The Soviet Union, along with the United States and Great Britain, was one of the three countries that contributed most to the writing of the United Nations Charter. Russia is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Russia has always had a special weight in the affairs of the world organization, and it will also play an important part in determining the direction the organization will take in the confusing and dangerous world of the 21st century.

From 1945

From its earliest days, the United Nations has had to live with certain basic false assumptions. Because the Charter was written before the end of World War II, the work and membership of its most important organ, the Security Council, was based on the assumption that the victorious wartime alliance would stay together to monitor, and, if necessary, to enforce world peace. The leaders of the victorious wartime alliance became the five permanent members of the Council whose unanimity was to be the basis of the Council’s capacity to act. If that unanimity was regularly broken by the veto, the Council would to a large extent be paralyzed. Even now that the Cold War has been over for fifteen years, the unanimity of the permanent five, as we saw last year over Iraq, still cannot be taken for granted.

The authors of the Charter believed that arms races had been a major cause of war in the past. One of the basic ideas of the Charter was that a collective security system, monitored and, if necessary, enforced by the five permanent members, would permit a major degree of world disarmament. Within four years of the signing of the Charter, however, the greatest arms race in history, including weapons of mass destruction, was under way among the permanent members of the Security Council. From being the designated guardians of peace and security, they had themselves become the greatest threat to world peace.

That is not the only paradoxical element in the history of the Security Council. Today conventional weapons, and especially small arms, account for virtually all the casualties in the conflicts that rage around the world at any given time. The permanent members of the Security Council account for more than 80 percent of the thriving arms trade that sustains these conflicts.

After the original dream of the United Nations collapsed, the organization had to find its way through the forty years of the Cold War by a process of improvisation and readjustment. The Security Council was paralyzed for much of the time by the lack of unanimity of its permanent members. The speed of the decolonization process had not been anticipated at San Francisco and created points of friction and conflict in several sensitive regions – Kashmir, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and, later on, in Cyprus and the Congo and other parts of Africa. In order to prevent such regional disturbances from triggering what everyone on the planet feared most, a nuclear confrontation between East and West, the Security Council was able to agree to – or at least not to oppose – a means of containing regional conflicts without the direct involvement of the Soviet Union and the United States. Thus was born the technique that is now called peacekeeping – non-forceful operations managed by the Secretary-General under the general authority of the Security Council.

The Secretary-General was originally intended to be a predominantly administrative official. Another unanticipated consequence of the Cold War was a large expansion of the political role of the Secretary-General. With the Security Council paralyzed and the superpowers suspended in the balance of nuclear terror, an elected, high international official, universally recognized as non-partisan and serving only the United Nations, proved on a number of occasions to be a life-saving asset for the international community, especially in resolving critical situations between East and West. The Secretary-General’s political role now occupies most of his time and energy.

When the Cold War unexpectedly came to an end, there was a brief period when it seemed that the Security Council might at last be able to work in the way the Charter had envisaged. The Council’s legitimizing role in evicting Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait was an exemplary use of Chapter VII of the Charter, which provides for forceful action against aggression. During the 1990s, however, it became clear that the nature of the problems that came before the Council was changing. Conflicts between states had largely given way to disorders within sovereign nations. The old peacekeeping technique, designed to contain conflicts between states, was far less suited to dealing with the collapse of governmental authority, and with violence and massive suffering within national borders, in places like Somalia, Bosnia, Mozambique, Cambodia or Angola.  Nonetheless, of seventeen such operations mandated by the Security Council, only three – Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda – were unquestionable failures. Perhaps the most important general development of the 1990s, especially after the UN’s failure to stop the Rwanda genocide, was that the question of humanitarian intervention by the United Nations could no longer be ignored. Indeed, by the end of the decade, it seemed to be the most pressing security issue for the immediate future.

The 21st century

The events of the early 21st century took the United Nations, and the world, in a very different direction. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the radical national security policies of the George W. Bush administration, the second Iraq war, and the persistence of global suicide terrorism have created a climate of alarm and confusion that is only now, in 2004, beginning to resolve itself into new agreements, better international relations, and a common resolve to face the new dangers together.

One of Washington’s reactions to the tragedy of September 11 was to declare a radical new national security policy of unilateral preventive, or even preemptive, war. This policy was in contravention of the basic principle contained in Article 2.4 of the Charter – that all nations should refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial or political integrity of any state. For this reason, and because a widespread adoption of such a policy would be catastrophic, it caused serious international concern. Succeeding events have shown some of the practical difficulties of preventive or preemptive war. The operation against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and, even more starkly, the occupation of Iraq, have shown that even the greatest military power, although it can easily win the opening battle, will have the utmost difficulty in dealing with guerilla or terrorist resistance, with setting up a new representative government, or with bringing preventive military operations to a satisfactory conclusion. It has also become clear that preventive operations depend upon a degree of accurate intelligence that was not available in the case of the second Iraq war. In other words, unilateral preventive action is far from being the realistic and practical policy that some assumed it to be two years ago.

The situation in Iraq has also changed. The invasion of Iraq by the American-led coalition in March 2003 with no Security Council legitimization caused a rancorous division among the membership of the United Nations. After more than a year, during which the initial victory over Saddam Hussein was followed by an increasingly chaotic and bloody occupation, a new stage has been reached. With the assistance of the Secretary-General’s representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, it was possible to put together an interim government in Baghdad to which sovereignty has now been handed over by the United States. And in a new and unanimous resolution the Security Council has defined and legitimized the steps to be taken by the United Nations and its members for the future of Iraq. Although there are still enormous problems and risks ahead, at least the United Nations consensus over Iraq has been restored, and the United States has been partially extricated from an impossible situation, although its troops are still the main element of security in Iraq.

After all the divisiveness and frustration of 2003, the UN has to some extent resumed its proper place in international affairs, but serious questions remain. The United States declared the policy of unilateral preventive or preemptive war because Washington believed that there was no other effective way of confronting the new dangers so dramatically exemplified by the attacks of September 11, 2001. Its recent experiences with preventive war in Afghanistan and Iraq may well have modified that view, but how far is the United Nations, in its present state, capable of playing a central role in ensuring international peace and security in a world where many nations have become, or feel they have become, dramatically less secure? Does the Security Council, for all its excellent resolutions on terrorism or nuclear proliferation, have the practical capacity to help nations to deal with the new face of danger – the deadly triad of global suicide terrorism, the possible proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the problem of rogue or dysfunctional states?

The United Nations: Strengths, weaknesses, and new challenges

The Secretary-General and his special representatives throughout the world have proved their usefulness again and again. The quiet diplomacy of Kofi Annan and his team is little known to the public. Indeed its confidentiality is one of its major assets. The work of Lakhdar Brahimi, for example, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, was indispensable to setting up interim governments and moving the process forward toward constitution-building and elections. The Secretary-General and his representatives, however, have only skill, integrity, determination and patience. Action backed by real power, even force, has to originate in the Security Council.

Timely decision-making has often been a problem for the Security Council in the past. Even after the Rwanda genocide and the Council’s total failure to take any action in time, there is still no general agreement on humanitarian intervention. For example, apart from the efforts of the Secretary-General, nothing practical has yet been done to check the brutal ethnic cleansing of more than one million people in the Darfur region of Sudan.

It seems certain that the immediate action required to deal with threats of terrorism, perhaps combined with nuclear proliferation, will be even more difficult for the Council to decide on. In the past the Council has usually reacted to events rather than anticipating them. In normal situations this is certainly much better than doing nothing at all, but faced with the threat of terrorism and proliferation, mere reaction to disaster is obviously not enough. Such threats will originate from groups completely outside the traditional international community – groups that will not be deterred by diplomatic, economic, or military pressure. Often only expeditious action will have any hope of success. Thus it may well be that the future effectiveness of the Council will depend on a radical change in its attitude to emergency preventive intervention. This is one of the most difficult questions the Council has yet faced.

In the past the Council has encountered other problems that cause delay and give the impression of lack of authority. I have already mentioned lack of unanimity among the permanent members. Often in the past, the effort to avoid a veto has caused long delays in reaching a decision and has also resulted in feeble compromise resolutions in crises that demand rapid and decisive action. Moreover, the Council’s current permanent membership represents the world’s power structure in 1945 and is now to a considerable extent an anachronism. Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America have no permanent representation on the Council. This is yet another problem that will require attention if the authority and standing of the Council are to be strengthened.
Another serious problem is the present lack of United Nations physical capacity to act. The UN has no reliable standing capacity to take emergency action. At present it takes at least three months to assemble and deploy a peacekeeping force. The member governments have so far rejected all suggestions for a small standing UN rapid reaction force, so when immediate action is required the world must look elsewhere. This is one of the United Nations’ greatest weaknesses, and, incidentally, one of the strongest arguments for unilateral preventive action, although experience, as I have mentioned above, is showing that that approach does not work very well either. NATO, various “coalitions of the willing,” regional organizations, and sometimes individual countries – Australia in East Timor, for example – are increasingly called on to take on emergency peacekeeping duties until the United Nations can organize a peacekeeping force. In the worst of crises, like Rwanda, the UN was unable to find a single country willing to act in its name. Sixty years after its foundation, the United Nations, whose primary function is the maintenance of international peace and security, still has no capacity of its own to take immediate practical action. In the light of the new threats to security, which will certainly demand swift action, the Security Council should also consider this problem again.

The events of the first four years of the 21st century have shown the value, as well as the weaknesses, of the United Nations. Those events have also shown that the international community is facing new forms of danger that will demand new forms of action, reaction, and cooperation. For the United Nations, the world’s primary agency for peace and security and its center for harmonizing the policies of nations on important matters, this is an especial challenge. The Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change is expected to deliver its report before the end of this year. The quality of its proposals, and the reaction of the Security Council and other UN organs to them, will be a test of the organization’s ability to adapt to change. Only an evident willingness to adapt and to renew its sense of mission will inspire, in the governments and peoples of the world, the confidence and support that will allow the United Nations to meet the challenge of the years ahead.