United States, United Nations Stumble Over Rocky Relationship : Diplomacy: Testiness marks public and private clashes. At issue, aides say, are two distinct concepts of the secretary general’s job.

U.N. diplomats and officials are alarmed by the sometimes acrimonious and often exasperated feelings that have marred relations between Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and the Clinton Administration in recent months.

The troubles surfaced at the end of February, when the press attache for U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright rebuked the secretary general for writing a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin suggesting “ some kind of United Nations presence” in the occupied territories.

“We do not think the secretary general’s suggestion is particularly helpful or useful,” said James P. Rubin, the attache, in a rare public reprimand.

This testiness was a manifestation of an even more profound conflict in private.

Relations have fallen to such depths, reports an ambassador on the Security Council, that a diplomat from the U.S. mission to the United Nations vowed recently that “we will destroy” the secretary general if he dares to stand in the way of any North Atlantic Treaty Organization air strikes in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“What are they talking about?” the ambassador asked. “Is this Nikita Khrushchev trying to destroy Dag Hammarskjold? The secretary general cannot be anyone’s puppet. He must represent the United Nations. And, in the case of the bombing, his approach was the correct one. . . . All this fighting is no good for the U.N. We cannot have the U.N. and the United States opposed to each other.”

A good deal of hyperbole infused the supposed threat of the U.S. diplomat: There is, for example, no mechanism for members of the United Nations to remove a secretary general from office. A U.S. official, in fact, denies that members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations use that kind of language about the secretary general. But there is no doubt that U.S. diplomats have berated Boutros-Ghali in private for issuing statements that smacked of a reluctance to order air strikes.

Although Boutros-Ghali makes a show of brushing off criticism, he knows that he has much to lose from a sour relationship with the most powerful member of the United Nations.

“I need the United States,” he said in a speech in Washington in late October. “The United Nations needs the United States. Finding the right relationship between the U.N. and the U.S. may be one of the most important tasks of our time.”

The problem is only partly personal. The secretary general can be stubborn and arrogant and contemptuous. But he can also be charming and courtly in private, and both sides insist that--despite some angry exchanges over Somalia last fall--he and Albright now deal with each other with warmth and good-natured banter.

At issue, U.N. and U.S. aides said, are two distinct concepts of the job of secretary general.

Boutros-Ghali, 71, a former professor and deputy foreign minister in Egypt, conceives of an active role for himself, one of an international political leader offering a host of peace initiatives, his power moored in the moral force of an organization representing 184 governments.

His aides said his authority was established in Article 99 of the U.N. Charter, which states, in its entirety, that “the secretary general may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”

U.S. officials believe that Boutros-Ghali is reading too much into this sentence. In the prevailing view among U.S. officials, he is an international civil servant charged with carrying out policy, not making it.

Albright has said that Boutros-Ghali should regard himself as “a chief administrative officer” serving the Security Council as if it were his board of directors.

“The secretary general often oversteps his role,” a U.S. official said, “and some of the things he does are counterproductive.”

Not only does this complicate delicate international problems, the official said, but “it gives critics like Sen. (Robert) Dole an opportunity to lambaste the United Nations and hurt the constituency for the U.N. in the United States.”

Dole, the Senate Republican leader who likes to pronounce the secretary general’s unusual name in mocking tones, regularly admonishes the White House against letting Boutros-Ghali set U.S. foreign policy.

Some of the sharpest rhetoric leveled at Boutros-Ghali has come from two Reagan Administration officials who share the view that he is trying to usurp power: former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who derides Boutros-Ghali as a would-be “commander in chief of the world,” and former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who claims that the secretary general acts as though he were “chief executive officer of the world.”

Clinton Administration officials believe that Boutros-Ghali sets himself up for such attacks by stretching the limits of his office beyond political bounds.

But Edward Luck, president of the U.N. Assn. of the United States, a citizen group that supports the United Nations, said the real problem lies in the conflict between the activism of the secretary general and the minimalist approach of President Clinton to foreign affairs.

“The United Nations has become a symbol of activist internationalism at a time when the United States would like the world to go away,” Luck said in a recent interview. “The secretary general is trying to expand his role at a time when the United States would like him to be quiet. He has become the nagging voice in the middle of the night.”

Luck believes that Boutros-Ghali should rein in this nagging voice.

“The secretary general has thought more about his role than any other secretary general,” he said. “He has a pretty coherent idea of what he wants to do. But he shouldn’t preach about it. He pays too little attention to the political nuances of how and when something is said.”

But Luck also believes that the problem is exacerbated by the narrow goals of Clinton’s foreign policy.

“It’s as if the stars are crossed,” he said. “We have an activist secretary general with a lot of ideas and an Administration with a minimalist foreign policy that does not want to be reminded about what goes on in the world.”

The fiasco in Somalia in early October that left 18 U.S. soldiers dead badly bruised relations. Boutros-Ghali felt betrayed when Clinton announced a March 31 withdrawal of all U.S. troops after the soldiers died in a battle with the militia of Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid.

From the secretary general’s point of view, the operation had been fashioned to U.S. specifications.

The Americans had handpicked the key U.N. staff for Somalia, including retired U.S. Adm. Jonathan Howe as the civilian chief. They had persuaded Boutros-Ghali to appoint an American favorite, Kofi Annan of Ghana, as the undersecretary general in charge of peacekeeping.

The Americans even demanded and won the right to keep the Rangers and other U.S. combat troops under U.S. rather than U.N. command.

On top of this, U.S. officials had pledged full support to Boutros-Ghali’s plan to disarm the warring factions of Somalia and, after an ambush of Pakistani peacekeepers, to hunt down Aidid as a criminal.

All this changed after the October deaths.

U.S. officials, from Clinton downward, led the public to believe that the Americans had been ordered into battle by the United Nations and Boutros-Ghali.

In a televised address, Clinton announced that, in preparation for eventual withdrawal, he was immediately dispatching reinforcements to Somalia.

“These forces will be under American command,” he said, leaving unspoken the false implication that the others had been under U.N. command.

Boutros-Ghali believed that the U.S. had made him the scapegoat for the October debacle and had undercut his goal of aggressive U.N. peace enforcement in crippled lands such as Somalia. And Boutros-Ghali was infuriated when Clinton then sent Ambassador Robert Oakley--an antagonist of the secretary general during the Bush Administration’s Somalia expedition involving 28,500 Marines--back to Somalia to assuage Aidid and straighten out the political mess.

The view of U.S. officials is far different.

They believe that the secretary general’s hatred for Aidid--first honed, they said, in his Egyptian Foreign Ministry days--had misled the U.S. Rangers into the manhunt. Boutros-Ghali’s theories about aggressive peacekeeping may look persuasive on paper, U.S. officials said, but a U.S. President cannot afford to shed the blood of his troops on a distant and remote adventure.

Some U.S. officials acknowledged that the Administration was unfair in heaping so much public blame on Boutros-Ghali. A Pentagon official called it “shameless.” But they nevertheless resented Boutros-Ghali’s whining about it.

U.S. officials believed that it was unseemly for an international civil servant to so blatantly attack the most powerful member of his board of directors in public.

Similar misunderstandings confuse the conflict over air strikes.

In June, the Security Council authorized NATO, “subject to close coordination with the secretary general,” to use air power to protect U.N. peacekeepers and deter aggression in Sarajevo and other besieged towns of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Boutros-Ghali interpreted the resolution as granting him the final say on any use of NATO air power in Bosnia. But his comments implied that he feared the consequences of air strikes and would approve them only with great reluctance.

Diplomatic admirers believe that his reluctance reflected his reading of the mood in NATO: The United States and its West European allies were not ready for air strikes. Boutros-Ghali sensed a change in that mood after the deadly Feb. 5 missile attack on the marketplace in Sarajevo. He then called on NATO to prepare for air strikes and delegated his authority to launch them to U.N. and NATO officials on the scene.

In the view of his admirers, Boutros-Ghali diverted public anger over inaction in Bosnia from the United States and Western Europe to the United Nations for six months and then, when the time was ripe, galvanized NATO into action.

U.S. officials see the situation differently. They believe that, no matter what the legal mooring of the resolution, the secretary general should not have asserted his power to decide what was really a military matter. Military expertise is a hallmark of neither his experience nor his office. Even more important, the Americans believe that he made himself an obstacle to air strikes by his obvious reluctance to use them.

As the Americans see it, Boutros-Ghali relented, changed his mind about the need for air strikes and transferred authority to his officials on the scene only after he was pressured to do so by U.S. diplomats.