THE United Nations Security Council is in the midst of debates that focus on its ability to respond to international crises.
Among the UN’s six primary bodies, the Security Council is tasked with maintaining global peace and security. It determines the existence of a threat to the peace or act of aggression. Then it acts as the arbiter, bringing together parties to a dispute to negotiate a settlement.
Early in its existence, it carried out its mandate successfully, negotiating an end to civil disturbances in Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador and Liberia.
The council’s intervention in the crises in Iran in 1946 and the Suez Canal in 1956 prevented the dangerous escalation of the Cold War.
But geopolitical realities have since evolved, making it more difficult for the Security Council to respond to crisis situations. Today, there is a growing concern that wars, political dissension and eroding respect for international law are pushing the UN system to a breaking point.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the number of conflicts is at its highest since the UN was founded in 1945. The conflicts have also become more complicated, with superpowers often taking sides, requiring a more studied approach.
At the same time, calls for reforms within the Security Council have grown louder, with smaller member states demanding a bigger role in the decision-making process.
The council’s power structure hasn’t changed in eight decades, with the same clique of superpowers — the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russia and China — still holding court.
That means the voices of the billions of people in Africa and Latin America are not heeded.
Zheenbek Kulubaev, Kyrgzstan’s foreign minister, framed the issue squarely. “The Security Council is not a closed club,” he said early in the debate. “It is not a space reserved only for those who have more power.”
Instead of “approaches based on confrontation or bloc politics,” the emphasis should be on dialogue, balance and cooperation, Kulubaev added.
Petr Macinka, Czechia’s deputy prime minister, totally agrees with Kulubaev. “While great powers speak about world order, smaller nations focus on what happens when that order breaks down,” Macinka said.
There are other inherent faults in the UN system. Critics lash out at the council’s veto-deadlock mechanism, in which a single permanent member can kill any proposed initiative.
The council’s permanent members have invoked their veto power more than 300 times. Russia (and the former Soviet Union) leads the list, using dozens of vetoes mainly to deny countries perceived to be US allies from joining the UN.
The US has used the veto 93 times, most of them to block resolutions critical to its staunch ally, Israel.
Invoking vetoes has made the council practically powerless in resolving major conflicts like the wars in Ukraine, which involves Russia, and the Middle East, where Israel has been engaged in combat in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
China vetoed the sending of UN peacekeepers to Guatemala and Macedonia because those countries recognized Taiwan.
Still, the Security Council has not been a total disappointment. It remains the only forum where the world’s most powerful nations come together and try to work things out. And, with little fanfare, it has passed resolutions that have made an impact on the fight against terrorism and on protecting humanitarian aid workers in the frontlines.
Reforms have been proposed, but the initiative to move them forward is glaringly absent. Those who wield power in the council generally are not inclined to share it with member states who are less politically and economically endowed. That is the old-boys-club mentality at work.
The international think tank Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) looks at the Security Council as an archaic institution that “reflects the geopolitical realities of 1945, not those of the twenty-first century. As a result, the council is increasingly viewed as illegitimate and ineffective.”
The CFR suggests nothing less than an amendment to the UN Charter that will need a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly to go with the approval of all five permanent Security Council members.
Only by repairing the deep political fissures within can the Security Council regain its credibility.
