The Four Problems of the Apocalypse for the United Nations

Oh, welcome to this session of the CIPA policy discussion. I'm John Mathiason as you can see from under my name and we're going to talk about organizations of the UN system which is one of my favorite subjects and has been for quite a while. As you can see, I'm standing just in front of the United Nations with a bunch of students who have just come to visit the United Nations for the first time.

Actually, if you look over my shoulder, I'm one of them and so I've been dealing with the United Nations since about 1959 when I first came there. And I've been kind of observing it ever since both as a staff member of this United Nation as a consultant working with the United Nations and as a person teaching about the United Nations. And today is a probably a good time to start talking about that as you will see and partly it's because if we were looking at history we're now about a little over a hundred years since the first international organization, big one, the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization were founded and were 75 years since the United Nations itself was set up in 1945 with the UN Charter.

So with that in mind let me move over to and I’ll do my share of screen, go over to my presentation, and that'll take about half an hour and then we'll have a discussion in which you can put in questions and we'll go back and back and forth. So, we're there now I think I am almost ready to start my presentation so let's do this. The presentation I picked is called The Four Problems of the Apocalypse and the United Nations System.

Reason for that is that when we talked about the apocalypse we're talking about a fairly dramatic end to things. And the questions are there end to things that we have to deal with and how do we deal with them, so that's the question. Now the four problems that I picked for this are all problems which if they aren't solved will do a lot of damage to humans on the planet. The four problems are pandemics which we're now, I won't say enjoying today all over the world the COVID-19 and we'll talk a little bit about that.

Now of course pandemics are not a new thing there were the bubonic plague there are a whole lot of, in fact there are novels written about plagues. There was a hundred years ago what was called the Spanish Flu. Ironically the Spanish Flu started in Kansas in the United States but hey what are we worried about that sort of thing.

What's new about pandemics is that they now spread a lot more than they ever did so they are a problem. Second one is climate change a new problem, and it really is a new problem, which if it isn't solved is going to do a lot of damage to humans. The third one is nuclear weapons. That's been around a while and the reason that it is a panic, a problem of the apocalypse is that if the nuclear weapons were ever used well goodbye humans on the earth.

And finally and this one is a - is not of the same type as, cybersecurity or the Internet. Now all of the problems have in common that they are problems which cannot be solved by individual states or even coalition's of the willing. It's because they're essentially borderless and when they're borderless that means that you can't basically close your borders anymore for this type of thing and protect your state that way.

Back in the good old days of the bubonic plague and whatnot do you you could kind of close your borders and then it wouldn't spread. You can't solve them with individual states anymore and it can't be solved by the magic of the marketplace where ok we'll all by testing kits and that'll solve the problem, nope, can't be done that way. And the answer is for the first time, not for the first time, but in this century we need international organizations to solve the problems. Now the organizations we're gonna focus on are what we call the United Nations system. And the United Nations system consists of the United Nations with its wonderful buildings in New York, and Geneva, and Vienna, and Nairobi, and the specialized agencies like the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, International Trade Organization, etc., they have to do it. And this has been recognized surprisingly enough that four days ago we celebrated the second version of International Day of Multilateralism.

So in other words there's a recognition, an increasing recognition that we need multilateralism and international organizations to solve these problems. Now the reason for this and how you do it has a little bit to do with something we don't always talk about which is called power. That is power is getting people to do something that they might not otherwise do. For example not spread out too much co2 in the atmosphere or not gosh yet within six feet of somebody so you pass on the corona virus.

There are two types of power that we usually talk about one of them is the kind of power that is the basis for the States this and that's coercive power. You say either you do what I want or I will make do something to hurt you. If we were States and you did something I didn't like I can put tariffs on your trade, or I can arrest you and put you in a camp. All of these things are the type of power that states ultimately are able to use. Now the only problem with coercive powers is very costly. And for that reason if that's the only basis of organization you'll have nothing but conflict and that's not a good thing.

So powers that be probably the least expensive kind of power is legitimate power. You do something because it's simply the right thing to do, you believe it's the right thing to do. My classic example of legitimate power is when I was stationed in Vienna, I noticed that if you had a street, to cross the street you waited until you got the light which said you can walk across the street. And that was true even if there was no traffic because people in Vienna said well that's the right thing to do and they would wait until the light turned green even if there was no traffic.

Now as you know that wouldn't work in New York City where you basically cross the street and dodge the cars as much as you can. Legitimate power however is the only basis of the international system. The international system has no coercive power built into its organizations. It will only work if people say, the reason that I'm listening to what international organizations say is because I think they have the right to say it and I ought to listen to them and then behave properly, that's power.

Now what makes legitimate power and there are a couple of things in that. First of all there has to be an agreement on what is right. That is what is the kind of thing that you say is the right behavior to do. You have to believe that it's in everyone's interest not to walk against the to walk across the street against traffic. You have to have an agreement that you should have the right to free speech as something that is important for your society to work properly. Now if there's an agreement on what is right you also have to have information on the extent to which what is right is being done or information which specifies what ought to be the basis for what is right.

And so keep in mind that legitimate power, agreement on what is right, you have to have information. And the third element very often is you have to have networking. People have to get together either as individuals and groups and say this is the right thing to do. So for example in terms of the Coronavirus people have to say okay well I'm going to stay home. And they communicate with other people they say we're gonna stay home, for example, that's legitimate power; now that's what you need at the international level.

Now what we look at, those of us who are kind of academics, but it's more than academics, is well how do you organize this sort of thing at the international level. And in that you get something that is a concept called the regime, or regime theory. Now regime is different from governments, government is something that runs your physical country. A regime is the basis for international action. Regimes are basically set up because there is a problem that has to be addressed and we have to set up institutions and procedures, and whatnot, that will allow us to deal with the problem. It's a new concept it really only started and in IR in about the end of the 1980s. In part because they had to explain why states would accept a thing called the Law of the Sea treaty. Even though it might not necessarily be in their individual action, but it was better to have a law of the sea treaty, than they have a lot of accidents in the sea.

Okay now a regime, in most of what's done by scholars say, to be a regime you have four stages to really have a regime. The first stage is to get an agreement on what are called principles and these are statement of fact. If you don't have an agreement on facts you can't do anything about it. So one of the first issue is getting these principles established. Now we'll see as we look at the four problems of the apocalypse that there are differences in this. The first stage, you get an agreement on the facts. The second is an issue then you have to have an agreement on norms. And norms are basically the agreement of what is, does, do the individual states or other parties to the regime agree that they have to do something.

That's an important thing if they don't agree on what to do about it, to do something, you can't solve the problem. The next stage down is a little bit more complicated you have to agree on the rules, and that's what are the extent to which obligations are exercised. How do, what is, what if states are going to implement their norms, what do they have to do, what are the procedure, what are the rules, so that you can see the extent to which everyone is behaving according to what they agreed. And then finally you have procedures which are to set up institutions that ensure that something happens with obligations. Before I move over to the specific one, of one of the classics, is in the area of human rights, generally speaking.

There was an agreement and principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, states who joined international organizations say well we will implement our human rights obligations. Then you set up rules, and the rules were reflected in international conventions on human rights like the International Covenant on civil and political rights or the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. And then you had the set of procedures, and this included committees to review the extent to which states we're living up to their agreeing, what they promised to do with regard to Human Rights; so that's the regime.

Now the status of the four problems, in terms of regimes, is a little different. A pandemic, pandemics have been around for a long time and we have an organization which was basically, it was decided fairly early on that pandemics aren't good, we ought to do something as a world to deal with them. And well we'll set up one organization which will deal with it, that's the World Health Organization. Now it's not the only one because some of the elements of pandemics have to do with things that are done, not by the WHO, but by others.

So for example one of the causes of the pandemic that we're currently in was trafficking in certain types of species which happen to carry viruses and trafficking is dealt with by other organizations like the UN organization on Drugs and Crime. And there are implications, for example, in terms of other factors like food and this sort of thing, where you, where people who are more vulnerable, are more subject with. WHO has been set up to do that, there's an agreement that it's there to deal with health problems, health problems have to be dealt with internationally, you've got a whole lot of procedures.

So that one is a pretty well almost full regime. Climate change is a little different, there is a general agreement that climate change is a problem. Now some people will argue about how big a problem, but there is an agreement that it's a problem and that states ought to do something about it, and that's reflected in something called the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or the UNFCCC.

Now the problem with the that is that there is an agreement as far as the norm are concerned but there's no agreement on the rules, what states have to do. Now the to the extent that there's an agreement it's found in something called the Paris agreement, but that's voluntary, in other words we ought to do something about climate change we, as individual countries, say well we'll do something but it's not a legal obligation and some countries can simply pull out of it.

Gosh, one country that pulled out of it is the United States, they said that on the 5th of November of this year we won't be part of the Paris agreement and too bad. Nuclear weapons is the third one, and that was probably in many ways, of the, how would we say the apocalyptic type things, one of the first because after World War II, it was realized that nuclear weapons, if they were used, could destroy the planet, and so forth. The way to deal with that, problem was identified the norms was that nobody who didn't have a nuclear weapon could have on, the ones that had nuclear weapons would promise to get rid of them, so they had a norm system.

They had rules, they said okay we'll set up what's called the non-proliferation treaty which says this is how we manage to deal with your responsibilities, and with a particular side event that, to a lot of countries nuclear stuff isn't about weapons, it's about medicine or other sorts of things, and how do we use peaceful use properly. It can be used, for example for generation of electricity using nuclear power plants. So you had to set up a set of rules, and you set up an institution, which is the International Atomic Energy Agency, working out of out of Vienna. And they do a pretty good job of keeping track of who's doing things properly and who isn't, except for those countries which didn't actually ratify the non-proliferation treaty. So it's an incomplete one in that sense.

There are at least five countries which we know have nuclear weapons but which aren't party to all of this and so they're not inspected. But for example in issues like the Iran or a deal which was set up under the IAEA, there was a way of ensuring that the rules were followed, so far so good. Then we get to cyber security or the internet, now that's really news. We didn't really have the internet until the 1990s in a real sense.  And what we now know is that there are little problems with security in the internet. Maybe the internet could be used to influence elections, or the internet could be used for crime, the internet could be used, for example, as a weapon.

So for example you could hack somebody's electrical system and shut it down, for example. And for this, the problem is, there is sort of an agreement on what, that there is a problem, in fact there's an agreement on that. But there's no agreement on what the norms; are what are the responsibilities of states. If there's no agreement on the norms, there's no agreement on the rules, and whatnot, so we'll look at that a little bit differently.

So these are the four problems and there's regime status. Now, the real problem is to make sure we complete the regime creation process. And that's what you've got to start looking at as we look forward, after we all get to go back out in the street, and or to restaurants, or to factories. How do we get progress on regime creation. The first issue is that you have to have information.

You have to have collected information about the nature and state of the problem. Now with regard to the Coronavirus, one of the issues is, well gosh, how many people are being affected, where, and why? And that's an issue that we're not exactly sure where it stands, and to a certain extent it's being generated by individual states, but it's being collected by the World Health Organization. And the World Health Organization has to decide, or help decide, how do you verify whether or not the information is good or not.

And so examples in the last couple of days, the World Health Organization has said that there is not enough evidence to say that if you've had the COVID-19 and survived that you can't get reinfected. Might be, might not be. And so they're collecting information on that. With regard to the climate change, we know very well that there is a mechanism that's been set up, called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is designed to organize the collection of data on climate change.

Now this is fairly new, because unfortunately, we don't have a lot of over time data. Part of that is because when you're dealing with temperature, the first problem is you didn't have any thermometers before the end of the 18th century and who didn't get a lot of information collected. So the IPCC was set up to collect information get agreement on the information and then make that available so that norms could be determined and rules could be determined.

Now the IPCC has had five, IPCC has existed since about 1989 and it has had five sequential assessments of how things are. And I have to tell you the good news is that they did the assessments, the bad news is each assessment was worse than the other one. Now in part that's because they happen over time and climate change is actually happening over time, even though it's not as easy to see. The second one is that it's a very conservative process. In order to get an agreement you have to have peer-reviewed research and this sort of thing, and a lot of research just wasn't done until recently.

So, for example, we've only now begun to factor in the fact that the glaciers in Antarctica are beginning to melt and that's raising the sea level. With regard to nuclear weapons, again, it's a question of keeping track of who is, to what extent is there any production of nuclear weapons. And one of the things they do with that is, that information comes by way of inspections, or because there are indirect methods of measuring whether or not a given country is doing stuff that generates the kind of radiation that goes with weapons, as opposed to just generating electricity. And in the area of the Internet, well there is a lot of information, but there's no central source for it.

And so, as a result we don't know necessarily what's happening. That's why you could talk, for example, of the "dark web", which is a part of the Internet which you can't see. For those of you who are fans of that, the new John Sanford novel, which is one of his mystery novels, is all about something in the "dark web". Well it used to be he was only dealing with crime in Minnesota, now there were there we go. Okay now, you have to have information, the second thing you need is to be able to disseminate the information. And that that can be a problem because some of the information some people don't like or you don't trust, you have to have information disseminated that can be trusted.

And here's one of the reasons why we end up having international organizations doing that, you're more likely to be able to trust an international organization than to trust a government because the government might not tell you the truth, or might not tell you the whole truth. And so therefore you need someone who has collected the information and disseminates it in a way that is neutral. Now I can, education is one method, like having courses at Cornell University, but the other one is something like the media.

Now here's a fun thing that happened, and when I was starting in the UN, if you wanted to find out what was happening in the UN, you would have to wait until the documents produced were sent to a national library and then catalog so that you could read it. That was the only way you got the documents, unless you were in a government office and they sent you the documents in the government office. It wasn't well disseminated at all. They didn't even do a good job on coverage in the media because, well first of all, a lot of public media didn't think the international organizations were very interesting, so they didn't do much. Now we're in a different world and this is why I can be more optimistic, if you want to find out what's happening in an international organization you go to their website. They have all of their documents available, you can download them, you can read them, there's so many of them. Well you have fun reading them.

For example, one of the things that I look at a lot are evaluations because I that's one of my interests, and I'll come back to the issue of evaluation. You can get evaluations of projects for all organizations, you just download them and you find out whether they work or not. Or they have a coverage of all of the meeting. Or nowadays, if you can't go to New York and watch the United Nations General Assembly, they broadcast that, they webcast it. And a lot of other specific things are webcast.

So in a way you can see the extent to which the regime is being created by observing what's happening. And that can help you get progress on regime creation . In part by finding out the extent to which there is agreement and what are the areas where there isn't agreement, so far so good. Then once you have that you need to have some kind of mobilization. Governments have got to say we have to get an agreement on stuff.

One of the interesting, more interesting issues on which you've just recently got an agreement is something called migration. Now migration has existed through as long as humans have existed but it's become a an international problem when you have issues of people crossing national borders and either becoming illegal and being arrested or becoming part time and then you have to get them back all this kind of stuff. And this was an issue that was, has been seen well, it was seen since the time we can set up the League of Nations because one of the first things the League of Nations did was to deal with refugees, which is a particular type of mobilization.

At any rate, this has been going on for a hundred years, and only recently have you gotten an agreement on dealing with migration as a big problem, in the form of a compact on migration that was adopted in nineteen, was adopted, gosh, last year. And the only problem with this was you've got a lot of governments say we have to get an agreement on this because we want regularity, we want neatness, and things like that, in migration. And this was adopted, and it's been adopted by most governments. Unfortunately one of the countries that didn't was the United States. There's also mobilization by nongovernmental organizations, for example, in terms of Human Rights we have a lot of organizations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch.

And for climate change we have things like Greenpeace and various ones like that. So in other words you get Congress because you get information people get the information, they use the information you get mobilization. Now as we said we've had some issues here at the international level, and I want to talk about three of them before we get into the broader discussion. Funding, governments fund themselves pretty neatly by taxing. They tax things, or if you're driving on one of the types of interstates in the United States you have to pay to go on the highway, that's a pay for use so.

Governments have a way of collecting that kind of information now sometimes there's a back-and-forth on this, whether or not they have to have enough, they can only spend as much as they have revenue. International organizations don't, in most cases, have that ability to fund. In fact, most international organizations are funded from, well three possible sources. One of them is if you're a member of the organization you are expected to pay an assessed contribution, Country Club dues is the way I look at it. And interestingly enough this is set up in a world where it's based on the presumption of ability to pay. The richest countries are supposed to contribute the largest part of the budget.

But in reality, given that it's based on your GDP, every country pays the same amount in terms of what their ability to pay is. But the bigger richer countries have to pay more. And in that sense if this isn't well understood, one of the things that's happened with regard to the coronavirus pandemic is that the United States said we're paying too much to the WHO, well, no they're not because their assessed contribution is what would normally be their ability to pay 22 percent. Now they're not the biggest country pain to the WHO, in fact if you added together all of the European countries they're paying about 50%. Now of course they pay as individual countries but if you add them all together they're paying a lot more than the US.

So part of the problem is that kind of funding isn't well understood and it's sometimes used by governments to try to put pressure on, and that's not a good thing. Then you have voluntary contributions, you like something that the organization is doing so you give them voluntary money. And that can come either from governments or from somebody else. Now for example, a foundation headed by the originator of Microsoft gives a lot of money to the WHOI or for programs that it works with a WHO on, on health. There you go. The third one is sometimes you can get a little bit of funding from people. One of the things that UNICEF does it gets about 20 percent of its funding from individuals and groups in countries which do things like UNICEF Halloween or UNICEF Christmas cards and that goes into UNICEF .

There are only a few countries, few programs, which pay for themselves. One of them is the World Bank because they can charge interest or service charges. Another one is the World Intellectual Property Organization which charges to cross registered copyrights and patents, and that's how they fund 90% of their budget. But most organizations aren't like that so funding is a problem, how are we going to do that? And there are issues that will have to be confronted, how do we make sure that international organizations are not dependent, so dependent on individual states that they can be influenced in stupid ways. The second issue is staffing, how do we get people to work for these organizations? And there is a very well structured system, it's actually based on what used to be the best, the rules for the best-paying international civil service which was the United States, and so forth.

And finally there is the issue of accountability. With regard to governments you have all kinds of accountability mechanisms depending on how, the country is run. If you don't do a good job you don't get re-elected, if you're corrupt you get arrested, this sort of thing. Accountability is a different issue in international organizations because they're one step up. There's almost no, frankly, corruption in international organizations because their accountability is done by an incredibly complex and effective form of of audit. And increasingly they're becoming accountable because they have to report on whether or not their programs work or not, and that's called evaluation. And so they're being addressed.

One of the questions thats been said is, well, how do we find out whether WHO did a good job with regard to the coronavirus? And the answer will be that somebody will set up an evaluation of that, fairly quickly I would think. And interestingly enough most international organizations have methods of of evaluation which can be applied for problems like how well did we do with it, and collect data, and be credible, so that's another issue. So we have to solve the accountability problem, we have to make sure we get good staffing, and it has to be international staffing. You can talk more about that and you have to have a set of funding.

So we have basically set up a system of organizations, sort of in some cases already there, in some cases evolving, to solve the four problems of the apocalypse. And so our next question is now what, (trumpet sound: dah dah dah dah dah) and so let's discuss it. All right, and now we've got some time, you can ask some questions. A nice thing about thisis that the questions are put out by, are actually done by you guys and I'll try to answer them. I answered one that was done in advance, which is what do we do about, how do we hold the WHO accountable? I will say this, like I say, we can do an evaluation.

Now there are two ways, there's another way, you would have a meeting. Because there are periodic meetings of all international organizations and if it isn't done by governments it could be done by NGOs, it can be done by other international organizations, say hey, tell us how you did it and what were the problems. And we're beginning to see this already because the question has been asked, and all right, you begin to get the answer. And once you get the answer you look at the organization and say what could we improve.

And there are two ways of doing improvement, the easiest way is for the management, the international civil servants running the organization, say ok this was a problem that we had. We weren't able to collect data or more efficiently or effectively and if we had been able to do that we could have indicated the pandemic earlier. And they could make their own change or the governments could say, alright you've got to change. Now sometimes you need the governments to do that, to change the nature of the rules simply because otherwise governments won't accept them. So we'll see what happens on that pandemic.

Okay, aha, here's a question, How do you evaluate the progress, hang on I'm going to look at that, yes, how do you evaluate the progress of the UN and acting on climate change? Is there anything else they can do considering the lack of coercive power? Climate changes you know my one of my favorite things. If for no other reason then I've always been a fan of data, and the, and I've actually done a little bit of, I started looking at climate change back in the 90s because there was an issue of, well , the first world conference on world, on the environment. The First world conference on the environment didn't deal with climate change it dealt with smog. But afterward one of the things they decided was well maybe the climate was changing, and little by little you've got this sort of thing.

Now how do you look at progress on acting on climate change? Well the answer to this one is an interesting one. At this point the only part of the UN as anorganization that is dealing with anything, is the organizations which deal with the environment, the United Nations Environment Program, and the organization that provides the Secretariat services to either the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The reason is, until there is an agreement on the rules, there's not much you can do except, hey you gotta adopt some rules.

Now to a certain extent that happened with the Paris agreement, in the sense that the government's basically agreed, okay we have to do something and they got an agreement on what's in the Paris agreement, which is a series of things to be done. Now one of the problems in the Paris agreement was that there was no monitoring mechanism set up. What was said in the Paris agreement is we may do something on dealing with what was set up and that's in the process of negotiation. At the same time we still have the IPCC, and that has a Secretariat basically run out of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat is run out of Bonn in Germany, which is because it's a new organization and needed, it needed office space, and the Germans had just moved the capital from Bonn to Berlin so they had a lot of office space and they brought in organizations. So you have these organizations chugging around trying to, making sure that the data is provided. So the answer is we can evaluate that part of project, of progress, but that's about as far as we've gotten. Until you have an ability to say this country is doing naughty things you can't begin to convince other states to say, oh they're doing naughty things and maybe we should do something about it like tariffs. Which is in fact what's going to happen, possibly, with the Paris agreement.

Second question, Sarah Brown, what happens if there are heads of states that don't believe the information and agreements, what are the strategies? This is a question I almost have to send back to you guys. What the international organizations can say is these are the facts these are the facts, and it's not necessarily up to the International Secretariat's to say I don't agree with President Trump, who thinks that the data from the WHO isn't correct, we have that,; no we can't count on that. But they can do it again, in the case of climate change there's not much you can do until you get the rules agreed.

What happens, for example, in other areas which aren't part of our four, like human rights, you just embarrass a country and if they're embarrassed enough they may change their behavior, hurray. So there are, some strategies that you can do ,the the main strategy is to basically put the facts on the table and hope that you can get to people so that they use them. Now how do you get to people? Part of it is education, part of it is getting to the media to do things correctly. I have to say the media did not do a good job of covering the idea that the World Health Organization spends too much U.S. money because they didn't explain the concept of pay on the basis of ability to pay.

Okay, now, what could be the future of global leadership after a pandemic which nobody is looking at Washington, DC to lead after World War II? Now, the question is, to what extent do you have to have a national governmental leader, well, I tell my students that the answer to any question like that, in the international system, is jein, which I learned in, when I was stationed in Austria, is ja und nein, yes and nein, yes and no, because what you can do is you can see if you can find some other countries that are willing to take the lead and that countries will accept them taking the lead. You get some interesting little things at the international level.

One of the leaders in how you deal with climate change, are what are called Small Island Developing Countries, which are small islands which are really interested in climate change because if it isn't solved they're going to go underwater. And at the international level they become among the leaders to push for that. Now of course, if you don't really care if Palau goes underwater there just aren't enough people there, or Niue. But they can, if they can mobilize enough people that's fine. It is always better however, that the richest countries, and those are the ones who are in the P5, agree on things.

A classic case recently is the, what was called the Iran Nuclear Deal. Now Iran is not an official nuclear power. They have ratified the non-proliferation treaty. There was a suspicion that they might be developing enough fuel that could be turned into weapons, and they would put under pressure, the Security Council did it. And then they set it up, a system whereby they would be monitored by the IAEA; the only problem is the U.S. withdrew from that. Now what happened, what can you do if the U.S. withdraws? And the answer is you try to work around them but in a real world you have to have all of the main players on board.

For climate change you need the United States, if for no other reason that it is the largest per capita producer of CO2, it's not the largest producer of CO2, that's China, but in per capita terms, China is not at the same level as the U.S., so you have to get them there. Now how do you do that, that, I'm sorry to say will depend on people in the United States in an election, assuming there is an election, so that's that's how you do it you got it. Now would the fact that the U.S. is losing its, if you will, prestige at the international level, help solve this problem? Answer is yes. Yes, you guys can, if it makes you angry enough, change the government to one which believes in this international system; that it's for the benefit of all.

Okay let me take a couple questions from the Q&A, here's one, what would be the future, oh this is the same question, congratulations, I just answered. No the answer is, international organizations simply state the fact, and let somebody else say that there's a conflict between the types of facts. Just for example on the pandemic, the main thing that the U.S. did recently is to say we're going to cut off funding for the World Health Organization. All right, now how do you deal with that. Well almost all of the other governments then said this is terrible we don't agree with it. China increased its contribution to the WHO, (garbled word) in getting prestige with other people. Is that the best way to do it, possibly.

One thing you can do is try to get the Secretariat's, can try to put countries together and reach an agreement on the rules. And apparently the Director-General of the WHO, who by the way isn't, although he had worked in a government, his experience has been as a career, as an international civil servant so he knows how the place operates. He basically had a call to governments, the only problem as the U.S. refused to participate in the call. Okay so the way to do that, you gotta U.S. say, you got to get the information out that say something is wrong we've got to get an agreement on this, we've got to put this on the table.

Now one of my other questions has to do with a coercion and the future of UN military interventional. Here's an interesting case, the UN as I said has no coercive power but you've seen a lot of UN operations of a military type. Usually coming out of the Charter, and usually being initially, being based on national military getting together and fighting something. This was the basis of the original Korean War, for example. It was also used in the first Gulf War, in other words. But mostly they are where the UN becomes a, how would we say, tries to stop a conflict by providing military sources.

Now the problem is those aren't really UN military, there is no UN military. The UN has a system of contracting national military, for the purposes of providing troops, which under general UN auspices will try to stop conflicts. And there are a lot of them, there are I think right now about 24 operations like this. Now the problem is that these aren't really UN military, and it really depends on whether the countries that they come from really agree with the policy, and are willing, in exchange for a payment from the UN which comes primarily from the major contributors will continue to have their troops there. It's not a well system working, and not working out . So there we have a little bit on that one.

Then here's another question, what is the risk to national and global economies if there's no push for a treaty on cyber security, and individual states hen use technology to undermine the basis for fair competition? This isn't, this is I haven't spent much time talking about cybersecurity. I will say this, the reason that it's on the table is that we now understand that it's something that's trans-border and might have problems in terms of crime, in terms of influence of elections, in terms of well, influencing, how would we say, the economy. So on the one hand there's a question we have to be, should this be regulated? And we have the dark web for example, we have a lot of cyber attacks, people doing cyber ransom and all of this kind of stuff, and the question is what is the responsibility of states to solve this? or of an international organization? There is no agreement on this. Some states have done something, so for example the European Union has done something on privacy, and they use that to try to regulate Facebook and Amazon and things like that.

China has policies to keep some types of, some types of internet entities from getting in. Now the problem with the internet is there is no way you can stop it. One of my, when I was teaching at Syracuse, one of my students did her dissertation on countries killing the internet. Bad luck, you can't. You can make it difficult to use because a lot of the internet comes through the telephone lines and these are sometimes owned by national governments, but you can still get it over from satellites, or from, if your next door to a country that has it, you just use wireless, and things like that.

So it's not an easy thing. So there's no agreement yet on how to deal with it. And it does conflict with some of the other norms and standards like the rights to free speech, for example. To what extent is regulation of the Internet suppression of free speech. And there are discussions of this. Now the problem is that until you get an agreement on what the problem is, and what the solutions the states should be, you can't do much about controlling cybersecurity as an international thing. I can tell you this only became an issue when you had the first World Summit on the Information Society, which was I think in about 2004. And that was originally going to talk about information generally and it ended up talking mostly about governance of the Internet.

Now when we use the term governance we have to be careful, that's not government. Governance means providing direction and that sort of thing, providing ways in which whatever it's supposed to do, it does well. And the only agreement up till now was to set up something called the Internet Governance Forum, which meets once a year. And mostly involves NGOs, although sometimes it involves governments. And it meets once a year, but it doesn't connect well at this point with the Inter Governmental System. The IGF, which, whose Secretariat is located in Geneva, and consists about five people, plus interns, plus a lot of interns, then reports to the Commission on Science and Technology of the ECOSOC, and that's a fair distance away.

So we have to wait until that gets a big enough problem that you have to get an agreement to do something about it. An agreement eventually set up probably, in an international convention on internet governments, which states canthen join. And you set up an organization to oversee and monitor the extent to which states do the right thing in terms of governing the Internet. So any other questions? Any other questions? Let me see if I got any there, no any other questions? Last chance okay let me do a quick final summary.

The four problems of the apocalypse, as I hope I've described, or you've experienced yourself, have to be solved. And they have to be solved reasonably quickly, because if they're not solved the problems that they could cause to humans as individuals and humanity as a group of people, will be negatively affected in big ways. You didn't think that before, now that we're in the middle of the coronavirus, you can, you're experiencing it personally. If it isn't solved in climate change, you're already beginning to experience it if you're in a small island or if you're near it, and if you, if it keeps going on, don't buy beach property; for one thing.

Okay, with regard to nuclear weapons, if we don't make sure we have solved that the chance that somebody can accidentally, who has a nuclear weapon, push the trigger, could start something. And that's because a lot of these weapons are old, you haven't the progress in getting states that own nuclear weapons to get rid of them, has basically stopped. A lot of the treaties are wearing out. And with regard to cyber, with regard to cyber security, at a certain point if we don't find some method to govern it, we'll have more crime; you'll get hacked; we'll have more zoom booms.

Now we don't have a zoom boom here, but hey, who knows. And states will begin to try to suppress the Internet, even though it's not, and they will have more conflict. So all of that said, we've got to get together to solve the problems. And our best tool to do that isn't individual states because a lot of that depends on the politics of individual States. We have to do that by getting the people in a broader sense, participation, to become engaged. Now the reason we even made some progress, for example on human rights, for example on climate change, is because you've had a public reaction. In terms of climate change all I have to say is one word, Greta. And that can help because that can lead us, you could put enough pressure on your governments to get the agreements that are necessary.

And you can become consumers of the information generated by the international organization and use that to hold whoever has to be held accountable, accountable. Not only the governments, not only NGOs not only corporations, but also the international institutions themselves. And to do that, we've got to make sure that this is included in education, we've got to make sure it's included in the media, and we've got to make sure that we have mechanisms to basically study and report on that, and I would say that's what we got to do. So there we are. And we're almost at ourtime limit, if there are no other additional questions I really want to thank you for coming in. I've enjoyed doing this, this will be recorded so it's available to people who couldn't get there at this point. So off we go, all right. And I look forward to seeing you all after that.