World Agenda: Barack Obama takes his call but the UN hangs up

The famous "3am phone call" – the subject of so much discussion during the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination – finally came.

Barack Obama faced an early foreign policy test, as Joe Biden predicted he would. The President met the challenge, his staff loudly proclaimed, by being roused at 4.30am Czech time, even though North Korea's rocket launch was a dud.

But Mr Obama's response shows the pitfalls of relying on his new partners on the international stage for firm multilateral action.

The eloquent American leader declared that the world should act and turned to the UN Security Council to punish North Korea's brazen breach of UN sanctions.

Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something," Mr Obama insisted. "The world must stand together to stop the spread of these weapons."

The UN did... well, nothing.

Unlike the North Korean rocket, multilateral diplomacy fizzled before it even left the ground.

Security Council Resolution 1718, passed five days after North Korea's nuclear test in 2006, orders North Korea to "suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile programme".

Despite President Medvedev's mugging for the camera with Mr Obama at the G20 photo shoot, and Mr Obama's sit-down in London with President Hu Jintao, neither Russia nor China showed any disposition to offer even a token denunciation of the North Korean launch.

The UN Security Council met for three hours on Sunday evening and the only thing its 15 members could agree was for its Mexican chairman to tell the press that talks would continue.

Japan, which had just watched a North Korean rocket hurtle menacingly overhead, convened the emergency session in the hope of getting a prompt statement of denunciation.

But China and Russia objected even to language expressing the council's "concern" over the launch.
Neither Beijing nor Moscow was even ready to recognise that the rocket firing amounted to a breach of Resolution 1718.

Chinese and Russian diplomats argued that more technical information was required to assess whether the North Korean projectile had really been a ballistic missile, rather than a rocket to send a satellite into space. But they did not task the UN or anyone else to investigate.

The fact that the UN resolution banned any activity "related to its ballistic missile programme" seemed lost on them.

"Every state has the right to the peaceful use of outer space," Igor Shcherbak, Russia's Deputy Ambassador to the UN, said.
Mr Obama is about to find that UN diplomacy is like bicycling through sand.

He speaks boldly about imposing sanctions on North Korea. But his new Russian and Chinese friends, who both hold veto power on the Security Council, do not seem interested in playing that game.

Susan Rice, the US Ambassador at the UN, is pushing for a new Security Council resolution on North Korea.

Diplomats say the US wants a resolution that would condemn the rocket launch, call for better enforcement of the current travel ban on certain North Korean officials, and expand existing sanctions by incorporating new North Korean companies and new categories of luxury goods into the UN embargos imposed after the 2006 nuclear test. It would also call for mandatory inspection – and possibly seizure – of certain North Korean cargos by all UN member states.

Yet even that symbolic diplomatic denunciation of North Korea may be beyond Mr Obama's reach, as negotiations in the coming days will tell.

Behind the scenes, the Obama Administration is said to have assured China that no action will be taken at the UN which might jeopardise the resumption of the six-party nuclear talks between North Korea and China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States.

Although the Chinese and the Russians do not like the word, there is indeed reason for "concern". These are the very same powers on whom Mr Obama is relying to help curb not just North Korea's nuclear programme but Iran's.

It is worryingly possible that Mr Obama will soon get a real 3am call – either when Israel attacks Iran's nuclear facilities or Iran conducts a North Korea-style nuclear test.

Source:the times