Reining in the U.N.: Mistaking the Instrument for the Actor

Ernest W. Lefever

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993

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Summary:  The United Nations is only an instrument of sovereign states occasionally useful in specific crises. When used hastily or inappropriately, it risks internationalizing and prolonging local conflicts.

The United Nations is not and cannot be a political actor in a world of sovereign states. Despite the successful Persian Gulf War coalition, the humanitarian effort in Somalia and repeated calls for strengthening U.N. peacekeeping capability, the Security Council is no substitute for alliances, ad hoc Great Power coalitions or unilateral U.S. foreign policy initiatives. The United Nations on occasion may be a useful instrument to serve the parallel interests of the United States and other major powers in addressing specific crises. But this consequential difference between actor and instrument has been frequently confused, especially since the Cold War's end.

One should not be surprised if U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali considers the United Nations, indeed the position of secretary general itself, as an international actor with the power to make and maintain peace in troubled regions. Even critics of the United Nations often accept that U.N.-authorized troops may have an "international legitimacy" that allied or unilateral military actions do not. But both this modest claim and the more extravagant ones of the secretary general call for critical comment.

THE WRECKAGE OF WILSONIANISM

Both views must be seen against the backdrop of a persistent Wilsonian idealism that has been rejuvenated in the wake of the Security Council-blessed Gulf War. President Woodrow Wilson helped to usher in the idea of a League of Nations that sought to sanitize and order world politics. At the dawn of the United Nations in 1943, Secretary of State Cordell Hull predicted that "there will no longer be any need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power ... by which in the unhappy past the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests."

But the long weekend between Versailles and Pearl Harbor was quickly littered with the whitened bones of failed expectations. The World Court was powerless to resolve disputes, and the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war did no better. The League could not stop Mussolini or Hitler or prevent Japan from rearming. The symbols and machinery of international cooperation were tragically irrelevant as the world was racked by tyranny, aggression and civil conflict. The juggernaut of war rolled on.

The fateful decisions of war and peace, tyranny and freedom, were made by the governments of sovereign states--usually unilaterally, sometimes in alliance with other states, and very rarely with the assistance or sanction of any international body. This fact was true of both the enemies of freedom and its defenders.

The secretary general has claimed that the United Nations "invented peacekeeping." But more often peace has been created and maintained by the decisions of independent states taken to curb turbulence or to deter expansionist powers. The decisions of the United States to enter the world wars were unilateral and contributed mightily to world peace. In World War II the U.S. effort, alongside that of its allies, led to the defeat of Hitler's Germany and of Japan. Five years later, President Truman's move to counter North Korean aggression ...

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