End times diplomacy at the UN.

• Author: Gowan, Richard

It is hard to write analytically or even clearly about diplomacy at the United Nations over the last six months. Donald Trump's triumph in the U S. elections plunged the UN, like most of the rest of the world, into a state of fractious chaos. For eight years, the Obama administration had invested in the institution as a mechanism for both solving immediate crises like the war in South Sudan and long-term threats like climate change. Now all that grinding work appeared vulnerable to Trump's whims. He was dismissive of the UN on the campaign trail and few diplomats and international officials doubted that he would escalate his attacks once in office.

But Trump was not the only problem facing the UN in late 2016. As of November, it was plain that the institution was about to undergo a profound trauma over Syria. Russian and Syrian government forces were pressing in on the long-besieged city of Aleppo, the rebels' last major urban redoubt. Meanwhile, the Obama administration seemed intent on using the UN to make a parting political statement over Israel and Palestine. Had Hillary Clinton won, Obama's team might have floated a Security Council resolution setting out parameters for a future Israeli-Palestinian deal. As it was, Washington gave tacit support to a resolution tabled by other Security Council members condemning Israeli settlement building in the occupied territories.

That maneuver threw Trump into a rage. It remains unclear how bad exactly U.S.-UN relations will be during his tenure. The president has called for huge UN budget cuts yet sometimes claims that he wants to help the organization succeed. (1) While we try to grasp what his multilateral policies add up to, it is worth considering the lessons coming out of the strange, yet brutal, period of diplomacy at the UN between his election and his inauguration.

This was a moment of intense uncertainty when many of the normal rules of the multilateral game were temporarily suspended. The U.S. permanent representative to the UN, Samantha Power, and her allies suddenly found themselves on an unexpected precipice. The Russian-Syrian drive for Aleppo threatened to undo years of painstaking, albeit futile, efforts to end the Syrian war on the West's terms. Russian diplomats could not conceal their delight. Power and her Western counterparts must have asked themselves if this represented the shape of things to come at the UN if Trump adopted a sweeping pro-Russia foreign policy.

If the post-electoral moment was terrifying for Power and other Western ambassadors, it was also curiously liberating. In most crises, diplomats at the UN have to balance attacks on other powers with the need to maintain decent working relations to handle the next crisis together. Power and other U.S. officials frequently criticized Russia over Syria, for example, but were usually quick to look for ways to rebuild dialogue afterward. Their European allies on the Security Council had sometimes argued for a harder line, but had little choice but to follow Washington's lead. At least in the first weeks after Trump's election, these constraints no longer seemed relevant. Power and her British and French counterparts lined up to attack the siege of Aleppo in passionate terms in the Security Council. The United States backed proposals for UN investigators to gather evidence of war crimes in Syria that could potentially implicate Russian personnel, and Power emerged as one of the strongest anti-Russian voices in the Obama administration, devoting her final address as ambassador to an attack on Moscow.

As the clock ran down on the Obama administration, however, some U.S. partners had second thoughts, with the UK notably tacking toward Trump over Israel. Nonetheless, Power and her counterparts' outpouring of outrage at the UN in late 2016 remains a striking case study of what we could call "end times diplomacy": diplomatic engagement at a moment when the rules of the international game are suddenly and fundamentally in question. There have been even more dramatic examples of this sort of diplomacy in the past. In 1939, for example, the League of Nations met to expel the Soviet Union in response to its invasion of Finland, even though the outbreak of World War II had consigned the organization to irrelevance. The election of Donald Trump did not present quite such a cataclysmic situation, but it nonetheless upended many officials' established assumptions about the rules of international cooperation.

Yet, rather curiously, Trump's ascension to the White House did not have the deadening effect on US. diplomacy that many commentators and officials expected. Samantha Power's successor, Nikki Haley, has pursued an approach to Moscow that is often indistinguishable from the former administration's. She has persistently challenged Russia over its support for Damascus in starkly moral terms and avoided the language of...