Why Is the Western Press Beating Up on Ban Ki-moon?

That’s the question the Segye Ilbo asks.

There was the Foreign Policy piece by Jacob Heilbrunn, of course. But there was also an article in The Economist that took the poor man to task for poor management skills (although the article itself gave the Banster a mixed report card).

The Segye Ilbo, however, says the dominant view is that the Western media’s attacks on Ban stem from the inability of people used to the European style of organizational management and handling of duties to understand the East Asian way of handling duties, which is to say, keep your head down, be quiet and let the United States do the heavy lifting.

This is to say, they cannot understand Ban’s style of quietly bringing parties together through behind-the-scenes coordination to produce solutions rather than strongly criticizing and actively intervening every time a major world crisis occurs.

This view gains credence from the fact that the articles critical of the Banster clearly note that he’s had no policy failures so far. The articles criticize his operating style, for the most part.

One high-ranking diplomatic source at the UN said it seems people looking for quick results can’t understand Ban’s style of doing things, and in particular, the said articles were written with the intention of criticizing poor Ban.

Another diplomat said the atmosphere on embassy row was that these articles intentionally tried to highlight a lack of results even though it’s still too early to grade Ban’s capabilities and achievements with half his term still ahead of him, and that the diplomats of some Asian countries were outraged by these criticisms of Ban.

Another UN secretariat official said the criticism wasn’t too worrisome since they were about policy failure but rather that results were’t coming quickly, and that he thought Ban would firmly push ahead with his agenda in the future, too.

Marmot’s Note: Why is it that as I read the Segye Ilbo piece, all I could think of was this?

Tagged as: Ban Ki-moon