched the Africans, who desperately need the UN, to coax the Chinese.
Along the way Holbrooke played Helms like a fiddle. Astonishingly, he invited the UN Security Council’s Archenemy No. 1 to address it in New York a year ago, and Helms lambasted it as inefficient and Utopian, then he invited the council to address Helms’ panel here. It was quite cathartic.
Holbrooke and Hayes helped to persuade a wary world to change.
That includes peacekeeping. Until now, the Security Council would decide on a mission, only then seek troop contributors. Relations between the council and the peacekeeping division are lousy, with the latter in need of savvy professionals, such as logisticians and planners, and far better training.
Biden and Helms, ideological adversaries, actually worked the phones and twisted arms too. When things got close in late December, Helms sent letters to recalcitrant countries, such as Argentina, for whom he had carried political water.
There was even late-December help from mercurial Ted Turner. When the final accord’s percentages weren’t exactly in line with the Helms-Biden demands, Holbrooke got Turner to throw in a critical $34 million. That filled a shortfall that partly reflected the fact that many national governments had already done their budgeting for this year and couldn’t fork over more.
There are still problems, including the U.S. contesting $500 million in back arrears, which includes an assessment related to the fall of the Soviet Union. Still, it’s a most impressive achievement.
It explains one previously undisclosed letter of congratulations sent to Holbrooke, a fervent Al Gore supporter.
It was from another ex-UN ambassador who battled the same problem nearly 30 years earlier: former President George Bush.
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Tribune Washington bureau chief James Warren co-hosts “Unconventional Wisdom” with Michael Tackett of U.S. News & World Report at 7:05 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.