Half-way through, Ban Ki-moon in the shadows

Poor Ban Ki-moon.  He began his term as United Nations secretary-general under the shadow of Kofi Annan, a charismatic personality who successfully used the bully pulpit of his relatively powerless post to inspire world publics to a global vision over the heads of squabbling national leaders.

Now, half-way through his five-year term, Ban is under the shadow of Barack Obama, who is successfully using his position of considerable power to articulate a global vision that is persuasive to publics worldwide.  Like Mercury at sunrise, the secretary-general has become virtually invisible in the brilliant light of Obama's ascent to the global stage.

Of course, obscurity is what Ban's supporters inside the Bush administration wanted of a U.N. secretary-general when they maneuvered him into the post in 2006.  John Bolton, who was George Bush's unconfirmed emissary to the United Nations during that selection process, later revealed that the administration's short list of acceptable secretary-general candidates from Asia had only one name on it -- Ban's. 

Bush administration officials were openly irritated with the attention Kofi Annan garnered from news media and political leaders when he challenged Washington conservatives on the use of force, their occupation of Iraq, millennium development goals, the Israeli-Lebanon war, peacekeeping, and nuclear weapons.  They were determined to ensure his successor would not make waves.

Ban has met, and possibly exceeded, expectations.

Highly respected as foreign minister of South Korea, where he navigated his country's tight military alliance with Washington, its lovestruck economic embrace of China, and its sunshine tango with the paranoid communist regime in Korea's north, Ban gave the assurance of quiet backroom diplomacy working hand in hand with the Security Council's five guarantor powers, not upstaging them.  Rhetorically challenged, he could not claim Annan's bully pulpit even if he wanted too.

But he has tirelessly plugged away at thankless tasks like trying to coax the hardline leaders of Sudan and Myanmar into unclenching their fists a bit to allow relief aid to populations they control but do not trust.  In many ways, he recalls Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the much underestimated secretary-general in the 1980s whom the Reagan administration treated as an occasionally useful doormat.  Pérez de Cuéllar's mumbling inarticulateness masked a cunning skill at forging solutions to conflicts, enlarging U.N. authority, and herding great-power cats without their ever feeling threatened.

Ban had a somewhat rocky start inside the house when he announced restructuring of U.N. departments -- abolishing the department of disarmament affairs and splitting the department of peacekeeping operations into two -- that touched off intense resistance among many member states. Since none of the many blue-ribbon commissions that have exhaustively studied and made recommendations for U.N. reform over the years had ever proposed either action, the conspiracy-minded around the United Nations--and the powerless are always susceptible to conspiracy theories--were soon speculating he was carrying out Washington conservatives' wishes, an impression not helped by ousted ambassador Bolton's praise.  Ban had to backtrack.

The secretary-general recognized that Washington's neoconservative network in particular had shifted into high gear to discredit his predecessor when Annan crossed red lines concerning Iraq and Israel.  Ban has been determined to keep the United Nations low-key inside the "Quartet" that has fiddled silently and fruitlessly for an Arab-Israeli peace agreement, and he drew criticism from U.N. mediators in the region for toeing Washington's line in barring (as did Annan) any U.N. staffer from contacts, however informal, with Hamas officials.  The Israeli attack on Gaza at the end of 2008, in which U.N. facilities were hit, forced Ban into an unaccustomed confrontation with the Israeli military, in which he has tenaciously held the U.N.'s ground.

At pains to show distance from his backers in the Bush administration, Ban embraced climate change as an issue he would espouse, and he has been dogged in underscoring the urgency of action to halt it.  He has also beaten the drum, even during the 2008 economic meltdown, for increased investment by governments in achieving the development goals endorsed by national leaders at U.N. summits in 2000 and 2005.  Neither initiative was welcome to the Bush administration, but nor did they threaten that regime's core constituencies. 

Just as Pérez de Cuéllar could reap a U.N. harvest from Mikhail Gorbachev's changes in Soviet policy, so now Ban Ki-moon is reaping a harvest from Barack Obama's changes in Washington.  Ban has been thrilled by the new possibilities Obama has already opened for strengthening respect for international law and and the competence of international institutions. 

Fortunately, Ban is that anomalous public figure who does not need the spotlight in order to thrive.  He won't be getting much of it in the age of Obama.  In the most recent cross-national polling about confidence in world leaders, Ban had the second best rating in a field of eight leaders -- 45 percent favorable, 35 percent unfavorable.  But across all twenty countries surveyed, America's new president was off the charts, netting 61 percent favorable, 31 percent unfavorable.

Ban just has to reconcile himself to toiling in the shadows.