What Does Europe Fear and Why Does it Lead to Military Sclerosis?

What Does Europe Fear and Why Does it Lead to Military Sclerosis?


By Robert Stein, PhD


June 13, 2008


Only sixty years ago, more than 70 million people died during and after World War II. Even in our wildest imagination, it is difficult for most of us alive today to conceive what life was like for those who suffered through the devastation of a near universal war. The experience of two successive massive bloodlettings in only twenty years, resulting in the death of two generations dramatically altered the mentality of Europe. The bloodiest continent for the previous five centuries, where the efficient science of human slaughter was perfected, has been peaceful since then. Pan-europeans, the offspring of the arrogant militarists who began those wars, are now largely socialist. They take pride in their pacifist traditions and limited military budgets. They scold the inexorably retro patriotism of Americans and their belief in the value of military hard power, while simultaneously ignoring the international stability which has accompanied the emergence of America as superpower.


However, what Europeans really fear, is not America, but themselves. When they criticize the muscular exercise of American power, which ended two world wars, they are really criticizing the racism and chauvinism of their own colonial past. America’s greatest bloodletting, the Civil War, purged the stain of slavery from the nation, rather than advancing national ambition. The First and Second World Wars so undermined European’s belief in themselves, that they are now fearful anytime America exercises its military superiority. Their overly developed sense of fear even extends to situations entailing the removal of malignant tyrants, such as Saddam Hussein, in order to prevent the emergence of a new fascism. Europeans are unable to understand why America, too, is not paralyzed with self-doubt. To protect the world, they advocate parceling out American power to the United Nations where most governments are not democratically chosen. Why an institution where most members are plagued by state sanctioned murder, abject racism, political repression, corruption and a lack of legal due process would act equitably is the height of illogic.


But cultural demons and national psychoses are rarely permanently exorcized. Europe’s insomnia during the 90’s Balkan conflicts brought into consciousness its latent fear that the dogs of war, long repressed, would exploit that opportunity to re-emerge. Despite ample economic capacity to support a high tech military, they so feared themselves that American intervention was required to again resolve another European conflict.


The problem resembles that of a reformed alcoholic. As a prohibitionist without exception bans alcohol, today’s socialist Europe and their new one-world sympathizers, don’t believe America can be a social drinker. Despite attempts to project their cultural impulses elsewhere, it is European fear of themselves and jealousy of America that currently poses the greatest danger to their own safety and economic wellbeing. As aged grandparents no longer able to drive themselves often shout out backseat commands, today’s socialists believe they can sloganeer America into retreating from the responsibility which has inevitably devolved on the world’s leading power.


The conflict in the Middle East and South Asia is a battle to advance the most important values of western civilization. Those who believe in the essential goodness of America, despite its inevitable flaws, will accept that the nation which was founded upon the best of European traditions, cannot sit silently while it is left to almost single-handedly protect those western values on the battlefield. It is time for Europe to emerge from its postwar phobia. There is no good reason why Europe cannot assume greater global military responsibility. Europe is not so infirm that it must sit and tremble inside its own continental home, debating whether the psychopathic criminal wishes it harm, and the American policeman wishes it well. If it chooses to recover from its trauma of sixty years, it might just realize that it doesn’t have to obey madmen with weapons and go quietly into the night.

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In many ways, Dr. Stein's article addresses the ongoing problems of 'burden sharing' - i.e., Europe continues to benefit from the U.S. continuing to bear the lion's share of the obligation to maintain 'international peace and stability' through support of an expensive and extensive military infrastructure.


As the following article reflects, Europe has exploited this relationship by diverting its resources to various initiatives (e.g., NEGATIVE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT LAW & POLICYMAKING) that run COUNTER U.S. NATIONAL INTERESTS.

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/Pubs/display.cfm?pubID=864

THE SECOND BERLIN WALL

By Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Millen


Strategic Studies Institute

The latest contretemps in NATO regarding burden sharing in Afghanistan has the distinguishing feature of being altogether pedestrian. European reluctance to contribute more troops and funding to Afghanistan has less to do with disagreements over strategy than it does with a pattern of behavior stemming back to the birth of the Alliance.


Few recall the contentious deliberations at the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and its European allies regarding military contributions to the Alliance. The Truman administration expected the European powers to reconstitute their armies once they had recovered economically. But, having little faith in the American security guarantee, European statesmen refused to raise sufficient forces for defense without a tangible commitment from the United States. With no movement on the matter, the United States relented, deploying several divisions to NATO in 1949. Yet, the European reciprocal pledge did not materialize.


With security assured through collective defense and the U.S. nuclear umbrella, European states progressively invested in social welfare programs that demanded a greater portion of gross domestic products (GDP). And social welfare states are voraciously self-indulgent. During this transformation, an interesting pattern of behavior manifested. Rather than share collective defense equitably, member states attempted to shift security burdens subtly to other members. Other than voicing annoyance, the United States, as a global superpower in a bipolar world, accepted this behavior because the larger goal of peace in Europe remained intact.


Even had the United States objected to this sort of behavior, what could be done? Every state west of the Iron Curtain, whether a member of NATO or not, enjoyed the collective good of security. The United States certainly could not have denied this security to any particular state. Hence, allied compliance with U.S. security policy initiatives alternated between acceptance of America’s leadership role and American use of bargaining (e.g., financial and prestigious incentives). Ultimately, it was easier to ignore the behavior.


The end of the Cold War held different meanings for both sides of the Atlantic. For the Europeans, it meant a peace dividend with the inexorable drop in military expenditures, falling well below 2 percent of GDP. Perhaps this laxness would not have evolved had the United States withdrawn from NATO as most Realists predicted.


However, the United States, ever fearful of a security dilemma emerging again in Europe, sought to keep a united Germany subordinated to NATO, while also using the prospect of NATO membership to moderate the behavior of Central and East European states. With both policy vectors, the United States was eminently successful, but then, reacting to questions of NATO’s continued relevance, the Alliance added collective security missions to its repertoire. Whether the Europeans understood the implications of collective security or simply went along, never believing in its implementation, is anyone’s guess.


With the extension of the U.S. security commitment to Europe affirmed, along with the rise of the European Union (EU) in 1993, there arose among European statesmen a nontraditional view of foreign and security policy. The centerpiece of this new policy would rest on international institutions, regimes, and other normative devices to undergird security and stability. In theory, this approach obviated the need for high military readiness, which declined precipitously, and permitted even greater budgetary allocations toward social welfare programs, much to the satisfaction of everyone—except for the United States.


Much to the chagrin of western European statesmen, Hobbes’ state of nature threw cold water on the soft power approach in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, requiring American intervention (under the aegis of NATO) to resolve the conflicts. In response and with great fanfare, European governments pledged to improve military capabilities, first with the Defense Capabilities Initiative (DCI) and the Prague Capabilities Commitment (PCC), and, second, by the creation of the EU Rapid Reaction Force (EURRF) under the EU Headline Goal. Regrettably, European states did not increase military expenditures to meet the DCI/PCC goals, at least not with any type of urgency. Contrary to initial lofty pronouncements, the EURRF has not evolved into a European security pillar. Its offspring, the EU Battle Groups (EUBG), suffer from an inability to handle large crises and also from a lack of political will to deploy contingents into dangerous environments. Hence, the European security pillar is little more than a peacekeeping force with paltry combat capabilities.


The dichotomy between European rhetoric and action regarding Afghanistan is certainly perplexing. In the wake of 9/11, NATO did provide some assets to Operation Enduring Freedom under Article V; the coalition in Afghanistan includes many non-NATO nations; and all participating governments agree with the overarching goals for Afghanistan. Yet, the majority of European governments consistently fail to deliver on their financial and military pledges, many of which date back to 2003. A plausible explanation may be that European statesmen are prisoners of their political systems.


Fundamentally, European affinity for extravagant social welfare programs, the obsession with cutting military spending, and a distinct predilection for peacekeeping operations are manifestations of European political institutions. Because of their pluralistic design, parliamentary governments tend to be unduly influenced by the mercurial passions of the electorate. Moreover, coalition governments, that is, governments which lack a legislative majority and must form a government with other political parties, often experience paralysis over contentious issues and can even fall as a result.


The security challenges in Afghanistan have become divisive among coalition states precisely because they expose the old practice of burden shifting and because the United States uncharacteristically has not backed off its insistence for greater military contributions.


Transatlantic tensions will very likely become intractable. On the one hand, the old European standbys of claiming overtaxed militaries and implying other allies are not fulfilling their obligations have become threadbare with the United States. But on the other hand, populist attitudes that increased military spending to meet new challenges will threaten cherished social welfare programs appear to have boxed in European governments. The pawns of these national policies are the armed forces, which are deployed into theater as a coalition or Alliance balm and not as a force to render decisive results. Small troop contingents combined with a plethora of national caveats tend to undercut the theoretical advantages of multilateralism. In Afghanistan’s case, the sum appears to be smaller than the whole.


The real issue at stake is not whether success or failure in Afghanistan will endanger the Alliance; rather it is whether the United States will continue to see utility in NATO’s integrated military structure. NATO as an institution will remain because the United States sees utility in its continuance. However, in the future, the United States will likely revert to bilateral negotiations to build coalitions because of the niggard behavior of too many NATO members.


Similar to the first Berlin Wall, today’s metaphorical Berlin Wall symbolizes the enslavement of statesmen to the social welfare state and weak political systems. And while future generations will look back and ask why Europe slept when a challenge grew into a threat, this should be the starting point.


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The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This colloquium brief is cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited.


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Clinton and Obama Calls for 'Solutions' & Change' Will Impair Economic Freedom: Are Consistent With Europe's Global Collectivist and Socialist Agenda

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson022708.html


February 27, 2008


The Future with Europe


The Swiss Newspaper Junge Freiheit Interviews Victor David Hanson


Although the focus of the interview was on immigration policy, the following extract demonstrates a rather accurate description of the European global collectivist and socialist agenda, whose principles and programs Senators Clinton and Obama apparently embrace in their calls for ‘Solutions’ and ‘Change’.


...JF: Do you see any appreciable differences between the way the U.S. is dealing with immigration issues, and Europe's response to similar problems?


VDH: We will stop the influx soon and through our powers of assimilation and popular culture absorb those here; you may well not and thus are already seeing a tiny elite on top mouthing utopian leftwing bromides while a radical rightwing movement on bottom will grow, demanding xenophobic solutions.


I am not confident in an easy solution for Europe, given its 20th-century past - whether confronting the specter of a Muslim Eurabia, or the counter-rightwing backlash that could get very ugly. You in Europe have little facility - socially, culturally, and politically - to absorb immigrants into full-fledged Europeans. We do (as Europe's historic critiques of America as a mongrel nation attest) - if the numbers of new arrivals are reasonable, of diverse backgrounds, and of legal status.


Officially Europe sounds more utopian, while in reality Europeans are clannish and reluctant to integrate and embrace; America sounds strident and angry, while Americans in their personal lives integrate, assimilate, and marry Mexican nationals who come here illegally - the tragedy being that if we just cut the numbers of new arrivals of illegals, the existing cohort would soon disappear through assimilation.


JF: What is it that makes the U.S. and Europe so different from each other? From the outside, the two are often perceived as a monolithic unit: the West. Does this unity really exist, or are we talking about two separate worlds? Do you think the alliance between the U.S. and Europe is made to last, or is it no more than an illusion?


VDH: We have a common legacy, as the elections in France and Germany remind us. And we coalesce when faced by a common illiberal enemy - whether against the Soviet empire or radical Islam.


But after the fall of the Soviet Union, you diverged onto a secularized, affluent, leisured, socialist, and pacifist path, where in the pride and arrogance of the Enlightenment you were convinced you could make heaven on earth - and would demonize as retrograde anyone who begged to differ.


Now you are living with the results of your arrogance: while you brand the U.S. illiberal, it grows its population, diversifies and assimilates, and offers economic opportunity and jobs; although, for a time you've become wealthy - given your lack of defense spending, commercial unity, and protectionism - but only up to a point: soon the bill comes due as you age, face a demographic crisis, become imprisoned by secular appetites and ever growing entitlements. Once one insists on an equality of result, not one of mere opportunity, then, as Plato warned, there is no logical end to what the government will think up and the people will demand.


JF: Would you say many Europeans' critical attitude towards the U.S. is rooted in legitimate concerns, or does it rather stem from a typically European bias against the U.S.? How would you describe the nature of this bias?


VDH: In part, the animus originates from innate envy, and jealousy over the loss of European imperial preeminence; in part, there is the old befuddlement that a mongrel population of European rejects in America has now created the largest and most powerful nation in history - as a sort of deviant Western answer to European notions of class exclusion and aristocratic pretension. But once you predicate status, as is done in America, in a Western liberal society on the acquisition of money rather than birth, then you see something enormously dynamic, but also crass, and that crassness apparently drives the Euros crazy. Finally, we are enablers: there are no consequences to vocal and cheap anti-Americanism. If we withdrew our troops, and cut the E.U. loose, then it would see that in a world without America at its side, creepy people like Putin, Ahmadinejad, and Dr. Zawahiri are not just bogeymen of a U.S. President.


JF: Is there a corresponding bias against Europeans in American society? How come nobody has ever thought to diagnose such a sentiment? Is it truly non-existent, or is it just that Americans are too wise, and Europeans too cowardly to mention it?


VDH: There has always been skepticism of Europe as a class-bound, hopelessly aristocratic static society, warped by Old World factionalism, and prone to dangerously wide springs between totalitarian fascism and totalitarian Marxism. Few note such suspicions of ours, since we are self-obsessed within our borders, and don't translate these musings into some driving ideology. Nor do we feel that Europe per se affects our lives to any great degree, despite our ubiquitous Western heritage that we owe to Europe and the billions of U.S. dollars that are held by European governments.


The irony is that while Europeans periodically chest-pound and loudly vie with each other in hating the United States for various alleged sins (fill in the blanks from global warming to Iraq), slowly, insidiously we in the U.S. are drifting away from Europe, whether defined by commitments to its security (I doubt we would intervene again in the Balkans) to sort of a popular weariness. One article in Le Monde or a quip by a Chirac or Schroeder might pass over the heads of those in Iowa or Nebraska, but not a few hundred of these per day. So the Europeans have done the almost impossible: alienated a Western powerful ally, that kept it safe and free for the majority of the 20th century.


JF: Europeans like to take the U.S. to task for their geopolitical immorality. Are Europeans really morally superior? Or would you rather say, Americans are not immoral but Europeans are unrealistic? Where does this lack of realism originate? And where will it lead Europe in years to come?


VDH: Well, Europeans are no more or no less moral than the U.S. - though the collective West itself is quite a bit more moral than a Russia, China, or India, whether we look at China's environmental travesties, Japan's whale hunting, or Russia assassinations abroad. Europe allowed a quarter of a million to be butchered in the Balkans for a near decade. Its agricultural subsidies are the most illiberal in the world, and it has no compunction about trading or even extending trade credits to the most oppressive regimes in the world, whether that be Cuba, Iran, or Syria.

No, I don't think Europeans are "unrealistic." They are instead canny in fabricating a utopian veneer and a sophisticated humanistic rhetoric to mask everything from cut-throat trade policies to a complete abrogation of international military responsibilities.


Americans, in contrast, are the naive ones. They spend billions trying to jump start democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, while being blamed as "imperialists." They keep the peace on the high seas, whether in the Persian Gulf, the Aegean, or the Korea Sea, and run up enormous deficit in the international free commerce that ensues. And they open their markets to almost anyone, and run on enormous massive debts that encourage a China or India to enter the international system of commerce and trade.


JF: Europeans like to cast the European Union less as a kind of United States of Europe but rather as a precursor to a "one world" utopia. What is your view on this? Do Americans feel any sympathy for this idea? Will it get Europe anywhere?


VDH: Europe is to be commended for creating a structure that avoided a third world war. But its present notion of utopia - minimal defense, socialism, atheism and agnosticism, continental governance - is a prescription for disaster. When the individual believes in nothing transcendent, has no allegiance to a notion of nationhood, and believes nothing is worth sacrificing for, stasis sets in, lethargy follows, and an effete citizenry becomes as vocal in condemnation as it is impotent in matching deed with word.


JF: What would serve American interests better - a "one world" European Union, which would always be fundamentally "other than" the U.S. in structure as well as in nature but would never challenge the U.S.'s position as a super power? Or a United States of Europe, which would function according to similar principles as the U.S. but might well prove a threat to U.S. hegemony?


VDH: We would welcome the challenge and tension of the latter, since with it there lies hope; the former, however, means the fountainhead of Western culture will slowly decline and whimper as it melts into a pool of irrelevance. Who wants to see that? Americans love Sarkozy for his muscular rhetoric and the glimpse of a proud France of years past.


JF: What would Europe need to do differently in order to become a serious international contender?


VDH: Open its economy to free trade; reduce the size of government; curb entitlements; rearm; forge a closer alliance with the U.S/, the U.K., Australia, Japan, and other Westernized countries; and redefine the E.U. as a sort of commonwealth rather than an omnipotent Big Brother.


JF: European powers have ruled the world for century without ever being challenged by any powers outside of Europe. Has this situation changed and if so, how come Europeans are not aware of the change? What risks do Europeans run by ignoring it?


VDH: Being powerful and rich, but weak militarily means all your eggs are in the U.N. basket, and such multilateral associations are as corrupt as they are weak - rusty chains that reflect the vulnerability of their autocratic weak links. So you offer low-hanging, enticing overripe fruit to anyone who chooses to pick it - whether radical Islam, Iran, Putin's Russia, or China.


And you demonize the United States for our skepticism of such questionable multilateral institutions; but we suspect that your critiques are not based on principle, but the necessity of collective defense and decision-making in lieu of a credible military. How sad that you hate the liberal nation that defends you, and appease the illiberal forces who would intimidate or destroy you.

Religious Environmentalism, UN Corruption & Crony Kumbaya Capitalism

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,250789,00.html


At the United Nations, the Curious Career of Maurice Strong


February 8, 2007


By Claudia Rosett and George Russell


NEW YORK — Before the United Nations can save the planet, it needs to clean up its own house. And as scandal after scandal has unfolded over the past decade, from Oil for Food to procurement fraud to peacekeeper rape, the size of that job has become stunningly clear.


But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have cut his ties to the world organization.


From Oil for Food to the latest scandals involving U.N. funding in North Korea, Maurice Strong appears as a shadowy and often critically important figure.


Strong, now 77, is best known as the godfather of the environmental movement, who served from 1973-1975 as the founding director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi. UNEP is now a globe-girdling organization with a yearly budget of $136 million, which claims to act as the world’s environmental conscience. Strong consolidated his eco-credentials as the organizer of the U.N.’s 1992 environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, which in turn paved the way for the controversial 1997 Kyoto Treaty on controlling greenhouse gas emissions.


But his green credentials scarcely begin to do justice to Strong’s complicated back-room career. He has spent decades migrating through a long list of high-level U.N. posts, standing behind the shoulder of every U.N. secretary-general since U Thant . Without ever holding elected office, he has had a hand in some of the world’s most important bureaucratic appointments, both at the U.N. and at the World Bank. A Canadian wheeler-dealer with an apple face and pencil mustache, Strong has parlayed his personal enthusiasms and connections into a variety of huge U.N. projects, while punctuating his public service with private business deals.


Along the way, Strong has also been caught up in a series of U.N. scandals and conflicts of interest. These extend from the notorious Oil-for-Food program to the latest furor over cash funneled via U.N. agencies to the rogue regime of North Korea, which involves, among other things, Strong’s creative use of a little-known, U.N.-chartered educational institution called the University for Peace. Above all, the tale of Maurice Strong illustrates the way in which the U.N., with its bureaucratic culture of secrecy, its diplomatic immunities, and its global reach, lends itself to manipulation by a small circle of those who best know its back corridors.


Officially, Strong cut his ties to the U.N. Secretariat almost two years ago, as federal investigators homed in on the discovery that back in 1997, while serving as a top adviser to then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he took a check for almost $1 million that was bankrolled by Saddam Hussein’s U.N.-sanctioned regime. The check was delivered by a South Korean businessman, Tongsun Park, who was convicted last summer in New York Federal Court of conspiring to bribe U.N. officials on behalf of Baghdad. Strong denied any wrongdoing and said he would step aside from his U.N. envoy post until the matter was cleared up.


Since then, Strong has receded, as he often does, into the shadows. He is currently spending most of his time in China. His name flickered recently through the speaker lineup for a gala dinner for clean technologies in San Francisco, but the organizers say he then canceled because “he has so much going on” in China.


China is a special place for Strong, a self-declared, life-long socialist. It is the burial place of a woman said to be one of his relatives, the famous pro-communist American journalist Anna Louise Strong, a vociferous supporter of Lenin and Stalin until the mid-‘30s, and a strong booster of Mao Zedong’s China. Maurice Strong’s presence in Beijing, however, raises awkward questions: For one thing, China, while one of the world’s biggest producers of industrial pollution, has been profiting from the trading of carbon emissions credits – thanks to heavily politicized U.N.-backed environmental deals engineered by Strong in the 1990s.


Strong has refused to answer questions from FOX News about the nature of his business in China, though he has been linked in press reports to planned attempts to market Chinese-made automobiles in North America, and a spokesman for the U.S.-based firm that had invited him to speak in San Francisco, Cleantech Venture Network, says he has recently been “instrumental” in helping them set up a joint venture in Beijing. Strong’s assistant in Beijing did confirm by e-mail that he has an office in a Chinese government-hosted diplomatic compound, thanks to “many continuing relationships arising from his career including 40 years of active relationships in China.”


And from China, Strong has to this day maintained a network of personal and official connections within the U.N. system that he has long used to spin his own vast web of non-governmental organizations, business associates and ties to global glitterati. Within that web, Strong has developed a distinctive pattern over the years of helping to set up taxpayer-funded public bureaucracies, both outside and within the U.N., which he then taps for funding and contacts when he moves on to other projects.


Working With Kofi Annan


Working as a top adviser to Annan from 1997 to 2005, Strong was the author of Annan’s first big round of U.N. reforms, which broadly shifted power away from the member states and toward his boss in the Secretariat. These changes included adding the post of a deputy secretary-general to help manage the expanding turf of the Secretariat. Annan first gave that job to a Canadian, Louise Frechette, who ultimately drew criticism for mismanaging Oil-for-Food and left the U.N. early last year to join a Canadian institute that included Strong on its board of governors. Annan replaced Frechette with one of Strong’s former colleagues from a stint dating back to the mid-1990s at the World Bank, Mark Malloch Brown, who — with Strong as one of his special advisers — had then served under Annan from 1999-2005 as head of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP).


More ominously, Strong’s reforms also created the Office of the Iraq Program, which consolidated ad hoc operations into one department inside the U.N. Secretariat that was better known as the Oil For Food program. That office was headed by Benon Sevan, who was indicted last month in New York federal court for taking bribes via Oil-for-Food deals (Sevan, beyond reach of U.S. extradition in Cyprus, has denied any wrongdoing).


Strong also had a hand around 1997-1998 in creating the Byzantine structure of Ted Turner’s ground-breaking $1 billion gift to the U.N., which Turner since 1998 has been doling out in installments from his Washington-based U.N. Foundation. Turner’s funding, augmented in recent years by money from other donors, flows into the U.N. from the U.N. Foundation through a specially created U.N. department set up under Annan in 1998 and administered not by the budgetary arm of the U.N. General Assembly, but by the secretary-general.


Styling himself as a guru of global governance, Strong also helped to launch a major campaign for the U.N. to entwine its murky and graft-prone bureaucracy with big business, via so-called public-private partnerships. Strong introduced this process in his 1997 reform proposal as the bland notion of “consultation between the United Nations and the business community.”


Through his maneuvers, Strong has nurtured the U.N.’s natural tendencies to grow like kudzu into a system that now extends far beyond its own organizational chart. In this jungle, it is not only tough to track how the money is spent, but almost impossible to tally how much really rolls in – or flows through — and from where, and for what.


The U.N. today claims to have a core annual budget of only about $1.9 billion. But its total budget is more on the order of $20 billion per year, trailing off at the edges into opaque trusts, complicated in-kind donations and odd projects shielded by U.N. immunities — and accounting complexities — from any real oversight. And the potential for conflicts of interest is huge — and often overlooked by the U.N. itself.


Strong’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering has also put him in the cockpit of global power politics. From 2003 to 2005, he served as Annan’s personal envoy to the nuclear-crisis-wracked Korean peninsula. That role took him to Pyongyang, and also brought him into close contact with the South Korean government, where Ban Ki-moon, who last month took over from Annan as U.N. Secretary-General, was then foreign minister. In 2004, for example, Ban and Strong shared a head table at the annual dinner of the Korea Society in New York.


South Korean diplomats have downplayed any connections between Ban and Strong. But one of Ban’s first acts when he took charge at the U.N. last month was to appoint as his head of management a Strong protégé, Alicia Barcena, a Mexican environmentalist. It was Strong who brought Barcena into the U.N. orbit, in 1991, to help organize the Rio summit on the environment, which he chaired in 1992. To prepare and then follow up on the Rio agenda, Strong founded a network called the Earth Council Alliance, in which Barcena served until 1995 as the founding director of the flagship chapter, based in Costa Rica. She then moved on to jobs inside the U.N. system, including work with UNEP and UNDP. When Strong took charge of the University for Peace along with his other projects eight years ago, he invited the Costa Rica Earth Council to move its offices onto the university campus, where it was absorbed into the U Peace structure and curriculum. [SIMILAR TO PROPOSED UN REFORMS OF THE UN ENVIRONMENT PROGRAM IN NEW ITSSD REPORT]


In her current slot as chief of the U.N.’s administrative and financial operations, Barcena looks likely to have a managerial hand in an audit that Ban has promised of U.N. related flows of money to North Korea — in which Strong’s University for Peace played a part.


Means to an End


Indeed, as a microcosm of how Strong navigates the U.N. universe to achieve ends that are often far from visible, there is no better example than the use he has made of the odd little U.N. offshoot in Central America called the University for Peace.


Located on the outskirts of the Costa Rican capital of San Jose, U Peace was set up back in 1980 with the approval of the U.N. General Assembly as a school to promote “the interdisciplinary study of all matters related to peace.” From the start, it enjoyed a curious status. It was chartered by the U.N., and its governing council has always been dominated by appointees of the U.N. secretary-general. But at the same time, U Peace operates with no regular U.N. funding, and is subject to no U.N. oversight – even though occasional reports on U Peace are given by the secretary-seneral to the U.N. General Assembly.


Strong himself, in memoirs he published about six years ago under the title "Where on Earth Are We Going?", may have been one of the first to seize on U Peace’s stealth-like possibilities. He noted that while working for Annan in 1997 on U.N. reform, “I studied the constitutions of each of the U.N. organizations and was intrigued to find that the autonomous nature of the University for Peace exempted it from the normal reporting, administrative, personnel and other bureaucratic requirements.” [UNACCOUNTABLE GOVERNANCE]


At the time Strong observed those traits, U Peace had become little more than a shell. As described by various sources, it was low on students and lower on funding; its activities, such as they were, were confined to Central and South America.


Two years later, in 1999, Annan suddenly gave U Peace a major upgrade. He re-stocked the institution’s governing council with fresh appointees, who promptly elected Maurice Strong as their president. Strong, who already had interests in Costa Rica, including not only the Earth Council offices opened by Barcena, but some beachfront property he had purchased in 1978, took on the revamping of U Peace alongside his duties as a close adviser to Annan, and then as Annan’s Pyongyang envoy.


The result, after more than seven years of Strong’s stewardship, is a small school in Costa Rica, handing out degrees in fields such as “peaceology,” while serving in effect as Strong’s unofficial branch office — one of the quiet hubs for his global network. Sporting the U.N. emblem, but with no U.N. oversight, U Peace has also opened offices in Addis Ababa, Geneva and New York. The Geneva and New York offices both have the strange feature that they have no dealings with students, but enjoy close ties to U.N. facilities via the UNDP for moving people and money around the globe.


And for a tiny outfit in Central America, U Peace has developed an extraordinary recent
interest in North Korea. Starting with a push by Annan in 2003 for a U.N. development strategy for North Korea, that interest appears to have migrated from an inter-agency task force convened by Strong inside the UNDP, to an initiative pursued by Strong via U Peace — a vehicle exempt from any normal U.N. oversight.


In 2004, with a seed donation of about $330,000 from the Canadian International Development Agency (of which Strong was the founding president from 1968-1970), U Peace set up a trust fund dedicated to North Korean projects, called the DPRK Trust Fund. That same year, 2004, Strong hosted a conference in Vevey, Switzerland, on North Korean “energy scenarios.” That conference served as a basis for a 2005 report supervised by Strong, and underwritten by U Peace. Along with Canadian money, U.S. government records show that the funding for the report also included a $25,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. A former Energy Department assistant secretary, William Martin, worked on the 2005 report, and recently took over from Strong as head of the U Peace governing council.


Among the contributors to the U Peace energy report, described in it as acting “in a personal capacity,” is a former head of UNDP’s regional bureau for Asia and the Pacific, Nay Htun, who spends part of his time working in the New York office of U Peace, according to the head of that office, Narinder Kakar. (Nay Htun, an engineer, unsuccessfully ran last year to become head of the World Health Organization, as a candidate sponsored by Burma.)


At this point the cross ties grow at a blinding pace between U Peace and other U.N. ventures in which Strong played a leading role.


The U Peace report concludes, for example, with proposals for a $1.4 million energy project for North Korea, one third of that supported in cash and in-kind by the government of North Korea, and the rest to be funded by $150,000 from the UNDP and $750,000 from a U.N. outfit called the Global Environment Facility, or GEF.


The GEF, spawned by the 1992 Rio conference (which Strong chaired) is a joint effort of UNEP (which Strong founded) and the World Bank (where Strong was appointed in 1995 as a senior adviser to the president) and the UNDP (run from 1999-2005 by Strong’s former World Bank colleague, Mark Malloch Brown, and from 2005 to the present by another of Strong’s former World Bank colleagues, Kemal Dervis).


The report prescribes that the follow-up on its energy project be implemented by North Korea’s “National Coordinating Committee for the Environment” and “the DPRK Academy of Sciences” – an outfit that quite likely includes North Korean officials involved in the country’s missile and nuclear bomb programs.


And last summer, using the UNDP’s staff and diplomatically privileged facilities to handle the travel arrangements, and the money, U Peace paid to send a delegation of 10 North Korean officials to an energy conference at Lund University, in Sweden. U.N. internal documents seen by Fox show that the payment for the North Korean travel was requested by the U Peace office in Switzerland, handled by former UNDP official Nay Htun in New York, and involved bankrolling the airfares and transferring cash stipends to the traveling North Korean officials via the UNDP office in Pyongyang.


Junket Financier


The use of U Peace as the financier of the junket served at least one important purpose: it allowed UNDP to declare, if asked, that it had not violated any internal rules about financing North Korean travel or using hard currency for the benefit of North Korean officials. This is a charge that has been vigorously brought by the U.S. Government concerning U.N. funding via its offices in Pyongyang, which are run by UNDP. Those accusations prompted Ban Ki-moon last month to promise a full external audit of U.N. operations world-wide, starting in North Korea.


But the Lund affair may involve still further twists and turns. According to lists leaked from within UNDP, the ten North Korean officials who went to Sweden were all listed for purposes of the trip as functionaries of North Korea’s energy industry. Yet the names that have been leaked point to other intriguing possibilities.


For example, the group included someone named Jon Yong Ryong, described in the leaked UNDP list as “Expert, Environment and Energy.” That is the same name, as it happens, of a North Korean official posted a few years ago to the North Korean mission to the U.N. in New York. That official spoke up at a 2003 meeting of the U.N. Disarmament Commission to lambaste the U.S. and assure the commission that in North Korea, “nuclear activities will be confined at the present stage to the production of electricity” – a promise belied by North Korea’s test last October of a nuclear bomb.


Another name on the leaked list, this one described as “Senior Officer, Power Resources Development,” is that of Ri Kwang Su. There was a broadcaster with that same name on North Korean radio, whose commentary as translated by the BBC monitoring service on March 28, 2005, included, “Our army and people will keep enhancing the nuclear deterrent forces.”


What exactly is going on, who these traveling North Koreans actually were, or what U Peace is really doing, is hard to determine. A spokesman for the UNDP would only say that “UNDP often acts as a kind of central service provider for the U.N. system … so it would be normal for a UNDP country office to assist the University for Peace on something like transferring funds for travel and arranging tickets.”


But there is nothing normal about this setup, starting with the relationship between U Peace and the “U.N. system.”


In response to questions emailed by FOX News, a U Peace official confirmed that “U Peace does not come under the purview or oversight” of U.N. auditors. A confidential assessment of U Peace carried out in 2004 by the Canadian International Development Agency, which bankrolled what U Peace calls the “DPRK Trust Fund,” noted that “an evaluation would normally benefit from periodic monitoring and evaluation reports produced by the institution itself or by external observers. Such reports do not exist.”


This below-the-radar arrangement is rationalized by both U.N. and U Peace officials on the grounds that the U Peace does not depend on the U.N. for funding (although over the past five years U Peace has received at least $280,000 in grants from UNDP, along with in-kind support). But in rattling the cup for donations, and apparently in pursuing projects, U Peace appears to trade heavily on the fact that it wears the U.N. label. On its website, it advertises that “although U Peace is not subject to U.N. regulations and does not receive regular U.N. funding, it has strong links with the U.N. Secretary-General’s office and many other parts of the U.N. system.” (Nor do the “strong links” stop there. The rector of U Peace from 2005-2006 was Julia Marton-Lefevre; she is the sister-in-law of Richard Holbrooke, formerly U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. under President Bill Clinton.)


The question is, what is the “U.N. system?” Most of those links appear to have involved Maurice Strong himself, who shortly before taking on U Peace had added to his multitude of other U.N. roles a new one as part of a new, privately funded financial center inside the U.N. Secretary General’s office.


In fact, records show that at the same time that he first took over U Peace, Strong was on both sides of the biggest single donation that rolled in to support his revamping of the institution.


Channeling Ted Turner's Money


Strong’s role as a private U.N. financier dates back to 1997 and early 1998, while working on Annan’s reform plan for the entire Secretariat. In the midst of that effort, Strong helped structure a new office inside the Secretariat called the U.N Fund for International Partnerships (UNFIP), dedicated to a novel enterprise: channeling Ted Turner’s $1 billion gift to the U.N. directly through the Secretariat, in annual allotments of $100 million, to select projects within the U.N. system. Turner later cut back on his own annual contributions, supplementing his money with donations from others, and thus stretching out the UN Foundation’s direct link to the Secretary-General for years to come.


Turner’s U.N. Foundation money began flowing in 1998. That same year, while listed in the U.N. phone book as affiliated with UNFIP, and working as a special adviser to Annan, Strong joined the U.N Foundation’s board of directors. In effect, Strong stood at a special new crossroads within the U.N., where a variety of private funders would be taking a major role in funding future U.N. plans.


In 2000, UN records show that the UN Foundation., with Strong still a board member, approved a $2 million grant that flowed through the U.N. via UNFIP to U Peace, where Strong had just taken charge. Strong then resigned from the U.N. Foundation board.


At the same time, Strong was getting private funding from other sources that would eventually prove even more questionable. Last summer, at the trial of Tongsun Park, Saddam’s illicit lobbyist, it emerged in court testimony that a few years after Strong accepted from Park the check for almost $1 million funded by Baghdad, the two men had set up yet another business arrangement. In the year 2000, according to evidence presented in court, Tongsun Park was paying the rent for a private office Strong used in Manhattan. This was in parallel with his official work as an Under-Secretary-General and special adviser to Annan at the U.N., and his new post as head of U Peace.


To whatever conflicts of interest this might have entailed, Strong added another one by hiring his own stepdaughter, Kristina Mayo, to work in his official U.N. office, without declaring the family relationship to the U.N.. Mayo’s name also came up at Park’s trial, as the person who in 2000 handled the checks sent on behalf of Park to pay for Strong’s private New York office. In June, 2000, for example, Mayo sent a fax providing details for the money to be deposited directly into Strong’s account at the U.N. branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Why Strong, often described as a tycoon, would have been relying on Park to pay his private office rent at that time has not been explained.


But then, it seems Park and Strong had known each other, and had business dealings, for years. Strong himself told the press in 2005 that when he took on the role from 2003-2005 as Annan’s personal envoy to the Korean peninsula, Tongsun Park served as one of his advisers.


This was a relationship in which it’s unlikely that Strong could have been oblivious to Park’s earlier history as one of the star players in the 1970s congressional bribery scandal known as Koreagate. In that saga, Park was indicted on federal charges including money laundering, racketeering and acting as an unregistered agent of South Korea’s Central Intelligence Agency. He testified in exchange for immunity, and for a while dropped out of sight.


But by the early 1990s, Park was back on the East Coast power corridor social scene, and had befriended the U.N.’s then-Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, paying calls on him at the U.N.’s official residence on Sutton Place, and sending flowers to his wife. In the autumn of 1996, before Annan took the top U.N. job, Strong served as a special adviser to Boutros-Ghali. That same autumn, around October, 1996, Strong and Park did some business together, lobbying for the sale of Canadian nuclear reactors to the Korean peninsula. The man who recruited them jointly for this assignment was a Canadian, Reid Morden, then head of a Canadian Crown corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, with which Park at the time had a consultancy.


What goes around at the U.N. apparently never ceases to come around: nearly a decade later, from 2004 to 2005, Reid Morden worked for Paul Volcker as the operating head of the U.N-authorized probe into Oil-for-Food – in which both Park and Strong again turned up. The early relationship between Morden and the two men was revealed only in a terse footnote on page 100 in the second volume of Volcker’s four-volume final report, along with the notice that Morden had recused himself from the sections of the investigation involving his two former associates.


Beyond that, Maurice Strong’s ties to movers and shakers in other parts of the “U.N. system” multiply in dizzying directions – not least involving Kojo Annan, the U.N. Secretary General’s son, whose own possible conflict of interest in the Oil for food scandal was among the factors that first sparked the Volcker investigation. Kofi Annan called for the independent probe after press reports revealed that his son, Kojo Annan, had been working for a Switzerland-based firm, Cotecna Inspection, which in 1998 had won the U.N. contract to inspect goods shipped to Saddam’s Iraq under the U.N. program.


'Sustainable Tourism'


On Dec. 28, 1999 — around the same time that Strong was concurrently taking charge of U Peace, and serving as a special adviser to Annan, and sitting on the board of Turner’s U.N. Foundation — Maurice Strong and Kojo Annan simultaneously joined the board of a company called Air Harbour Technologies. Registered in the Isle of Man and Cyprus, Air Harbour was a venture put together by a young Saudi businessman, Hani Yamani, whose father, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, was once Saudi Arabia’s powerful oil minister.


Air Harbour aspired to a role in “sustainable tourism,” mapping out a number of projects in Switzerland, Cyprus and Africa, which appear never to have fully materialized. Strong spent just over six months on the board, then resigned in July, 2000. Kojo Annan remained on the board, where he was joined in January 2001 by a family friend and former associate from Cotecna, Michael Wilson. Six months later they both resigned, at which point, according to Volcker’s probe, Air Harbour had ceased operations .


And Paul Volcker had his own links to Strong. One of these ties ran through the World Bank. Strong, while running a Canadian firm called Power Corporation of Canada in the 1960s, had hired a young Australian, James Wolfensohn, who went on to found his own investment firm, Wolfensohn Associates, where Volcker took a job in 1988 after leaving his post as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. In 1995, Wolfensohn, with Strong’s backing, became President of the World Bank, and promoted Volcker to take his place as chief executive of Wolfensohn Associates. At the World Bank, Wolfensohn then hired his old employer, Strong, as a special adviser. And when Volcker, nine years later, was tapped by Annan to run the UN inquiry into Oil-for-Food, it was from the World Bank, then still under Wolfensohn, that Volcker drew the initial team to set up his investigation.


Volcker for many years, and at least until 2003, also held a seat alongside Yamani senior – the father of Air Harbour’s chairman — on the advisory board of the Power Corporation where Strong, serving as president in the 1960s, had then employed Wolfensohn.


All this is just a sampling of the tangled nest of personal relationships, public-private partnerships, murky trust funds, unaudited funding conduits, and inter-woven enterprises that the modern U.N. has come to embody—and which Maurice Strong has done so much to create. Yet another potential conflict of interest involves a company called Zenon Environmental Inc., a manufacturer of water purification equipment, which in April, 2000 was registered as an approved Canadian vendor to the U.N. procurement department. Six months later, Strong joined Zenon’s board, and remained there through at least 2005, while also serving as a special adviser to Annan. Zenon was acquired last year by General Electric, and the board was dissolved.


To clean up the U.N., Ban has called for auditors to work their way through the offices and agencies of the system one by one, starting with operations in North Korea. That circuitous approach is unlikely to work. To cut to the core, the real starting point could well be for Ban to launch an investigation into the past and current career of Maurice Strong himself.


Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. George Russell is executive editor of FOX News.