The race to replace outgoing UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is underway, and as of today, five contenders are vying for the post. As part of the selection process, all candidates have made public their vision for the United Nations and how they see the role of secretary-general.
Assuming all the applicants have been truthful, it is clear from their statements that no one has the slightest idea what the job entails, what its limitations are, or how it should be presented in the future.
The United Nations was born out of a dream that never came true, in a world that never existed. At its core, it embodied President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vision of a post-World War II order that would seek to prevent wars through collective security, international cooperation, and a mechanism to address conflicts before they erupted into open confrontation.
However, these lofty principles did not survive the drafting of the UN Charter, which entered into force on October 24, 1945.
Basically, the UN is a club with two forums: a General Assembly in which all members are represented, and a Security Council with five permanent members and 10 members elected by rotation.
Each of these two pillars is subject to one major limitation: General Assembly votes are not binding and can simply be overridden, making them little more than a show for all practical purposes.
Security Council decisions, while binding in principle, are subject to veto by one or more of its five permanent members – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
From its inception, the club was subject to a built-in constraint, for one main reason: none of the five core members was willing to submit the exercise of its national sovereignty to the dictates of an outside entity.
Adding to this structural imbalance, each member is charged an annual fee based on a complex formula that includes their wealth. The result is that 10 members currently pay 75% of the total membership, while the remaining 183 members only pay about 25%.
The two bookends to the club’s history between its inception and the end of the Cold War were Korea and Iraq. After North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force to repel it.
This decision was only possible because of an unexpected circumstance: the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council at the time and therefore was not present to cast its veto—an oversight the Soviets never repeated.
The result was an American intervention under UN sponsorship, with two caveats: the absence of a veto and the willingness of a state – in this case the US – to commit troops to the effort.
For the next half century, the veto power left the Security Council largely unable to authorize the use of force, and every subsequent conflict, from the Middle East to Vietnam to India-Pakistan, played out beyond the UN’s purview.
On March 20, 2003, the US invaded Iraq. Before the invasion, Washington had tried, albeit informally, to obtain the approval of the Security Council. When that approval failed to materialize, the Bush administration proceeded unilaterally.
The invasion of Iraq highlighted a reality that no one had been willing to face: if a veto-wielding state decides to use force and has the means and will to do so, the international system as defined by the UN Charter is powerless to stop it. In other words, the multilateral security system defined by the UN Charter is essentially a sham.
The UN that emerged from the Cold War and its aftermath is essentially a three-legged stool. It includes the Secretariat; The “technical UN”, consisting of 15 specialized agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Telecommunication Union and the World Health Organization; and, last but not least, the “political UN”, consisting of the General Assembly and the Security Council.
To say that the political UN, as conceived by its founders, is broken is an understatement. With two major ongoing conflicts – one in Ukraine, one in the Middle East – not to mention a number of smaller regional conflicts in Africa and Asia occurring entirely outside the organization’s purview, the political UN as an instrument of collective security has become irrelevant.
Conversely, the technical UN – the specialized agencies – has demonstrated its usefulness, with pinnacles of excellence time after time, albeit with a caveat: left to their own devices, bureaucracies show a tendency to grow beyond reason, especially when not overseen by member states careless in their funding.
Revising the oversight mechanism and delegating it to the private sector, instead of terrible diplomats from member states with no administrative or managerial training, should be a priority.
The UN is a member-run organization. The upshot is that if members want the system to actually work, rather than serve as a casual Band-Aid on a wooden leg, its core—the political UN—needs to be redrawn.
Changing the UN to adapt it to today’s political environment means changing its Charter, and more specifically, the articles dealing with a political UN.
While the General Assembly can remain in its current form, the first and most fundamental demand is the abolition of the Security Council. Such a move would eliminate both the provision that its resolutions are binding and the right of veto, thus making the body acceptable to all governments.
In its place, eight regional security committees should be created – for the Americas, Africa, Europe (including Russia), the Middle East, Central Asia, Asia and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. Each would be autonomous, with its own rules of procedure and funding.
Membership would include all states of the respective regions, allowing them to focus on regional issues rather than being distracted or held hostage by other considerations. Of course, Regional Security Committees would not relieve member countries of concerns about the global balance of power.
But by providing a regional mechanism to address regional problems, they would go a long way toward finding regional solutions or ensuring that regional problems do not escalate into larger confrontations.
