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Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
November 2006
On Sale: October 31, 2006
464 pages
ISBN: 0374182205
EAN: 9780374182205
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
A man who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, who was widely
counted one of the greatest UN Secretary Generals, was
nearly hounded from office by scandal. Indeed, both Annan
and the institution he incarnates were so deeply shaken
after the Bush Administration went to war in Iraq in the
face of opposition from the Security Council that critics,
and even some friends, began asking whether this
sixty-year-old experiment in global policing has outlived
its usefulness. Do its failures arise from its own structure
and culture, or from a clash with an American administration
determined to go its own way in defiance of world opinion?
James Traub, a New York Times Magazine contributor who has
spent years writing about the UN and about foreign affairs,
delves into these questions as no one else has done before.
Traub enjoyed unprecedented access to Annan and his top
aides throughout much of this traumatic period. He describes
the despair over the Oil-for-Food scandal, the deep divide
between those who wished to accommodate American critics and
those who wished to confront them, the failed attempt to
goad the Security Council to act decisively against
state-sponsored ethnic cleansing in Sudan. And he recounts
Annan’s effort to respond to criticism with sweeping
reform—an effort which ultimately shattered on the
resistance of U.S. Ambassador John Bolton.
In The Best Intentions, Traub recounts the dramatically
entwined history of Kofi Annan and the UN from 1992 to the
present. In Annan he sees a conscientious idealist given too
little credit for advancing causes like humanitarian
intervention and an honest broker crushed between American
conservatives and Third World opponents—but also a UN
careerist who has absorbed that culture and can not, in the
end, escape its limitations.
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