During a scalding address recently, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky challenged the UN to "act immediately" or "dissolve" itself "altogether". The severe indictment was made to the UN Security Council, after a gruesome video of dead bodies in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha showcasing Russian atrocities in Ukraine, came to light. It pictured bodies of dead civilians strewn across the streets. But the received wisdom is that the UN is a toothless tiger. It would help Zelensky to recall how the UN failed to stop the slaughters in Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Darfur, as well as its reluctance to distinguish victim from aggressor.
Why blame the UN alone? The so-called “international community” is an ideological vapour bath every time a big nation pounds a smaller nation. The permanent members of the UNSC, in particular, assume greater responsibility by their leverage in interstate relations and their disproportionate impact in the making of binding resolutions focused on the preservation of international peace and security. But what happens when one of the veto-wielding States becomes the aggressor?
Whether Russian atrocities in Ukraine will be considered at par with the liquidation of Native Americans and indigenous peoples in the US and Canada, of Armenians under the Ottomans, of European Jews in the Holocaust, of Rwandan Tutsis at the hands of Hutu militia in 1994, and thus qualify for genocide is not known. What is clearly known is that the UN has repeatedly failed to confront genocide.
Even some NATO countries, listening now to Zelensky’s pleas for help, have turned their back on genocides and mass atrocities in the past. Despite Zelensky’s promptings, NATO countries have refused to confront Russia militarily, which might be strategically based on the presumption that a NATO intervention would give Putin the moral justification that he now so desperately lacks, helping him to rally his nation and stifle dissent. Zelensky has called for the International Criminal Court in The Hague to send war-crimes investigators as a first step. But such investigations take years, and rarely result in convictions. Besides, Russia, like the US, rejects the jurisdiction of ICC.
The Arab Spring, for example, stands as a testimony to how the “international community”, as a collection of significant actors including major States and intergovernmental institutions, responded to the important political and social development of the movement. But the “international community” is a combative construct, the organisational goodwill of which becomes strained when one of the major stakeholders is the offending side. With Russia being the aggressor, and the international organisations such as the UN, EU and NATO counting eggs, big powers such as China, France, the UK and the US, not to speak of Germany, Japan, India and Saudi Arabia standing at variance on the issue, other regional and smaller nations choosing to play their own games of ball, Ukraine is left literally alone to fend for itself.
Just in case the “international community” thought that America would bail Ukraine out, it helps to remember that it has failed in all the major diplomatic and military missions beginning from its military misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, to its attempts to impose its rules on Russia in Eurasia, to facilitate stabilisation in Ukraine, and finally to prevent North Korea from developing its nuclear programme. Its global legitimacy on the use of force, if any, has been seriously challenged by Russia’s military conflict with Georgia in 2008, by the Kremlin’s subsequent annexation of Crimea, by using force in the Caucasus in 2008 and then, covertly, in 2014 in eastern Ukraine and repeating it in 2022.
It is, as it were, an act of Russian decentralisation of the practice of hard power usage, to which America thought it held a monopoly, that now seeks to put an end to the Western aspiration to further extend NATO’s geopolitical influence. And when it comes to tropes on morality, it is well on record how the US and NATO unilaterally bombed Serbia for more than two months in 1999, followed by a ground incursion into Kosovo, without any UN authorisation under the pretext of “humanitarian intervention”.
After Russia bombed a maternity hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol in Ukraine, the murmur around Russia’s use of banned weapons, including cluster munitions gained ground. The humanitarian excesses in the form of the systematic assault on civilians, on hospitals, on refugee-evacuation routes, on Holocaust memorials, libraries and holy places evoked widespread condemnation from the “international community”. But when it comes to measuring the degree of culpability, it turns out that the US, like both Russia and Ukraine, refuses to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions. From Vietnam to the “secret” bombings of Cambodia and Yemen, the US has used cluster bombs with impunity. How can the pot now call the kettle black?
To Russia’s advantage, a new coalition of non-Western powers has emerged, seeking to diversify global commercial and monetary transactions. It is the rising economies of China, India, Brazil, and others that have challenged the dominant position of the West by establishing cooperative institutional arrangements, including annual meetings of the BRICS and the SCO groupings, the pooling of financial resources, and producing around 30% of global GDP. And now that Russia finds itself ensconced by nationalists, oligarchs, and radicals everywhere as allies, the vulnerability of Western societies stands exposed by a number of factors such as the rise of populism, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump in the US, not to speak of the Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar against Europe and the US. Newer mechanisms to taper off the effects of the sanctions on Russia are on the anvil.
Now, if we argue that the “international community” cannot intervene in big-power rivalry, the US must bear much of the responsibility. Since the end of World War II, the US has constantly sought to change regimes around the world to suit itself – from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, and Syria to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Honduras, etc. During the Cold War, it employed covert action against Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam and Chile, among others. American troops toppled governments in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s significant to note how Putin has exploited the aggressive militarism and past bombing campaigns undertaken by the US and NATO to frame his own justification for his military campaign in Ukraine.
All of this boils down to the fact that Ukraine is practically on its own in this war. The “international community”, Ukraine might conclude, is a sham when the interests of a big power are at stake.