"The failure of the United Nations - My failure is maybe, in retrospective, that I was not enough aggressive with the members of the Security Council"
About this Quote
A man tasked with embodying global consensus is admitting that consensus can be a trap. Boutros Boutros-Ghali frames the United Nations "failure" as inseparable from his own, then immediately qualifies it: "maybe, in retrospective". That hedging matters. It signals the diplomatic reflex to soften blame even while trying, finally, to speak plainly about power. The line is less confession than coded indictment.
His choice of target is surgical: not the UN as an abstraction, not recalcitrant member states in general, but the Security Council. In UN-speak, that is where ideals go to be translated into permissions, vetoes, and funding. By saying he was "not enough aggressive", he’s naming the Secretary-General’s structural paradox: you are expected to be the world’s conscience, yet you can only act as far as five permanent members allow. "Aggressive" here doesn’t mean belligerent; it means refusing to accept the Council’s comfortable rituals of handwringing and procedural delay as a substitute for action.
The context sharpens the bite. Boutros-Ghali’s tenure was haunted by the early-1990s catastrophes that exposed the UN’s limits in real time - Somalia’s implosion, Bosnia’s siege, Rwanda’s genocide - alongside a post-Cold War Security Council newly confident, then quickly selective, about intervention. His remark reads like a belated lesson in institutional theater: moral authority isn’t granted by title, it’s extracted through pressure. The subtext is that the UN didn’t simply fail; it was constrained, and perhaps he was too polite to say so when it counted.
His choice of target is surgical: not the UN as an abstraction, not recalcitrant member states in general, but the Security Council. In UN-speak, that is where ideals go to be translated into permissions, vetoes, and funding. By saying he was "not enough aggressive", he’s naming the Secretary-General’s structural paradox: you are expected to be the world’s conscience, yet you can only act as far as five permanent members allow. "Aggressive" here doesn’t mean belligerent; it means refusing to accept the Council’s comfortable rituals of handwringing and procedural delay as a substitute for action.
The context sharpens the bite. Boutros-Ghali’s tenure was haunted by the early-1990s catastrophes that exposed the UN’s limits in real time - Somalia’s implosion, Bosnia’s siege, Rwanda’s genocide - alongside a post-Cold War Security Council newly confident, then quickly selective, about intervention. His remark reads like a belated lesson in institutional theater: moral authority isn’t granted by title, it’s extracted through pressure. The subtext is that the UN didn’t simply fail; it was constrained, and perhaps he was too polite to say so when it counted.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Boutros
Add to List
