Shame on Antonio Guterres.
The United Nations Secretary-General has every right, and obligation, to meet with all the leaders of the world, even the most odious and criminal ones, if that serves the cause of peace. That is his job.
But it is his moral obligation not to make nice with bloody dictators. Alas, that’s exactly what Guterres did in attending a BRICS meeting in the Russian city of Kazan last week and bowing before Putin.
Instead of speaking truth to power, Guterres smiled and shook the hand of an accused war criminal, the instigator of Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.
In effect if not in intent, the Secretary-General gave Putin and his crimes the U.N.’s imprimatur. The only good thing that can be said about that embarrassing exchange is that Guterres could have genuflected, but didn’t. But in bowing before Russia’s dictator, Guterres lowered himself to the level of the infamous Karin Kneissl, the former right-wing Austrian foreign minister, who literally curtsied before Putin and then danced the waltz with him.
Citing persecution in her home country, Kneissl has since fled to Russia, where she holds the position of the Kremlin’s goodwill ambassador tasked with tiger conservation. Given the damage that Guterres has done to the U.S., he might want to consider joining Kneissl in a Russian exile.
After all, the U.N., and not its Secretary-General, is ultimately at issue here. That august body has been criticized for doing too little to stop wars and for being the hostage of recalcitrant members of the Security Council.
In defense of the U.N., one could say that its very structure militates against effectiveness. The General Assembly is largely powerless and thus prone to grandstanding, while the Security Council concentrates too much power in countries that abuse it. Reforming the U.N. may therefore be imperative, but it’s about as likely as reforming the American Electoral College.
So perhaps the U.N.’s ineffectiveness is both understandable and forgivable. And why should the Secretary-General be any better than the institution he represents?
That may be true, but the real question is: Why should he be worse and actually condone Putin’s imperialism, genocide and war by smiling and bowing? Surely Guterres, as a seasoned diplomat, understands the importance of slight gestures and rhetorical nuances in international relations. Surely he had to have known that bowing to a dictator is to show him respect and subordinate oneself to him — and by extension to absolve him of whatever crimes he may have committed.
Just to prove the point about the Secretary-General’s behavior, imagine that an international diplomat had bowed before Adolf Hitler in, say, 1943, when World War II and the Holocaust were raging in full force. We would have been outraged. Indeed, we would probably accuse him of collaborating with the Nazis and demand that he be punished accordingly after the war ended.
Small wonder that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to meet with Guterres in Kyiv. Zelensky wasn’t just having a hissy fit. He knew that shaking the hand of the man who shook Putin’s hand was equal to shaking Putin’s hand and thereby approving of Putin’s unprovoked destruction of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also on target in saying that Guterres’s visit to Kazan “does not advance the cause of peace. It only damages the U.N.’s reputation.”
To make things worse, Guterres’s bow took place at an especially unfortunate moment — just as several thousand North Korean troops arrived in Russia, headed for combat on the Ukrainian front.
Just as Guterres was expressing his subordination to Putin, Putin was rubbing it in by reminding Guterres of his ability to do whatever his heart desired — from invading Ukraine to threatening to attack Western capitals with nuclear weapons to inviting Kim Jong Un’s soldiers to consolidate his fascist regime and kill Ukrainians — and get away with it. As the world’s top international diplomat, Guterres had to have known about the North Koreans. He had to have realized that their presence in the war represented a stark escalation by Putin.
And yet the Secretary-General smiled, bowed and shook his hand — thereby smiling, bowing and shaking Kim’s hand.
Willfully or not, Guterres sullied the U.N. and the cause of peace. He should resign.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
