CLOSE, but no cigar. That pretty much sums up efforts to reach
agreement on an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which foundered at the
United Nations on July 28th. Delegates from more than 170
countries had spent a month trying to secure consensus on
regulating the $60 billion-a-year trade in conventional weapons.
A draft treaty emerged on the penultimate day of the conference.
It tightened some of the loopholes in earlier versions, while
still meeting the concerns of the foot draggers by making
munitions subject to fairly loose controls. But after a day of
increasingly frantic negotiations, the hopes of the vast
majority of UN members were dashed at the last moment by
opposition from both the Americans and the Russians, who
complained that there was not enough time left to “clarify and
resolve” a small number of issues. The feeling among many
diplomats present was that, having made a huge amount of
progress, there had been a failure of political nerve in the
White House, which has strongly supported the ATT since 2