The UN Security Council’s irresolute wrangling in 2003 over whether to use force in Iraq spurred pointed questioning by many observers about its relevance and even its future. Continuing differences over the course of postwar reconstruction only added to the chorus of doubts. On one point the world body’s most fervent admirers and detractors seemed to agree: the Security Council was in serious, perhaps critical, condition. “Events have shaken the international system,” warned UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. If the UN’s principal organs—beginning with the Security Council—“are to regain their authority, they may need radical reform.”
Perhaps, as Annan warned, the world body is—once again—at a crossroads. Before sharpening their scalpels in preparation for radical reform, however, the member states should ask whether the diagnosis of the malady is, in fact, correct. A second opinion, or at least a quick historical review, would be in order before reserving the operating room.
The United Nations was established in 1945, largely on U.S. initiative, to maintain international peace and security. The key Security Council was granted unprecedented legal and enforcement powers under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to ensure that its decisions would be respected and implemented by all member states. On the other hand, the charter granted the leaders of the victorious World War II coalition—the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, China, and France—veto power over the Council’s substantive decisions. This was seen as a way to both protect their individual interests and help perpetuate the wartime alliance, a key goal. These provisions were soon put to a severe test.
When the alliance gave way to the Cold War just a few years after the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco, Moscow began to cast veto after veto, and the Council was paralyzed for much of the next four decades. Critics, particularly from the U.S. Congress, questioned the utility of a Council that was so fundamentally divided. Many called for the elimination of the veto, but the founders had placed the bar for amending the charter—ratification by all five permanent members and two-thirds of the membership as a whole—very high so that their original architecture could withstand shifts in political fortunes. As large numbers of newly independent states from Africa and Asia joined the world body it was the United States that came to rely on its right to block disagreeable Council actions. Over the UN’s first quarter century, the U.S. did not exercise a single veto, but after 1970 it exercised its veto power substantially more often than any of the other four permanent members.
Following the end of the Cold War, the Council rediscovered Chapter VII and began to act more decisively to protect world security. During the 1990s it passed a record number of enforcement, peacekeeping, and nation-building measures. For example, it authorized a U.S.-led military coalition to expel Iraqi forces that had invaded Kuwait in 1991, imposed damaging economic sanctions on Baghdad, and mandated unusually intrusive inspections of Iraqi weapons development. For more than a decade, Iraqi Pres. Saddam Hussein responded with islands of cooperation amid a sea of defiance, a policy that time and again left the Council members divided about how to proceed.
It was thus hardly surprising that the Council members were unable to endorse the use of force against Iraq in 2002–03, despite Pres. George W. Bush’s repeated contention that the very credibility of the Council was at stake. To the president’s critics, the U.S.-U.K. decision to intervene militarily without the explicit authorization of the Council represented what Annan called “a fundamental challenge to the principles on which, however imperfectly, world peace and stability have rested for the last 58 years.” Clearly the rift over the Council’s proper role in international security matters remained as wide as ever.
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The United States had never accepted that it could use force only with the Council’s approval. By their actions over the decades, other countries had made it clear that they too reserved this prerogative for themselves. Prior Council approval of military action had rarely been sought and had infrequently been granted. Of the hundreds of uses of force by various member states since 1945, only a handful had been graced with Council sanction. Even Annan had argued that when the Council is deadlocked over the use of force to relieve a humanitarian calamity, as in the case of Kosovo in 1999, it may be morally, if not legally, justifiable to act outside the UN Charter.
The member states, it seemed, had some significant differences of perspective and values to sort out. But is the nature of the Council’s current malaise primarily institutional or political? Would the cure lie in reshaping the composition and rules of the Council or in addressing the evident political differences between the member states? Should the locus of the surgery, in other words, be within the walls of the Security Council chamber or in national capitals? At this juncture, misdiagnosing what ails the Council could well risk transforming the claim of its irrelevance into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For a decade now the UN member states—now numbering 191—have been engaged in a vigourous and inconclusive debate about what a reformed Security Council should look like. It is widely accepted that the Council should be enlarged from 15 to 20–25 members, in part to correct a perceived underrepresentation of less-developed countries. Perhaps five of these seats would go to new permanent members. Most observers call for greater transparency and accountability in the Council’s decision making and either constraints on or the elimination of the veto. Yet these same voices insist that, in the name of equity, any new permanent members should have the same veto powers as the original five. Under this recipe for gridlock, any one of as many as 10 countries could block, or threaten to block, Council action.
All of this is moot, of course, as long as the member states remain divided over which states should be named to the Council. Indeed, the very factor that prompted Annan’s plea for radical reform—the political crisis within the Council—suggested that the prospects for reaching agreement were even worse today than they were in the mid-1990s, when the last reform push took place. Perversely, for this we should be thankful; the core problem is strategic, not institutional. It hinges on Security Council relations with the U.S., not with the less-developed world. As the 2003 war in Iraq demonstrated, U.S. military capacities far surpass those of other Council members, and the gap is widening. Since 9/11 Americans also feel far more vulnerable to terrorist attacks and, hence, less inclined to place their national defense in the hands of non-Americans. This combination foreshadows both future splits within the Council and the likelihood that the U.S. would consider military options outside the framework of a deadlocked Security Council.
The good news is that a Security Council that could survive the ideological struggles of the Cold War is likely to find ways of adapting to these new political challenges. Even in the midst of the bitter debate over Iraq, the Council members managed to find common ground on acute crises in other parts of the world. The bad news is that those who pressed for an enlargement of the Council and limitations on the veto, in part to counterbalance American influence, were running the risk of creating an organ that was even less reflective of the balance of power outside the organization. This would likely encourage the very trends toward unilateralism in Washington that could eventually undermine the political and strategic foundation of the world body. Part of this foundation from the outset, it should be recalled, was the centrality of American power and vision for the global enterprise. Building a stronger bridge between Washington and Turtle Bay is where reform should begin.