The UN Security Council Doesn’t Provide Security

By Tibor Nagy, former Ambassador and recently Assistant Secretary of State for Africa

It’s heartbreaking. All over the world millions of innocent people suffering the horrors of conflict – death, destruction, sexual violence, starvation – have a hope in the “International Community” at some point coming to the rescue, but the truth is the cavalry isn’t coming because there is neither a real cavalry nor a real International Community. And even if some United Nations “blue helmets” arrive, their mission will be under-resourced and most likely fail. So, the only hope for long suffering victims in Congo, Yemen, Syria, Mali, South Sudan and Cameroon (among others) – recently joined by millions in Sudan and Haiti – is that the violence will eventually be extinguished through sheer exhaustion or one side “winning” over the other(s), and that they survive.

Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Immediately after World War II, Roosevelt and Churchill planned a global institution which would safeguard the global order, unlike the disbanded League of Nations which failed miserably to prevent the war. Central to this task was to be the Security Council (UNSC) – to which the new United Nations’ charter delegated the “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” And key to the UNSC’s ability to fulfill this role were the Permanent Five (P5) members – the winners of WWII - the US, Britain, Soviet Union (Russia), France, and China (then represented by Taiwan). The council also had six rotating members (now 10) representing various world regions, but only the P5 had individual veto power to nullify any UNSC resolution. To conduct this overwhelming mandate, the UNSC was given broad powers to intervene to address conflicts or international tensions: diplomacy; sanctions; arms embargoes; and use of force known as Peace Keeping Operations (PKOs).

Unfortunately, from the beginning geopolitical realities turned this promise of global peace and security into a cruel hoax for the victims of conflicts. The same ideological split which emerged in the world between Communism and the West also divided the Council. For example, the only reason the UN was able to engage in the Korean War to stop North Korean/Communist Chinese aggression against South Korea was because the Soviet (Russian) P5 representative was boycotting the UNSC meetings. If not, the Soviets would have vetoed the operation. And the UN has no standing military force, meaning that it depends on member nations to provide them when the UNSC authorizes a PKO. The operations themselves have strict limits on what forces can and cannot do, can only be launched with the consent of the parties in conflict, and must maintain “impartiality.” These constraints are not a formula for success.

The dismal results are telling. There have been 57 PKOs since the UN’s inception, with about half in Africa. Some still ongoing operations (Arab/Israeli conflict, India/Pakistan) began way back in the 1940s, while others started in the 60s and 70s (Cyprus, Golan Heights), and more recent ones in the 90s and 2000s (Western Sahara, Kosovo, Darfur, Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Mali). A look around Africa, a region I know well, shows that no UN PKO has fully succeeded in ending the suffering it was launched to resolve. And two of the greatest human disasters in the world, the Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi and the Srebrenica massacre of Bosniaks in Bosnia happened under the noses of UN peacekeepers, whose missions were under-resourced, understaffed, and unprepared.

If anything, the divisions within the UNSC are even worse today than they were during the Cold War. Now we have a multipolar world and China’s P5 seat is held by the Chinese Communist Party, with its policy of “non-interference” in the “domestic” affairs of other states so it can gain favor with autocrats around the world – no matter how cruel or odious. We also have a rogue Russia, whose aggression in Ukraine speaks for itself, and its willingness to use its Wagner mercenaries to destabilize fragile countries and prop up dictators shows there are no limits to its malevolence. It’s not only our adversaries, even “friends” like France prevent the UNSC from taking up conflicts like Cameroon’s civil war because of its friendship with the Cameroon regime. I have the greatest respect for our very able Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, whose indefatigable efforts to cool global hotspots are constantly stymied by P5 vetoes and whose frustration level must be stratospheric.

So, what to do, and how to make the UNSC’s $6.4 Billion “peacekeeping” budget – of which the US pays about $2 Billion - more effective? One suggested “reform” the Biden administration supports is expanding the UNSC membership and the P5 with longer terms for non-permanent members to reflect current global realities. But there is no agreement as to which nations should join the P5 and would adding more potential vetoes really make the UNSC more effective? Just increasing membership would lead to more speeches, more conferences, and less action. There has also been discussion of taking away the veto power of permanent members, but they would have to agree, and the chances of that are nil.

To make the UNSC truly effective, the UN charter needs a major rewrite to add more muscle to PKOs, eliminate the need to get consent from parties engaged in conflicts for a PKO, and allow the UNSC to adopt resolutions based on a majority of the P5 rather than unanimity. But again, the chance for such radical change in today’s world is zero. For now we must live in the Twilight Zone where the noble goals of the UN charter exist only on paper and there is no cavalry to ride to the rescue of the millions of victims of needless conflicts. It’s also a world which invites brutal outfits like Wagner to fill the void left empty by ineffective peacekeeping.

Ambassador Tibor Nagy was most recently Assistant Secretary of State for Africa after serving as Texas Tech’s Vice Provost for International Affairs and a 30-year career as a US Diplomat. He is a Fellow of the American College of National Security Leaders.

Ambassador Tibor Nagy
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See also: Why Peacekeeping Does Not Promote Peace by ACNSL Fellow Ambassador Dennis C. Jett, August 7, 2023