Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: Repairing the Security Council

Richard Butler

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1999

Article preview: first 500 of 1,555 words total.

Summary:  The U.N. Security Council has suffered a disastrous year: ignored by NATO, defied by Iraq, and hamstrung by great-power vetoes. Here's how to fix it.

Richard Butler is Diplomat in Residence at the Council on Foreign Relations. For the past two years, he was Executive Chairman of the United Nations Special Commission, the body charged with disarming Iraq. Prior to that, he served for five years as Australia's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York.

For the first half of the decade since the Cold War's end, the atmosphere in the U.N. Security Council was decidedly improved. With less East-West divisiveness, the council met more frequently and did more business. Only seven vetoes were cast in the post-Cold War period, versus 240 in the first 45 years of U.N. life. Twenty peacekeeping operations were mandated, more than the total for all the preceding years.

But then the initial optimism about the Security Council's ability to get its job done in a vetoless world turned sour. Particularly dismaying were the last 12 months, during which the council was bypassed, defied, and abused.

It was bypassed when NATO began military action against Slobodan Milosev«c's Yugoslavia without first seeking the Security Council approval that NATO countries knew would be vetoed by Russia and China. The fundamental significance of NATO's slight was not diminished by the post-conflict agreement of NATO and Russia to seek Security Council endorsement and U.N. participation in the policing and administration of Kosovo.

The Security Council was defied by Saddam Hussein, who correctly assessed that he could get away with disobeying the council's disarmament resolutions thanks to a combination of influential friends on the council, a general loss of will within the body, and a sympathetic secretary-general. During the past eight years, many but not all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been eliminated. Disarmament tasks remain to be completed, however, and monitoring and verification systems need to be secured to ensure that Saddam does not reconstitute his illegal weapons. Yet the Security Council has been unable to reach a decision that would restore, even in a modified way, the implementation of its own law. Indeed, some members -- including, incredibly, Canada, a nonpermanent member of the council -- have sought to lower the standard of Iraqi compliance.

Council procedures have also been abused. China prevented minor peacekeeping operations from proceeding in Guatemala and Macedonia and threatened to do the same in Haiti, merely because those countries had dealt with Taiwan. Although vetoes driven more by national interest than any sense of collective responsibility were common during the Cold War, they have been less so since, with nothing comparable to these Chinese vetoes, delivered and threatened. Such use of the veto is dramatically distant from that envisoned at the 1945 U.N. founding conference or by reasonable people today.

The five major powers were given permanent seats on the council to ensure their commitment to the new body. They were given the veto for a very limited and specific reason: to allow them to prevent a council decision authorizing the use of force against them. Beyond that, they were expected to exercise collective responsibility for "the maintenance of international peace and security."

Yet the Security Council's ability to function as the guardian of international peace and security has been thrown into question by the incidents depicted above. In all these cases, permanent members have weighted their narrow national interests over collective responsibility.

FIXING IT

End of preview: first 500 of 1,555 words total.