Laudable Failure

Bolton's Conference

For Under Secretary of State John Bolton, the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Illegal Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons was a personal triumph. Speaking for less than ten minutes on the opening day, 9 July 2001, he clearly explained that the United States would not tolerate any of the visionary proposals under consideration; nor would it accept any recommendations that departed significantly from the status quo, and it would certainly not permit small arms to become a major issue of concern for the UN.

He did not challenge the motives of the conference, however, which he praised as "laudable." Nor did he dispute that there are over 550 million guns in circulation, that they cause over 300,000 deaths every year, or that their spread exacerbates the dangers of crime, secessionism, and ethnic warfare. ¹ Instead, he stripped the conference of its agenda, its goals, and any trace of hope. When he stepped down from the speakers' podium, the conference was, for all practical purposes, completely over.

The magnitude of Bolton's words is even more profound in light of their own triviality. Bolton was delegated to represent the United States because his superiors did not want to waste their own time attending the conference. His speech represented not the result of a major policy initiative, but a diversion from his own work at the heart of another strategic revolution in U.S. arms control and disarmament policy. Upon returning to Washington he settled back to this real priority, convincing Russia to accept the end of the ABM Treaty, freeing the Bush administration to deploy a national missile defense.

Strictly speaking, the Small Arms Conference was not a failure. On July 20, after two weeks of deliberations, negotiators produced a final document, which was accepted by the consensus of all participating governments. But in a more profound sense the outcome could hardly have been worse for those who believe that small arms proliferation is a serious challenge for international peace and security. By depriving the UN of its ability to take initiatives and undermining the legitimacy of broad international action, the conference reduced the global small arms process to a motley collection of unrelated national and regional efforts.

It is no exaggeration to say that efforts to deal with the issue would be more aggressive today if the conference had never taken place. Even worse than the underwhelming final document was the climate of hopelessness it left behind. The whole issue has acquired a bad taste that will take some time to wear off.

Critics have found it easy to blame Bolton. ² It is tempting to dismiss the failure of the conference as a result of U.S. stubbornness, but it also would be extremely misleading. Even without Bolton's fireworks, the outcome would have been much the same. Long before the conference, activists and governments were tempering their bold proclamations of the dangers of small arms proliferation with cautious recommendations. When delegates gathered for the first official Preparatory Commission meeting (or Prepcom) in February 2000, their divisions became obvious. Long before the representatives of 170 governments assembled in New York, any hope for an ambitious agreement had evaporated.

Although the George W. Bush administration undoubtedly bears immediate responsibility for the failure, there is much more to it than that. A closer look reveals a wide circle of blame, extending to those who did the most to give birth to the conference itself. It took the combination of several ostensibly unrelated factors to undermine the UN Small Arms Conference. These were the inherent intractability of the issue, the lack of a unifying normative principle to guide international consensus, the reassertion of the primacy of the national interest in international politics, and the ambivalence of small arms activists and their supporters.

The disappointing results of the UN Small Arms Conference showed that unless these issues can be solved, the outlook for concerted action on small arms proliferation is dismal. In the short run, efforts to...