un

Mark Leon Goldberg reports that John Bolton, the Bush administration’s former ambassador to the United Nations, has a new book out. It’s called ConUNdrum — get it? — and apparently continues Bolton’s quest to shave several more floors from the U.N.’s Turtle Bay offices. But what’s more interesting, Goldberg reports, is who’s throwing book parties [...]

Say this for the insurgents in Afghanistan: they evidently have a good lesson-learning process. As I wondered after gunmen stormed a U.N. safe house last week, the U.N. mission in Afghanistan will follow the a similar script as after the 2003 bombing of its compound in Iraq. It’s withdrawing hundreds of employees from Kabul until [...]

As you’ve read, yesterday the U.N. mission in Afghanistan abruptly fired its deputy director for political affairs, Peter Galbraith, the longtime American human-rights gadfly diplomat. Galbraith got sacked for the absurdity of speaking out against fraud in an election the U.N. mission helped sponsor. And now the United States is in a tight spot: the [...]

[Updated 4:08 p.m., Saturday September 26: I think this post is wrong. Carnegie's James Acton explains carefully what obligations Iran has violated. My apologies.]
The disclosure of Iran’s nuclear facility under construction for years in secret near Qom — the second such undisclosed facility operated by Iran — deepens “a growing concern,” President Obama said in [...]

For the last two years, an unlikely bipartisan coterie of Cold Warriors have banded together to pursue the ambitious goal of deep nuclear-weapons reductions by the United States and a comprehensive international regime for nonproliferation. The goals of the crew — former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.); former Secretary of [...]

By a unanimous vote, a session of the United Nations Security Council chaired by President Obama has approved Security Council Resolution 1887, a measure to strengthen the nuclear nonproliferation regime. The White House sent around this factsheet to reporters.

Two parties. Two widely different reactions to the Obama administration’s announcement Tuesday that the United States will seek a spot on the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he “strongly” supports the move, arguing that the panel has become “increasingly dysfunctional and politicized” and the White [...]

Since 1988, the U.S. has banned federal funding for needle exchange programs. But with a president who pledges to lift the ban, why is the United States opposing UN efforts to promote them?

The United States could be the first Western nation in recent years to try a prisoner for war crimes allegedly committed as a child.
So says the ACLU, which is calling on the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child and the U.N. Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict to stop the military commission [...]

With violence reaching pre-invasion levels in Aghanistan, negotiations with the Taliban may be needed.