The Toothlessness of the United Nations
What America’s departure as a global leader might mean for the liberal international order.
Yemen or Ukraine, Syria and Iraq or Southern Sudan, there is no lack of the use of arms of the cruelest kind between and inside states. Yet, all UN member states outlawed military aggression long ago. Is it then legitimate to support the Yemeni government by military means against insurgents as the Saudis do, the Assad government against rebels as the Russians do, or the rebels against Assad as the Americans do? The question of the legitimacy of armed interference in the internal affairs of another country always has been extremely sensitive. This is because it touches on a traditional and central privilege of the nation-state: the monopoly on armed force.
Without that monopoly, effective governance is impossible. Without it, the nation-state cannot survive. Similarly on a global level: without a monopoly on military power, no effective global governance is imaginable. Therefore the institutions of the liberal international order created during the 20th century have tried to equip themselves with as much legal authority as possible, including outlawing armed aggression. The United Nations has no monopoly on armed force though; it does not even have armed forces of its own. Only through the Security Council can the United Nations decide to use military means to resolve conflicts or to keep peace. Security Council decisions, however, are subject to the agreement (or at least abstentions) of all five Permanent Members of the Security Council because they wield the power of veto. But as a decision to give legitimacy to the interference in the internal affairs of an independent country would gnaw at the sovereign rights of nation-states over time, such instances are few in the history of the United Nations. The first was a resolution to deploy armed forces against North Korea. That was in 1950. Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, had just attacked the Republic of Korea. The last decision that the international community must use armed force against a sovereign state was taken by the Security Council in 1990, after Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Today, draft resolutions to intervene against Assad because of his use of poison gas against rebels and civilians are regularly vetoed by Russia.
Much of the legal requisitions developed in the system of the United Nations and its sub-organizations can be understood as an effort to maintain the international order without taking recourse to armed force: international agreements with complicated conflict resolution systems, dispute settlement mechanisms, courts and tribunals, provisions for economic coercion. Even the Soviet Union and China with their own ideological systems alien to liberal values accepted this rules-based order as practical and effective. In addition, the United States and its allies over the decades made efforts to safeguard the liberal international order by a whole network of bilateral and multilateral security guarantees and defence alliances.
It is essential to back the value system of the liberal international order by word and by deed.
But as shown by the high number of armed conflicts in many regions of the world, it is a fragile system, notwithstanding all the rules agreed on in numerous international conferences and resolutions. It cannot be anything but fragile as long as the problem of the monopoly of power in the international system has not been resolved.
It is essential to back the value system of the liberal international order by word and by deed. Confronted with new threats to global governance by new state and non-state actors, and by the impact of new technologies and ideologies, we should — if anything — be making efforts to develop that order further.
The United States has been the one reliable pillar of the rules-based international order and the universal values it represents. On May 3, Rex Tillerson, the new secretary of state, said,
“If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value (…), it creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests.”
If meant and taken seriously, that statement is bound to shake the very foundation of that order.
