Strategy Before Structure: Rethinking the UN's Middle East Role
The next Secretary-General will inherit a United Nations that has been pushed to the margins of Middle East diplomacy. The instinct will be to build new structures by appointing a regional envoy, establishing a consolidated mission, or creating a new coordinating office. That may eventually make sense. It should come later.
The first task is harder. The next UN chief needs a Middle East strategy that consciously decides what the UN can realistically achieve across the region, where it still has an advantage, and where others are better placed to lead. Only then should the organization decide what structure it needs. There is precedent for this approach. The UN has already built a regional coordination architecture in the Middle East. It did so under tight political constraints, often while other powers led the main diplomatic track. Its own archives show how that architecture emerged, what made it useful and where its limits lay.
A Regional Problem Handled Through Separate Files
The UN's marginalization in the Middle East is hard to dispute. The Security Council endorsed the US-led Gaza plan and the Board of Peace, while the UN political machinery sits outside the core of the arrangement. Relations between Israel and the organizationhave deteriorated sharply. Regional states with leverage have filled more of the mediation space. At the same time, senior UN political posts in the region have remained vacant or under acting leadership.
Recent commentary has therefore focused on how the organization might recover influence. Daniel Safran-Hon and I argued last year that the UN should rebuild its political role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The next Secretary-General faces a wider problem.
The UN still handles much of the situation in the Middle East through separate political and institutional files. Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Golan each have their own mandates, offices, operations and reporting lines. There are good reasons for this. Security Council mandates respond to specific conflicts, and governments expect the UN to respect national political contexts.
Politics does not respect those boundaries. Gaza has shaped events in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and the Gulf. Syria's future touches Israel, Türkiye, and the Arab states. Gulf governments now matter across diplomacy, reconstruction and investment in several theatres. The same powers and security concerns recur across files that the UN bureaucracy handles separately. The organization needs a regional view of a regional system.
Strategy Should Come Before Reorganization
Alexander Costy and Adam Day have made the most developed recent case for a regional UN approach. They propose consultations led by the next Secretary-General, a review of the UN's regional footprint and a regional framework for longer-term cooperation. They also suggest folding existing country-level peace operations into a region-wide configuration under a senior envoy. Their diagnosis of fragmentation and weak strategic coordination is persuasive. Their institutional proposal may also prove right. The historical record points to a prior question: what should such a structure actually do?
Every incoming Secretary-General has a short period when political capital is unusually high. New leadership creates expectations. Governments listen. Reform appears possible. There is an understandable temptation to use that window to create something.
In the Middle East, formal machinery can quickly become another Security Council negotiation over mandate language, geography, authority, reporting lines and political terminology. The Council can spend months debating an office before agreeing on its purpose.
The sequence should run the other way. Define the functions. Set priorities. Map the capacities already in place. Identify the gaps. Then decide whether new machinery is required
That exercise also needs negative choices. The UN does not need to chair every negotiation. It should not spend political capital competing with states that have greater leverage with the parties. A serious strategy has to say where the organization should lead, where it should support, and where it should stay out. The UN has made these choices before.
In the past, the Architecture Followed the Function
My forthcoming book, The UN's Multidimensional Approach to the Israel-Arab Conflict, 1967–1982: An Architecture for Peace, reconstructs a period when the Secretariat had limited control over high-level diplomacy but considerable room to act at lower levels.
After the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Washington increasingly dominated the political track. Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy narrowed the Secretariat's space as an independent mediator. The UN found other ways to matter.
General Ensio Siilasvuo, then commander of the Second United Nations Emergency Force, established to supervise the ceasefire between Egypt and Israel, chaired direct military talks between both countries at Kilometer 101 on the Cairo-Suez road. Those negotiations helped produce the Six-Point Agreement of November 1973. Siilasvuo later chaired the Military Working Group attached to the Geneva Peace Conference, where practical arrangements for disengagement were negotiated and implemented.
At the same time, the UN began connecting operations across the region. UNTSO, UNEF II and UNDOF remained separate missions with separate mandates. In practice, they shared personnel, logistics, infrastructure and institutional knowledge. I call this Inter-Operation Collaboration (IOC): formally distinct peacekeeping operations pooling capabilities to deliver their respective mandates.
By late 1974, Siilasvuo concluded that proximity alone was not enough. He drafted a five-point proposal for a coordinating mechanism and sent it from Jerusalem to New York. The proposal triggered a revealing debate inside the Secretariat. A 1975 memorandum from UN Legal Counsel Erik Suy to Roberto Guyer, Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs, [DN1] focused on the command problem. Force commanders had defined authority over their own missions. A regional coordinator risked cutting across those mandates. Yet the memorandum's annex reached a striking conclusion: "an overall coordinator would be a great improvement on the present situation."
New York accepted the need for coordination while limiting its reach. Siilasvuo had proposed that the Coordinator hold the Under-Secretary-General rank and that the operations report through him. The Secretariat initially designated him Assistant Secretary-General and kept the missions' direct reporting lines to the Secretary-General. By September 1975, Siilasvuo was serving as Chief Coordinator with Under-Secretary-General rank.
The core restriction remained. He would coordinate and liaise, not command. Each operation kept its identity. That distinction reflected political reality. Egypt and Syria were wary of a structure that suggested permanence or deeper integration than they had accepted. The Secretariat, therefore, built only what the politics could sustain. This was institutional entrepreneurship in practice. Siilasvuo identified an operational problem, proposed a solution from the field, and used the authority available to make it work. Headquarters shaped and constrained the proposal, but it did not invent it.
The value became clear in 1978. When the Security Council created UNIFIL after Israel's Operation Litani, the UN did not start from zero. UNTSO headquarters was reorganized to serve as UNIFIL's rear Headquarters for operational, administrative and logistical planning. UNEF II and UNDOF released companies from existing contingents. UNTSO observers already working in the sector remained in place. Three days after Security Council Resolution 425, UNIFIL had a command structure, a temporary headquarters and a core contingent on the ground. That is what regional coordination can buy: speed, memory, and capacity already in place when a crisis arrives.
Coordination Survived. Political Capacity Did Not
The architecture had clear limits. The UN could help manage disengagement. It could not dictate a settlement. It could connect operations. It could not create consent. Its room for maneuver depended on the political space left by regional states and major powers.
When that space narrowed after Camp David, the architecture lost its political center. UNEF II withdrew. Siilasvuo retired in 1979. The Secretary-General did not appoint a successor.
What survived the closure is the instructive part. The modus operandi of pooling and sharing resources continued as routine practice. The political capacity the Chief Coordinator had accumulated did not.
That distinction should sit at the center of any new regional strategy. Operational coordination can be embedded in procedures. Political access cannot. An organogram cannot manufacture trust, leverage or consent. A new regional structure would be useful only if it serves a political strategy that explains where the UN can still create value.
Decide the Role, Then Build
The next Secretary-General should begin with a regional strategic review.
The first question is where the UN still offers something difficult to replicate. That may include long-standing liaison relationships, verification capacity, institutional memory, technical expertise, political good offices and the ability to sustain arrangements after individual mediators leave[DN2] . Furthermore, despite sustained attempts by some Member States to tarnish the UN as biased or untrustworthy, it is still perceived as an honest broker. Those assets matter even when another actor brokers the agreement. Ceasefires need monitoring. Adversaries need channels when talks stall. Political agreements need implementation. Separate diplomatic tracks sometimes need a connection. Institutional memory matters when the people who negotiated an arrangement move on.
The review should also identify where the UN should step back. Some functions are better performed by states with direct leverage. Some inherited structures may need reform. Others may be valuable precisely because they preserve capabilities that would take years to rebuild.
A strategy also has to decide how much room to leave for initiative below the political level. The Chief Coordinator's office was not conceived in New York. It was proposed by a commander who could see the problem from Jerusalem, then narrowed and legitimized by Headquarters. That experience suggests the value of leaving enough room for those closest to the problem to adapt institutional arrangements to operational need.
The result may well justify a regional envoy or a new coordinating structure. Or it may instead point towards stronger links among institutions already in place. That decision should come at the end of the process. The UN has been sidelined in the Middle East before. Its strongest response was to identify functions it could perform, connect the assets needed to perform them, and build only as much structure as the politics allowed. The next Secretary-General should apply the same discipline.
Strategy first. Structure second.