US President Joe Biden
Credit: Reuters Photo
By Andreas Kluth
The whole world, literally, knows that the United Nations and its Security Council are anachronistic, unfair if not downright rigged, generally dysfunctional and in dire need of reform.
On paper, such an upgrade is on the agenda this week, as the General Assembly convenes in New York for the 79th time. In a feat of communication last attempted in Babel, the 193 member states have approved an optimistically titled “Pact for the Future.” Now they have to figure out what that means.
Of more immediate relevance is the speech on Tuesday by the leader of the most powerful member state. The United States is the UN’s host country and largest financial contributor, as well as one of the five permanent and veto-wielding guardians in the Security Council. So it’s big that Joe Biden will lay out bold proposals for that council.
The council’s structure mostly reflects geopolitics at the time of its creation. In 1946, the (still nominally allied) victors of World War II — the US, UK, France, the Soviet Union and Nationalist China — became the five veto powers. Another six seats without vetoes went to countries that rotated in for two years at a time.
A first tweak came in 1965. The UN’s membership had more than doubled as the dissolution of the British, French and other colonial empires spawned new nations. So the great powers expanded the council, adding another four rotating members and making sure that Africa, Asia, Latin America and Western as well as Eastern Europe were represented.
That’s the way it is today, which strikes most of the planet, and especially the Global South with its disproportionate shares of the world’s population and problems, as somewhere between patronizing and risible. Pressure keeps building for a second round of reform.
Biden hinted that he was open to that idea two years ago, when he pledged support for adding permanent members — such as Germany, India and Japan — as well as rotating ones from Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Nothing came of that.
Biden’s offer this week, his swan song at this forum, will be bigger and clearer. In two sneak previews, his representative to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said that the US would support two additional permanent seats for African countries, but without veto power. It also wants another rotating seat for small island states.
That checks several easy boxes for American diplomacy. Always keen to be more popular than Beijing, Washington is eager to turn African countries such as Kenya into new allies. (Biden is also grateful that Kenya is leading a UN mission to pacify Haiti, historically considered to be in America’s bailiwick.) By offering those two seats, Biden hopes that all Africans rejoice at his magnanimity.
Also in the context of its competition with China, Washington is wooing the island nations of the Pacific. That explains the second proposal. Its innovation is to add a cross-regional category to the UN taxonomy, since island states everywhere (39 worldwide, from Nauru to Barbados) would be eligible. What the islands have in common is that they’re most at risk of rising sea levels and climate change, while lacking the clout to do anything about it. Giving them a louder voice at the UN is great virtue signaling for Biden.
But is it any more than that? Unfortunately not. That’s because Biden, via Thomas-Greenfield, has ruled out the one reform that could best address the council’s dysfunction: the veto.
Thomas-Greenfield knows the criticism, but doesn’t indulge it. With some exasperation, she points out that the council has passed more than 180 resolutions in her four years there. Deadlock isn’t total, she implies. The problem is that those 180 mainly include the ones normal people have never heard of. On the biggest issues — Russia’s war in Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East, North Korea’s nukes — the council is permanently stalled.
Russia, which torched the UN Charter by invading Ukraine, blocks any resolution that would condemn this egregious breach and its accompanying atrocities. China generally has Russia’s back. Russia also protects North Korea nowadays. The US, meanwhile, blocks most resolutions regarding Israel’s war in the Gaza strip, unless the text is watered down to banality.
One option for reform is to give the new permanent members the same veto power. That’s what the African nations demand as a group. After all, what’s the value of a seat if you can’t say no to anything? As almost everybody else points out, though, that would gum up the council even more.
The alternative is to scrap veto powers altogether. That would be great for multilateralism, bad for the interests of the great powers. One obvious problem is that all five would have to surrender their prerogative simultaneously. Good luck telling that to the Russians.
Then again, if the US were to lead by calling for such a step, the rest of the world, including the Global South, might rally to its position and turn away from Russia and China. That seems like a good idea.
Alas, it’s not in the cards. “We use our veto to promote the interests of the US government,” Thomas-Greenfield recited when pressed. “And yes, people think it leads to dysfunction. But for us, it is a power that we have, and we do use that power. I’m not going to make any excuses for it.” Oh well. Any other ideas?
Lots, actually. As Anjali Dayal, a scholar of international law, points out, the US could do much, even short of abolition, to restrain the veto. For example, the UN Charter already stipulates that states must abstain from voting (which includes vetoing) when their own interests are at stake. Could somebody enforce that, please?
The UN could also require that powers wielding their veto must appear before the General Assembly (and potentially be shamed in the court of world opinion), or even that the assembly can override a veto with a supermajority.
If there is any leadership at all on this subject, it comes not from the US but from the least powerful of the “permanent 5,” France and the UK. Neither has used its veto since 1989. In 2013, France even suggested a rule that suspends all veto powers in cases of mass atrocities or genocide. Taken up by Mexico, the initiative has the backing of more than a hundred member states.
Even here, the devil is in the details. What counts as genocide? Many people include Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, but two veto powers, Moscow and Beijing, won’t. What about Israel’s bombing of Gaza? The International Court of Justice in The Hague is grappling with that one; the US will simply say no.
It would be naive to blame any single country for the dysfunction of the system. It merely reflects a chaotic world, which, in the absence of a global government, tends toward anarchy. But that’s why the US has, since midwifing the United Nations after World War II, seen itself as the hegemon providing order when necessary.
That ambition is now gone. If Donald Trump succeeds Biden, he will snub the “globalists” at the UN and let the institution unravel. If Kamala Harris wins, she’ll carry on in Biden’s vein. That means, as Biden will show this week, signaling virtue while nodding to vice.