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National Security Strategy 2010

Enhance Cooperation with and Strengthen the United Nations: We are enhancing our coordination with the U.N. and its agencies. We need a U.N. capable of fulfilling its founding purpose—maintaining international peace and security, promoting global cooperation, and advancing human rights. To this end, we are paying our bills. We are intensifying efforts with partners on and outside the U.N. Security Council to ensure timely, robust, and credible Council action to address threats to peace and security. We favor Security Council reform that enhances the U.N.’s overall performance, credibility, and legitimacy. Across the broader U.N. system we support reforms that promote effective and efficient leadership and management of the U.N.’s international civil service, and we are working with U.N. personnel and member states to strengthen the U.N.’s leadership and operational capacity in peacekeeping, humanitarian relief, post-disaster recovery, development assistance, and the promotion of human rights. And we are supporting new U.N. frameworks and capacities for combating transnational threats like proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, infectious disease, drug-trafficking, and counterterrorism.
Pursue Decisions though a Wide Range of Frameworks and Coalitions: We need to spur and harness a new diversity of instruments, alliances, and institutions in which a division of labor emerges on the basis of effectiveness, competency, and long-term reliability. This requires enhanced coordination among the United Nations, regional organizations, international financial institutions, specialized agencies, and other actors that are better placed or equipped to manage certain threats and challenges. We are attempting to forge new agreement on common global challenges among the world’s leading and emerging powers to ensure that multilateral cooperation reflects the sustained commitment of influential countries. While we are pursuing G-8 initiatives with proven and long-standing partners, have begun to shift the focus of our economic coordination to the G-20, which is more reflective of today’s diffusion of power and the need to enlist the efforts of a broader spectrum of countries across Asia to Europe, Africa to the Middle East, and our neighbors in the Americas. We are also renewing U.S. leadership in the multilateral development banks and the IMF, and leveraging our engagement and investments in these institutions to strengthen the global economy, lift people out of poverty, advance food security, address climate and pandemics, and secure fragile states such as Afghanistan and Haiti.
Invest in Regional Capabilities: Regional organizations can be particularly effective at mobilizing and legitimating cooperation among countries closest to the problem. Regional organizations—whether NATO, the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the African Union, Organization of American States, or ASEAN, and the Gulf Cooperation Council—vary widely in their membership, constitutions, histories, orientation, and operational capabilities. That variety needs to inform a strategic approach to their evolving roles and relative contributions to global security.

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