Lawfare Archive: Kenneth Anderson on Living with the UN
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2021
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
From June 7, 2012: We don't review our own books here on Lawfare—not even if we happen to be Lawfare's book review editor. But Benjamin Wittes sat down the other day with Ken Anderson to discuss his wonderful new book, Living With the UN: American Responsibilities and International Order. It's a terrific read, full of insights about the U.S.-U.N. relationship, the U.N. as an institution, and the international governance movement more broadly.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:14.0 | That's patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | I'm Emily Day and this is an episode from the LawFair Archives from November 7th 2021. |
| 0:45.0 | The United Nations Climate Change Conference, or the COP26 summit, has dominated media covers this week. |
| 0:50.0 | The goal of these negotiations was to get an agreement to curb carbon emissions fast enough to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. |
| 0:57.0 | President Biden's major goal was to reassert America's ability to lead the world on climate change. |
| 1:02.0 | So, for this week, I chose an episode from June 7th 2012, in which Ken Anderson discusses his book, |
| 1:09.0 | Living with the UN, American Responsibilities, and International Order, and gives insights about the US, UN Relationship, |
| 1:16.0 | the UN as an institution, and international governance more broadly. |
| 1:36.0 | Hello, and welcome to the LawFair podcast, the special book review editor discusses his own book edition. |
| 1:43.0 | I'm Benjamin Wittes, and I'm here today in beautiful Palo Alto with LawFair's own Ken Anderson, who is out here at the Hoover Institution with me. |
| 1:53.0 | We're taking a break from a meeting of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law to discuss Ken's new book, |
| 2:01.0 | Living with the UN, American Responsibilities, and International Order. |
| 2:07.0 | Ken certainly requires no introduction to the LawFair readership, so I will offer none. |
| 2:13.0 | The book, published by the Hoover Press, is an incisive look at the relationship between the United States and the United Nations, |
| 2:21.0 | at when and how the United States should engage with the UN, and indeed a look at the UN itself, as Ken writes, |
| 2:30.0 | why is there still a United Nations at all? How has it managed to survive over time from 1945 down to the present, given its long record of underperformance, frequent outright failure, and even more frequent irrelevance? |
| 2:47.0 | Why has not the ruthless evolutionary logic of history pruned it as a failed institutional sapling in a relentlessly competitive forest, as the League of Nations was pruned? |
... |
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