A clearly anguished Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on April 5 castigated the United Nations Security Council members for their inaction on alleged Russian atrocities in Ukraine: “Are you ready to close the UN? Do you think that the time of international law is gone?” We asked Thomas G Weiss, a veteran scholar with expertise in the politics of the United Nations, to discuss the historic role of the Security Council and what its failure to stop the carnage in Ukraine means over the long term.
What did you think when you heard Zelenskyy’s questions?
I was impressed by his honesty. There is a saying in Washington that a gaffe is when the truth is spoken inadvertently. Well, he was not speaking it inadvertently. He was speaking openly and directly. He was speaking truth to power in that instance. The UN Charter has been violated many times, but this really was an egregious violation by a single country, Russia.
However, we all know the shortcomings of exaggeration. The number of times that, as Mark Twain would have said, the UN’s death has been prematurely declared are numerous. But this inaction really is a black eye for the UN that is in the news, day in and day out. It is going to be impossible to ignore this tragedy and ignore his testimony in front of the Security Council.
What did you mean by saying Russia’s actions were a violation of the UN Charter?
The Kellogg Briand Act at the end of the 1920s was an international treaty that outlawed war. Well, that did not go very well. But the UN Charter was a step in the right direction by trying to eliminate the illegal use of force, backed up with the threat of military action.
The use of force was only supposed to be permitted in self-defence or when the Security Council authorised it. The Charter’s provisions have been violated on numerous occasions. But this time is the most egregious violation seen recently, with a major power trying to swallow up a smaller country next door. That is one of the things that supposedly was put behind us, but clearly, it has not been.
When the UN was established, what was the Security Council supposed to be and do?
The idea was that there would be an automatic response to aggression, with the condition that the five permanent members – at that time, China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, all allies who defeated Germany’s fascism in World War II – would agree.
Later, that meant the UN would respond if the permanent members at least did not object, including economic, judicial and military responses. You did not need five affirmative votes, but you could not have any negative votes, which constituted a veto. Unless the five agree – and that obviously is not a lot of the time because they all have friends and foes – there is no decision, and this was the way it was supposed to function.
So while you can agree with Zelenskyy, actually the Security Council is functioning exactly the way it was supposed to work.
So one country could exercise veto power straight from the beginning. Was there a recognition then that such a structure ran the risk of disempowering the organisation?
A greater risk was that there would be no organisation.
Without the veto, Congress would not have signed on to the US joining the UN, and clearly, without the veto, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin would not have signed on either. The idea was during World War II these allies got along, and they were supposed to continue getting along. But that working proposition obviously evaporated. I mean, the ink was hardly dry on the 1945 UN Charter before this cooperation ended – recall that Winston Churchill already spoke of the “iron curtain” in March 1946.
But there is also a second reason behind the structure, which applies currently. In terms of the war on Ukraine, it explains, I think, the prudence that certainly US President Joe Biden and the West, in general, has applied.
Part of the logic at the founding was, “Listen, it is all for one and we come automatically to the rescue if there is aggression – unless, of course, it is a major power. And if it is a major power, let us not at least make things worse. Let us not start World War III by taking on China or the US or the Soviet Union.”
And that principle continues to apply, alas, to other nuclear powers. The Security Council would never agree to take on India, would never agree to take on Pakistan, and would not even agree to take on North Korea.
Has the five-member veto power diminished the UN’s status with the public?
It certainly means that the United Nations in the area of international peace and security is really hamstrung.
The awful truth is that this beast works when member states want it to work, and it does not when they do not. Once governments decide to do something, and they are on the same wavelength, it works. But that certainly is not the majority of the time.
I think we should still remember that, even while the hopeless Security Council is acting hopelessly in Ukraine, other parts of the UN continue to help. There are four and a half million Ukrainian refugees that the UN High Commissioner on Refugees is trying to assist.
At the same time, there happens to be United Nations Children’s Fund struggling to help children in Ukraine and refugee kids elsewhere while trying valiantly to further girls’ education in Afghanistan. That is the bulk of what the UN does most days of the week, serving in other humanitarian emergencies, protecting human rights, and trying to publicise the disastrous condition of the human environment and climate change.
Is there a danger – through the current lack of action by the Security Council – that it could be damaged by what’s going on in Ukraine? So Vladimir Putin in one way has assured the cohesion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but this war could hurt the United Nations?
It certainly might. It is a little hard to know whether the war in Ukraine would be lethal to the institution’s future. As I say, the UN has been declared to be on life support on numerous previous occasions. Yet, despite all of the black eyes, an annual Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll has found for decades that around 60% of the US public support the UN. I would be very surprised if the handling of Ukraine ended up inflicting terminal damage on the UN, but it is going to take awhile to recover. And we still do not know what the end of this mess is, so we will probably have to have the same conversation in a month or six months.
The UN could have done better on numerous occasions, as I argue in my book Would the World Be Better without the UN. But it also could have done far worse. The planet would be worse off without a Secretary-General to do shuttle diplomacy during the Cuban Missile Crisis or the UN’s deployment of peacekeepers on the Golan Heights.
And do we really want to do without an organisation that can get rid of smallpox and is close to getting rid of guinea worm and malaria? I think the answer to that is no.
Thomas G Weiss is a Presidential Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center.
This article first appeared on The Conversation.