U Thant's successor was the Austrian diplomat Kurt Waldheim, who had just lost his country's presidential elections. It is the peak of amazing irony that the UN should be led, for 10 years no less, by a man who was, it was eventually learned, had not only spent longer in the army than he had admitted but was in the Hitler Youth and was apparently a Nazi War Criminal!
By this time, membership at the UN had risen from its original number to 134, the new members mostly being third world countries from Africa and Asia. As such, it is likely that the UN's swing towards economic stabilisation/normalisation was a matter of popular consent - although I still remain skeptical that the Big 5 allowed this as a gesture of good will, rather than simply avoiding trouble with potential trade partners and resource holders. This stands to reason given Taub's own admission that the UN's political forum had become little more than a public stage for ill-treated members to vent their frustrations and insult their tormentors, either past or present.
In Autumn 1975, a Third World bloc calling itself the Group of 77, made to pass a resolution condemning the state of Israel as a whole. Through US support, this resolution was quelled and replaced with one denouncing Zionism as a form of racial discrimination. This distaste for the political religious fervour that led to the installment of the Israeli state was no doubt fuelled by the actions of Black September at the 1972 olympics, and the violent reprising Mossad operations Spring of Youth and Wrath of God that followed. It is a wonder to me that despite all this political upheaval on the subject of Israel, nothing much has been done to bring peace to the Middle East in terms of tempering the actions that created it, or calling for justice for the displaced Palestinian people. I am put in mind of the Native Americans who were herded and tormented for decades before being placed on ever shrinking reservations, and are now largely consigned to memory, rather than being centre stage on the political arena in a country that was stolen from them.
Through the early and mid 80s, the UN seemed to be sinking into obscurity through its irrelevance to world concerns, especially with the fiasco at UNESCO that led to the withdrawal of the US, threatening to collapse the organisation that looked to the US for a quarter of its budget.
Then suddenly the UN was thrown back into prominence by the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev and the eventual "collapse" (all things considered I prefer the term "decommissioning") of the Soviet Union.
Since 1966, the UN had only created three peacekeeping/monitoring forces and all in the Middle East. In 1988 and 89, it created five: in Afghanistan, Angola, Namibia and Central America as well as along the Iran-Iraq border.
The final section of the first chapter of "The Best Intentions" concerns itself with the actions of George HW Bush during the first Gulf War. Reading about it now, the proximity of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait to the collapse of the Berlin Wall is staggering (August 1990 and November 1989 respectively). A conspiracy theorist could easily see the hand of the global powers looking for something, ANYTHING (in this instance the global war for oil) to replace the political instability of the Cold War. It seems to me that the global superpowers suddenly found their political strategies that had been built on fear since the 50s, with nothing now to continue supporting them, and so all but created the oil crisis, which has itself now been running for 30 years.
Taub's demarcation is interesting here: tying in the resurgence of the UN to the end of the Cold War and perhaps he is right - it seems logical that a politically powered vehicle would return to prominence with the disappearance of clear-cut political borders (i.e. since the collapse of Soviet Communism, Russia has largely adopted a free market, capitalist economy based on the American model). On the other hand, it begs the question that I have basically already raised: how did the world move so quickly from the Cold War to the Crude War? And if climate change science is to be believed/accepted, how long will it be before technology makes the oil wars redundant and it is replaced by the struggle for water.
This final point is why I loved the film Quantum of Solace: for its intelligence. While films like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol are still lamenting the end of the Cold War (much as M did in Casino Royale), Quantum of Solace looked forward to a world that would be driven by the basic human need for the most basic substance on earth. As Greene himself said in his fundraising speech: since the Second World War, 17% of our planet's vegetated surface has been irreversibly degraded.
In other words: our planet is slowly desertifying, and like all desert peoples, it won't be long before we value water more highly than gold, diamonds and oil. When that time comes, I shouldn't wonder if Brazil, with what remains of its rainforest, became the new Malibu Beach!
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