This Ain't Kansas: Brutally Honest Reflections on the UN

This chapter might be the most honest thing anyone has ever written about the United Nations.

This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).

Bilahari Kausikan is not your typical diplomat. He served as Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the UN, then became Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The guy has seen everything. And in this chapter, he doesn’t sugarcoat any of it.

The title says it all: “This Ain’t Kansas, Toto.” The UN is not what you think it is. It’s not the shining beacon of international cooperation you see in textbooks. It’s messy, political, self-serving, and deeply flawed. But - and this is the key part - it still matters.

Let me walk you through his argument, because it’s one of the best reality checks on global politics I’ve ever read.

“How Many People Work Here?” - “About Half.”

Kausikan opens with a joke. A UN employee walks past the building with his young son. The kid asks, “How many people work there, Papa?” The man thinks for a second and says, “about half.”

It’s funny because it’s true. Kausikan is quick to acknowledge that plenty of talented, dedicated people work at the UN. Some have even died in its service. But the organization also attracts “incompetent timeservers and the downright corrupt, protected by powerful networks of vested interests.”

He learned this firsthand as a young graduate student in the late 1970s. He was working as a stringer for The Straits Times at the UN. He stumbled onto a story about a Singaporean who had taken Canadian citizenship, then re-declared himself as a Singaporean at the UN to get better travel perks. The guy was essentially gaming the system, taking up one of Singapore’s staff quota spots under a false flag.

Young Kausikan, full of self-righteous energy, marched into the UN’s personnel department and presented the case to some senior official. Did he think it was proper that an organization dedicated to international law would condone breaking a member state’s domestic law?

The official’s response? He tried to throw Kausikan out and get his press credentials revoked.

Kausikan kept his credentials. Not because justice won, but because he happened to know someone in the UN’s public affairs department who disliked the personnel guy enough to block him. That’s how things actually work at the UN.

The Sequel: When the Young Reporter Became Ambassador

Decades later, Kausikan was appointed Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the UN. Guess who was still working at the Secretariat? The same Singaporean-Canadian guy. He remembered Kausikan and was clearly alarmed to see the annoying young journalist now transformed into an ambassador.

The guy spent three years trying to avoid him. Kausikan says he enjoyed the man’s discomfort but had bigger things to deal with by then. He had learned an important lesson:

“There is no perfection to be found this side of heaven. Sometimes toleration for some degree of shenanigans is the necessary price for having any kind of system.”

That’s a mature take. The world isn’t clean. Sometimes a compromised system is the only kind of system possible.

How the UN Really Works (It’s Not Pretty)

Kausikan pulls back the curtain on what actually happens at the UN. And it’s not inspiring.

Many Permanent Representatives - especially from poorer countries - spend their time in New York trying to land Secretariat jobs after their postings end, or scheming to extend their stay as long as possible. Since Secretariat officials often depend on member states for their positions, everybody scratches each other’s backs.

The result? Careers get built on tiny bureaucratic victories. Kausikan describes diplomats fighting fierce battles over a comma or semicolon in some resolution whose original purpose everyone has forgotten. Because someone’s career depends on that punctuation mark.

General Assembly debates? Rarely won by logic or merit. It usually comes down to personal relationships, traded favors, and thinly veiled threats - all wrapped up in high-sounding principles.

One of the ugliest scenes, according to Kausikan: watching Western European diplomats hint to the poorest countries that aid might dry up unless they vote a certain way on human rights resolutions. The irony, he notes, is completely lost on these “staunch defenders of human freedom and dignity.”

Why Singapore Can Speak Its Mind

Singapore has an advantage at the UN that most countries don’t. It doesn’t depend on any country for aid. Its diplomats are well-paid, so a UN Secretariat job isn’t some golden prize. And Singapore is a decent place to live, so nobody is desperate to extend their New York posting forever.

This independence means Singapore can calculate its national interests clearly and speak honestly. And that, Kausikan says, is a big part of why Singapore is respected at the UN.

The UN Is Dysfunctional By Design

Here’s where Kausikan’s argument gets really interesting. His point isn’t just that the UN is broken. That’s obvious. His point is that the UN is broken on purpose.

The veto power of the five Permanent Members of the Security Council directly contradicts the democratic ideals in the UN Charter. The veto makes it impossible to act on many urgent issues. But without it, Stalin’s Soviet Union would never have signed up. Even the American Congress might not have agreed to join.

Is it better to have no UN than an imperfect UN? Kausikan says no.

And this isn’t just a big-power thing. Even small countries won’t hand over their most vital interests to international institutions. He tells a story about Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew reportedly telling a Malaysian general that if a hostile party came to power in Malaysia and messed with Singapore’s water supply, he would send in troops. He wouldn’t wait for the Security Council.

Water is life and death. You don’t outsource life and death to a committee.

The Myth of Sovereign Equality

Kausikan is blunt about something most diplomats won’t say out loud. The UN is not an egalitarian organization.

The General Assembly exists to give most countries the sensation of involvement. The five Permanent Members always intended to settle the big stuff themselves.

He goes further. The very idea of “sovereign equality” is an oxymoron. Sovereignty means you accept no limit on your will except what you choose. When two sovereign wills clash, there’s no objective way to determine who’s right. Only power decides.

Concepts like “Right,” “Justice,” and “Law” in international relations? Kausikan calls them “civilising myths that we choose to believe in so that we may, at least occasionally, live in a civilised manner.”

That’s harsh. But it’s also hard to argue with if you look at history honestly.

Don’t Worship Multilateralism

Kausikan pushes back against the standard line from Singapore’s own diplomats and policymakers: that a world governed by international law and multilateral organizations is fundamentally in the interest of small states.

This sounds obviously true. But Kausikan says it’s only partially true.

The UN is one tool among many. Not every situation calls for it. Singapore’s economic success gives it options that most UN members don’t have. Its international identity is more than just a flag and a vote.

He worries that ordinary Singaporeans might overvalue the UN. Small countries have narrow margins for error. Naive idealism about the UN can be just as dangerous as cynicism.

The Nest of Vipers: When Singapore Sent Its Best

Kausikan tells a painful story. A senior UN official asked to borrow a Singapore civil servant to advise the Secretariat on financial and administrative issues. The civil servant did so well that after retirement, the UN hired him at a very senior level. His real job? Investigating corruption inside the Secretariat.

He did his job too well.

Unlike a short-term advisor (who is just a “passing inconvenience”), a permanent investigator was a threat to entrenched interests. He was subjected to vicious personal attacks, quietly encouraged by major powers whose nationals felt threatened. He survived with his reputation intact, thanks to Singapore government support.

But the lesson was clear. You can do a job fearlessly in Singapore’s civil service and be rewarded. Try that at the UN and the system will try to destroy you. Kausikan says he still feels guilty for pushing this man into “a nest of vipers” without making that reality clear enough.

The Parts That Actually Work

After all this criticism, Kausikan is careful to say the UN isn’t useless.

When people think “UN,” they picture the Security Council and the General Assembly. Those are the dramatic, often dysfunctional parts. But the UN system includes dozens of specialized agencies and programs that quietly make the world work: the WHO, FAO, ICAO, UNICEF, UNHCR, and many others.

Without these agencies, many conveniences of modern life wouldn’t exist. And life for the world’s poorest people would be even worse.

The key to Singapore’s success at the UN? Looking at it with “clinical eyes” and understanding what you can and can’t make it do.

Why Singapore Said No to the Secretary-General Job

This is one of the best stories in the chapter.

In the early 2000s, rumors started circulating that a Singaporean should be the next UN Secretary-General. It was Asia’s turn. Names came up, including former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and former Foreign Minister S. Jayakumar. Singapore would have been practically a lock for the position.

Kausikan thought it was a terrible idea.

Why? The Secretary-General has enormous prestige but almost no power. The Charter says countries shouldn’t try to influence the Secretary-General, but that rule has never been followed. In practice, the Secretary-General is expected to do whatever the Permanent Five want while also keeping the General Assembly happy. Since the P5 often disagree with each other and with everyone else, the person in the job gets pulled in every direction and ends up pleasing nobody.

Kausikan’s track record of what happens to Secretaries-General is grim. One may have been murdered (Sweden was investigating at the time of writing). Another was probably blackmailed. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was removed when he annoyed the Americans. Even Kofi Annan, a UN insider who played the game better than most, got hammered for mildly criticizing US actions in Iraq.

A Singaporean, Kausikan argues, is incapable of doing nothing and would never become anyone’s pet. The country would get a brief glow of pride, but the ending would not be pleasant.

He was back at MFA headquarters and watched with alarm as some colleagues were actually tempted by the idea. He argued against it repeatedly. The matter finally resolved itself during a meeting in Washington. On the way out, President George W. Bush casually asked Goh Chok Tong if Singapore wanted the position and said the US would support him.

After what Kausikan describes as a “dramatic pause that almost stopped my heart,” Goh answered “No.”

Kausikan went back to the hotel and had a few celebratory bourbons.

The Cold War Was More Honest

Here’s a provocative take. Kausikan served at the UN from 1995 to 1998, right after the Cold War ended. He found the post-Cold War UN more dishonest than the Cold War era.

During the Cold War, at least the conflicts were straightforward. The US and the Soviets had their interests, and the UN sometimes served as a neutral ladder for both sides to climb down from dangerous standoffs.

Singapore’s greatest UN moment came during the 1980s Cambodian crisis. Singapore and its ASEAN partners prevented the world from simply accepting Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia as a done deal. This eventually led to a UN-supervised compromise that restored some autonomy to Cambodia.

After the Cold War? The West was exhausted but wanted to strut and swagger. They talked big about democracy and human rights while calculating how to exploit their victory. Kuwait got liberated because Saddam threatened Saudi oil. Rwanda got pious handwringing and a peacekeeping force explicitly forbidden from doing anything useful.

The commander of the UN forces in Rwanda, forced to watch atrocities he couldn’t stop, had a nervous breakdown and reportedly attempted suicide.

In Bosnia and Kosovo, the Security Council passed angry resolutions - including some threatening military action - while representatives of the US, UK, and France simultaneously snuck up to the Secretary-General’s office to whisper that they didn’t really mean it.

It was only when Serbia publicly threatened and humiliated Dutch peacekeepers that the West finally acted. And even then, they used NATO, not the UN. Kausikan suspects the real catalyst wasn’t Bosnian lives but NATO’s credibility. Holland was a NATO member. That changed the math.

Security Council Reform: Don’t Hold Your Breath

The Security Council’s five Permanent Members were the winners of World War II. That was over 70 years ago. The world has changed. The P5 no longer represent the real distribution of global power.

If you were designing the Council today based on actual power, Kausikan argues, there should be one Permanent Member (the US) or maybe one and a half (adding China, which has global potential but is still growing into the role). Russia can mainly act in its near neighborhood. The UK and France are broke, and if the EU’s common foreign policy meant anything, there should be only one European seat. Japan and India have stronger claims than either.

But reform won’t happen. Any change threatens one of the current members, and each of them has a veto. Discussions about Security Council reform have gone on for decades with zero results. Even a non-binding resolution suggesting minor transparency improvements got killed by P5 pressure.

Three entire chapters of the UN Charter are obsolete because they deal with decolonization, which is largely complete. They serve no purpose. But revising even those dead-letter provisions is impossible because any change opens the door to demands for other changes.

The UN Will Limp Along

The UN system won’t disappear. But its growing disconnect from reality is spawning alternatives like the G-20, the BRICS Bank, and the AIIB. These will coexist with the UN, uneasily at first and maybe more smoothly over time.

None of the Permanent Five want the UN to work too well. But none of them want to destroy it either. They sit at the core of the system, and that position is part of what makes them great powers. So the Security Council and General Assembly will keep limping along. Occasional successes will be ignored. More frequent failures will be highlighted.

Kausikan ends with something close to poetry:

“Even when the dreary, interminable and too often futile and absurd debates of the UN tempt one to hear in them the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the tide of internationalism, we should not forget that it is a tide that may constantly withdraw but never runs entirely dry. And that is just as well. Because if the tide should recede entirely, it may portend a tsunami to follow.”

In plain language: the UN is frustrating and often pointless. But the alternative to messy international cooperation isn’t clean independence. It’s chaos.

Who Is Bilahari Kausikan?

He retired in 2013 and became Ambassador-at-Large and Policy Adviser at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Before that, he was Permanent Secretary of MFA, served as Permanent Representative to the UN, and was Ambassador to Russia. He studied at Raffles Institution, the University of Singapore, and Columbia University. In his own words, all three institutions “attempted to educate him.”

Even his bio has attitude.

My Take

This is one of the best chapters in the book, and probably one of the best short essays on the reality of the UN I’ve read anywhere. Kausikan manages to be brutally critical and still appreciative at the same time. He’s not cynical. He’s realistic.

The core message is simple: don’t worship institutions. Use them. Understand what they can do and what they can’t. And never confuse your hopes for the world with how the world actually works.

For small countries, the lesson is especially sharp. The UN matters, but it’s not your savior. Your own strength, your economic success, your ability to think clearly about your interests - that’s what actually keeps you safe.

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