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 the contenders have made public their vision for the United Nations and how they see the role of the secretary-general.
Assuming all the contenders have been truthful, it is clear from their statements that none has the least idea about what the job entails, what its constraints are or how it should be presented in the future.
The United Nations was born from a dream that never materialized, in a world that never existed. At its core, it embodied the vision espoused by President Franklin D. Roosevelt 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 took effect on October 24, 1945.
In essence, 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 on a rotating basis.
Each of these two pillars is subject to one major constraint: General Assembly votes are not binding and can simply be overlooked, making them little more than a show for all practical purposes.
Security Council decisions, while binding in principle, are subject to the veto of one or more of its five permanent members — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
From its very inception, the club was subject to a built-in limitation, for one overriding reason: none of the five main members was willing to subject the exercise of its national sovereignty to the dictates of an outside entity.
Compounding this structural imbalance, each member is charged an annual fee based on a complex formula that includes its wealth. The result is that 10 members currently pay 75% of the total membership fees, while the remaining 183 members pay at most about 25%.
The two bookends marking the club’s history between its inception and the end of the Cold War were Korea and Iraq. Following North Korea’s invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force to repel it.
That decision was possible only because of an unexpected circumstance: The Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council at the time and thus 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.
Over the following 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 Security Council endorsement. When that endorsement failed to materialize, the Bush administration went ahead unilaterally.
The invasion of Iraq underscored a reality no one had been willing to confront: If a state holding the right of veto decides to use force and has the means and the will to do so, the international system as defined by the UN Charter is powerless to stop it. Put another way, 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,” made up 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,” composed 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 conflicts ongoing — one in Ukraine, one in the Middle East — not counting 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 occasional peaks of excellence, albeit with one caveat: Left to themselves, bureaucracies show a tendency to grow beyond reason, especially when unsupervised by member states careless in their funding.
Reviewing the oversight mechanism and delegating it to the private sector, rather than to timorous diplomats from member states with no administrative or management training, should be a priority.
The UN is a member-driven organization. The upshot is that if members want the system to actually work, rather than serve as an occasional Band-Aid on a wooden leg, its core — the political UN — must be redrawn.
Changing the UN to adapt it to today’s political environment means changing its Charter, and most specifically, the articles relating to the political UN.
While the General Assembly can endure in its present form, the first and fundamental requirement is to abolish the Security Council. Doing so 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 set up — 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 the states of the respective regions, allowing them to focus on regional issues rather than be distracted or held hostage by other considerations. Granted, the Regional Security Committees would not free member states from concerns about the global balance of power.
But by providing a regional mechanism to address regional problems, they would go a long way toward either finding regional solutions or ensuring regional problems do not escalate into larger confrontations.
