Most Important Peacekeeping Mission

The U.N.'s Most Important Peacekeeping Mission: Trump

Antonio Guterres has a tough job. A certain American president is making it harder.

By JANINE DI GIOVANNI

"He never thought he would get it,” remembers Melissa Fleming, a senior adviser to Antonio Guterres, the affable, cerebral head of the United Nations. In the fall of 2016, most in the cloistered world of international diplomacy thought the U.N. was about to choose its first woman as secretary general, weeks ahead of the United States electing its first woman president. But in the end, it was the 68-year old former prime minister of Portugal who got the job, elected in October 2016 with the support from long-time UN hands who’d marveled quietly at his seemingly casual mastery of languages and policy. A month later, Americans picked Donald Trump, a novice politician who talked about blowing up international institutions like the U.N., instead of Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state with a deep commitment to the existing global order.

Almost immediately, Guterres declared his intention to shake things up. An advocate of nimbleness in all things, Guterres told me in Geneva in 2017 that the U.N.’s internal regulations are designed as if “they had been conceived to paralyze the U.N.” He vowed to reform the U.N.’s development program to make it more economically viable. He wanted to help member states follow through on the Paris climate accord, as well as develop new sustainability goals. And, prompted by dispiriting reports of by U.N. troops in Democratic Republic of Congo sexually assaulting young women, he saw an urgent need to counter the negative reputation the U.N.’s peace-keepers have developed in certain parts of the world.

But less than a month later, before Guterres had even moved into his new offices in Turtle Bay, along came Trump—and suddenly, the U.N.’s new boss wasn’t just tinkering around the edges of a flawed institution; his mission was now to preserve the viability of the 72-year-old institution itself. In Trump, Guterres had to contend with an American president who was openly hostile to the U.N.’s mission (“The United Nations is not a friend of democracy, it’s not a friend of freedom,” he had said in 2016), who had campaigned on pulling the United States out of all manner of foreign treaties—trade, military and environmental—and who had mocked the U.N. as “a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time” and vowed to slash its budget. Then, as if to drive home how little he thought of the diplomatic class, he nominated then-South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley as the ambassador to the United Nations, replacing Samantha Power. Unlike Power, who had won the Pultizer Prize for her writing on humanitarian crises and authored the U.S.’s policy on genocide prevention, Haley arrived in New York with no foreign policy experience.

Trump would, over the course of the next year, trigger a series of international dustups, seemingly reckless provocations—from the puerile taunting of North Korea’s nuke-craving dictator to his abrupt withdrawal from the Paris agreement in August to the widely decried decision in December to officially acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, over the objections of the overwhelming majority of U.N. member states. Last week, in the middle of negotiations over immigration reform, Trump reportedly disparaged the entire continent of Africa as “shithole countries,” prompting outrage in the halls of U.N. headquarters in New York. “There is no other word you can use but ‘racist,’” said Rupert Coleville, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

But for all the obvious points of friction between two men whose dispositions and personalities could not be further apart—Guterres, a fierce advocate for international refugees who is fluent in four languages and likes to quote German philosophers, and Trump, the border-wall promoting nationalist who spends hours a day watching cable news and has sought to ban refugees from Muslim countries—close observers of the U.N. say Guterres’ signature accomplishment over the past year may well have been his pacification of the globalist-baiting provocateur in the Oval Office.

“If Guterres had one over-arching success in 2017, it’s been managing the Americans,” says Richard Gowan, an adjunct professor at Columbia University and an expert on the U.N. “He’s managed to establish some sort of functional relationship with the Trump administration, which is not something we could have predicted or felt confident of at the beginning of the year.” A senior U.N. official who asked to remain anonymous agrees: “It was a major achievement on the part of Guterres to avoid a showdown with the Americans.”

Guterres has managed to blunt Trump’s institution-busting instincts by harnessing them them to his own ambitions for reform. Guterres, observers say, sold Trump and Haley on the idea of a leaner, more efficient U.N., a management goal that appealed to Trump’s lifelong dislike for layers of bureaucracy. As for Haley, she and Guterres have managed to find enough common ground to avoid a complete implosion, and that was largely based on the reform package Guterres proposed. His strategy—to propel the U.N. out of its grey, 1970s management style, while quietly wooing Trump—paid off.

To prove the point, America’s volatile president has taken a more favorable view of the U.N. since Guterres visited the White House in October. The U.N., Trump said afterward, has the “power to bring people together, like nothing else.”

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Unlike the way the job is portrayed in, say, Hollywood movies, the U.N. secretary general actually has little formal authority—his or her power lies largely in the ability to persuade and cajole member states. In 2005, Kofi Annan had a breach with the George W. Bush administration when he dared criticize the Iraq invasion during a BBC interview. Annan continued to decry the invasion as illegal, straining his relationship with Bush until Annan’s departure in 2006. But in Trump, Guterres has found a partner with far less sympathy for or experience with international engagement than any preceding president. Indeed, Guterres’ career, with its roots in European socialism, reads like the inverse of Trump’s relentless pursuit of capitalist aggrandizement.

Growing up in Lisbon, he saw the intense rural poverty caused by the Estado Novo—the autocratic regime that ruled from the 1920s through the mid-1970s. Guterres’ father imparted to his family “a clear feeling the regime was not legitimate,” he told me. As a young man, Guterres worked at a progressive Catholic organization, doing social work in the slums of Lisbon. He came to a realization, he told me: “There was no humanitarian solution for the plight of the people living in those slums; the solution would be political and simultaneously linked to a democratic process.”

Guterres says he became “expert at organizing spontaneous demonstrations,” noting that this was before the era of Facebook or Twitter. “We’d say, let’s all go to the Presidential Palace! Or to the parliament or whatever, and we managed to gather anywhere from 20 to 3,000 people.” It was a time, he said, when you could “feel the strength of the city.” Devoutly Catholic and Socialist at the same time, Guterres ascended to the top of his party not by hewing to the extreme left but rather by engaging with intellectuals, scientists and business leaders across civil society.

In 1995, aged 40, Guterres became Portugal’s prime minister, with a campaign slogan of “hearts and reason” that outlined his blend of humanism and pragmatism. Three years later, Guterres lost his first wife, a successful psychiatrist, with whom he had two children. Prior to her death from cancer, colleagues remember how he flew back and forth from Lisbon to London, where she was undergoing grueling treatment, so that he could be with her in the hospital on weekends. Guterres resigned as prime minister after his party lost badly in the 2001 local elections. “Politics are what they are,” he says. “I think there is a moment in which you need to recognize … you need to move to something else.”

For Guterres, that something else was running the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is tasked with protecting refugees and helping them either return to their home country or settle safely in a new one. During Guterres’s tenure, from 2005–2015, refugee movements soared to unprecedented levels. In 2005, the number of refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced persons hovered under 40 million; by 2015, it had soared above 60 million. Guterres attacked the problem aggressively by increasing funding. He traveled constantly, visiting countless refugees’ homes. Fleming was alongside him most of the time. “He was always interested what the people were doing, how they were surviving,” she says.

“He is as at home sitting on the floor of a tent in the Beqaa Valley or talking to a Syrian refugee family as he is addressing the U.N. Security Council,” says Angelina Jolie, who has worked with Guterres in her role as a special envoy for refugees. He also reduced staff costs and increased overall efficiency. “I’ve never see anyone read spreadsheets as carefully as he did,” says one member of his inner office staff at Geneva. “I think he actually likes reading spreadsheets.”

The refugee crisis, largely the result of the implosion of Arab countries in the Middle East, especially Iraq and Syria, was hardly the U.N.’s fault—but Guterres told me he felt “an enormous frustration not being able to provide solutions. The solution of humanitarian problems is never humanitarian. The solution is political.”

In early 2017, I traveled with the new secretary general to Zaatari, a temporary refugee camp for Syrian refugees and now the fourth-largest city in Jordan. Guterres, who shook every single hand of the local staff, exuded a sense of humility and ease that his predecessor, South Korea’s Ban, often struggled to muster. This was Guterres’ 12th trip to Zaatari, which was built in 2012 as a camp for the tens of thousands of desperate people crossing the Syrian-Jordanian border. (Recent counts put its population at around 80,000.) Guterres took only a small entourage. “He likes to be nimble,” the diplomat told me. “Ban took huge travel parties.”

We visited a trailer where Syrian women were sewing clothes that they would later sell. Then we went to a makeshift school, and Guterres and his team filed in. The children stared as the older man fit himelf into one of the small desks and picked up a book. “How old are you?” one of the girls asked Guterres, as the rest of the class burst into laughter. The secretary general laughed, too, flipping through an English book. “This is how I learned English too,” he said.

The trip to Zaatari was probably one of the easier tasks Guterres had to tackle this past year. He arrived at an exceptionally challenging moment, with North Korea accelerating its nuclear weapons program, paralysis in the Security Council over the never-ending war in Syria, Trump-stoked doubts over the nuclear deal with Iran and climate change on the march. Many, if not all of these problems demanded U.S. attention, but in some respects were made more complicated by American involvement.

The refugee crisis was a case in point. The tide of refugees reached crisis level in 2015, when the number of people flooding into Europe, mostly across the Mediterranean Sea and across the borders of EU countries in the southeast, reached 1 million, more than triple the number of the year before. The influx gave rise to right-wing nationalist politicians across the continent. When we spoke in January, Guterres described the sense one might get from watching the news “that Europe was being invaded and that nobody was in charge.” And this has “created an anxiety and fear that was easily manipulated by political forces.”

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The key to dealing with Trump as well as the other 192 members of the U.N., Guterres told me, was a lesson on negotiating he had learned from his first wife. “When two people are in a room, in fact they are six,” he says. “What each person is, what each person thinks he is, and what each person thinks the other is … In any kind of negotiations or human relations, you have to bring six back to two.” But with a president as mercurial as Trump, and as unpredictable, knowing which of his identities to engage with can be daunting.

Early on, Trump indicated human rights and multilateral agreements, pillars of the U.N., were not a priority. In April, the administration cut off funding to the U.N. Population Fund, an agency that provides family planning services, over the issue of abortion. “Just 5 months into our time here, we've cut over half a billion $$$ from the UN peacekeeping budget & we're only getting started,” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley tweeted in June. In June, Trump declared his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement: “As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country,” he said in a Rose Garden statement. At the time, a spokesman for Guterres said the Paris decision was a “major disappointment for global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote global security.”

Guterres might have been frustrated, but he did not let on. After meeting with Trump last April, he told Judy Woodruff on PBS NewsHour that the world needs a U.S. “that is engaged with security issues.”

In mid-October, not long after Trump appeared before the General Assembly to lambaste the U.N. for its “bureaucracy and mismanagement,” the U.S. pulled funding from UNESCO, claiming the U.N. cultural organization displays “anti-Israel bias.” Ronald Reagan had done the same thing in protest of the UNESCO’s spendthrift habits, but many saw the unilateral move many saw as part of Trump’s pattern of distrusting international organizations such as NATO. Less than a week later, Guterres visited the White House and evidently charmed the president enough that Trump gushed afterward the “things are going to happen with the United Nations that we haven’t seen before.”

Though Trump didn’t specify what was coming, Guterres had no doubt briefed him on his work overhauling the tangled bureaucracy. The U.N.’s recruitment system—notorious for rewarding political cronies—was opened to outsiders, a reform that has left some long-term U.N. staff not entirely comfortable. Guterres has replaced many of the old guard with career diplomats, mostly from Global South or African countries.

Guterres’s most ambitious organizational goal has been to rectify the gender imbalance throughout the U.N.’s administrative ranks. Ban had placed significantly more men than women in senior management; within a year, Guterres has brought the ratio much closer to parity. Even before he took the office he named Amina J. Mohammed, a former Nigerian minister, as deputy secretary general; Brazilian diplomat Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti as cabinet chief; and Kyung-Wha Kang of South Korea to a newly created position as special adviser on policy. In August, he appointed Alison Smale, a former New York Times editor, to be under secretary general of global communications. He selected Alice Walpole, the former British ambassador to Mali and a divorced mother of six children, as his envoy to the U.N.’s mission in Iraq.

There’s a joke Guterres likes to use when describing his efforts to bring more women into the U.N. system. “Look,” he tells them, “There will only be equality when incompetent women are also in positions of responsibility, because there are plenty of incompetent men in positions of responsibility.”

But the internal makeup of the U.N. bureaucracy, while an important issue, pales in comparison to the danger many diplomats believe Trump poses to the global order.

As I was wrapping up my reporting, Guterres was dealing with the aftermath of Trump’s recent provocative foreign policy shift—recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel—and the threat it poses to resolving the intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, always a preoccupation at the U.N. “[W]e pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect...” he tweeted in early January. Then, just a couple of weeks later, the U.S. announced it would withhold more than half its scheduled $125 million payment from the United Nations Relief Works Agency, which provides humanitarian relief and other aid to Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Trump’s moves prompted the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, for the first time in 26 years to say the Palestinians won’t go for a two-state solution anymore, but want full and equal rights within a democratic Israel. Guterres quickly responded to Trump’s declaration. Without mentioning the president by name, he reminded people that he had “consistently spoken out against any unilateral measures that would jeopardize the prospect for peace for Israelis and Palestinians.” Jersualem, he added, was a “final status issue that must be resolved through direct negotiation between the two parties.”

Still, Guterres does not seem daunted. If anything, he appears to thrive on the challenges, say those who have observed him in the job. It’s been a year since he assumed the mantle of one of the most difficult and possibly thankless jobs in the world. The war in Syria is still raging with a humanitarian crisis in Idlib; Trump is vowing to pull out of the nuclear deal with Iran; Muslim minorities are being threatened with genocide in Myanmar, causing another massive refugee crisis in neighboring Bangladesh. All these are unresolved challenges. But he could claim credit for one success. A few months back, over lunch with a reporter from the Financial Times, he said his biggest achievement was, in fact, in handling Donald Trump. “We have avoided disruption with the U.S.”