Claudia Rosett

Kofi Annan, 1938-2018.

In defending the Iran nuclear deal to Congress, President Obama and his staff argued repeatedly that rejection would leave America in dire isolation at the United Nations. Obama can now relax. Having used slash-and-burn executive tactics to roll right over a dissenting majority in Congress and a…

Should it matter to the rest of us that Hong Kong has erupted this past week with demonstrations for democracy? China’s rulers say this is an internal matter. Western leaders, while expressing concern, seem inclined to agree.

It's well over a year since the United Nations intellectual property agency got caught undermining the U.N.’s own sanctions—shipping U.S.-origin computers and related high-tech equipment to North Korea and Iran. In classic U.N. fashion, the World Intellectual Property Organization, known as WIPO,…

Along with President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is yet another arrow in the quiver of the Islamic Republic’s charm offensive. The chief negotiator at Geneva over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Zarif was schooled in the United States, is fluent in English, and…

Bankrolled by the oil and gas wealth of Qatar, now hiring 800 staff members and opening 12 news bureaus across the United States, Al Jazeera will soon be coming to a television near you. From its Doha headquarters, the media empire of Qatar’s royal family is launching a new channel dubbed Al…

Surely Comedy Central’s The Daily Show meant well when it sent comedian John Oliver all the way to Africa to file a report savaging the United States for defunding the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Describing UNESCO as “an organization that helps people in need…

For two of Paul Wolfowitz's most prominent critics, Mark Malloch Brown and Ad Melkert, the war over the World Bank presidency could not have come at a better time. Whatever else the ousting of Wolfowitz has achieved, it has done plenty to distract from the North Korea Cash-for-Kim scandal that just…

While U.S. chief negotiator Christopher Hill has been struggling in Beijing to cut a diplomatic de-nuclearization deal with the regime of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, some of us here in the United States have been struggling to figure out just how much Kim's promises are worth. As ever, it's…

DESPITE FREQUENT DECLARATIONS OF REFORM, it seems that United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has learned nothing from the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food scandal, in which Saddam Hussein's billions corrupted the U.N.'s entire Iraq embargo bureaucracy. Earlier this month, Annan accepted from the ruler of…

ON SEPTEMBER 7, PAUL Volcker's inquiry into the Oil-for-Food program issued its "definitive report" on the biggest relief program--also the biggest scandal--in the history of the United Nations. The investigation alone cost $34 million, took over 16 months, and employed some 75 staff from 28…

IN THE EPIC UNITED NATIONS Oil-for-Food scandal, we now have a moment of high farce, with what will surely be remembered as Kofi Annan's "Hell, no" press conference--named for the secretary general's belligerent answer on March 29 to a reporter who, quite appropriately, wondered if Annan shouldn't…

IF, as the 9/11 Commission concludes, our "failure of imagination" left America open to the attacks of September 11, then surely some imagination is called for in tackling one of the riddles that stumped the commission: Where exactly did Osama bin Laden get the funding to set up shop in…

IN AMERICA, IT'S A SNAP to find exiles from most of the world's worst tyrannies. Just ask your taxi driver. For everyone from Iranians to Syrians, Chinese to Liberians to Uzbeks, America serves as the Grand Central Station of democratic dissent, a crossroads for outspoken dissidents from around the…

WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN kaput, it's time to address another mess in the Middle East, time for the United States to champion the trampled rights of an oppressed people, time to end the occupation. It's time, in sum, for Syria to get out of Lebanon. Syria's purloining of an entire neighboring country has…

IT'S HUGE, OPAQUE, PERVERSE, run by the United Nations, and about the last thing a postwar Iraq will need. But after a short pause, the Oil-for-Food program is with us once again, revived last week at the urging of France, and with the backing of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"CATASTROPHIC" was the word picked last week by Ruud Lubbers, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, to describe the exodus he expects from Iraq if the United States goes ahead and removes Saddam Hussein.