The chance to reform the U.N. assessment system arises only once every three years: 2009 is one of those years, and the Obama Administration must not let this opportunity slip away.
In December 2007, the U.N. General Assembly broke with a 20-year tradition of adopting budgetary decisions only by consensus by approving the 2008-2009 regular budget over a U.S. objection.
Every three years, the member states of the United Nations negotiate how to apportion the expenses of the U.N. regular budget and the peacekeeping budget. These negotiations center on the U.N. “scale of assessments,” which assigns a specific percentage of the budgets to each member state, broadly based on its capacity to pay as calculated from its gross national income (GNI), modified by various factors.[1] The current system is based on a methodology that results in a handful of states footing the lion’s share of U.N.