Alona Onyshchuk, 39, visits her husband’s grave with her daughter, Anhelina, 5, on 22 January. He is buried in the Alley of Heroes, a row of fallen soldiers, at a cemetery in Lozuvatka, a village in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine. (photo: OSV News/Alina Smutko, Reuters)
As global conflicts continue unabated and without mediation or solutions, the United Nations faces serious challenges to its credibility and effectiveness as a force of world peace and security — this on the cusp of its 80th anniversary next year.
The Preamble to the U.N. Charter, as established in 1945, states: “We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”
At the time of the charter’s publication, many global capital cities were in ruins or damaged. When the charter speaks of the “scourge of war,” the horror is fresh and palpable: Between 110 and 125 million people died or were wounded between the beginning of World War I in 1914 and the end of World War II in 1945. The horrors of the atomic age unleashed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki charged the founders of the worldwide body with a singular purpose — to prevent future wars.
Reflecting on the causes of both wars, the United Nations saw the following among its primary means to preventing war:
“All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”
“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations” (U.N. Charter, Article 2, Nos. 3 and 4).”
In the first quarter of the 21st century, the direct and indirect involvement in global conflicts of two of the global body’s founding members — the United States and the Russian Federation — contradict the U.N. Charter and serve as major challenges to the United Nations’ peace efforts. While each of these conflicts has its own rationale system on the part of the agents, they are generally not supported or considered justified by the majority of the member states of the U.N. General Assembly.
In the structure of the United Nations, there are six “organs.”1 We are concerned with three of those organs: the General Secretariat, the General Assembly and, especially, the Security Council.
The Security Council is the most powerful and arguably least democratic of the three organs. It alone has the authority to issue resolutions that are binding on member states (General Assembly resolutions are non-binding). Its resolutions are enforced by U.N. peacekeepers, that is, military forces voluntarily provided by member states and funded independently of the main U.N. budget.
The Security Council consists of the five permanent members — the P-5 — and 10 members elected by the General Assembly to two-year terms by geographic region. Any member of the P-5 can veto any substantive resolution even if the vote is 14 against 1.
This means if the actions of any member of the P-5 become the topic of the Security Council and a resolution is passed, that P-5 member can simply veto it. Practically, if any P-5 member is engaged in an activity contrary to the U.N. Charter or international law, its absolute veto power can nullify any sanction or condemnation from the Security Council, acting as a form of immunity.
Most recently, the P-5 veto has played a (not helpful) role in the attempts to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza. Although a large majority of the Security Council supported a cease-fire, the United States effectively cast a veto three times (18 October 2023, 8 December 2023, and 20 February 2024). On 22 March 2024, Russia and China vetoed a cease-fire resolution proposed to the Security Council by the United States. Finally, the council passed a cease-fire in Gaza, with 14 members in favor and the United States abstaining.
Insofar as the “battle of the veto” goes, there are great similarities between the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. Russia will veto any resolution not favorable to its own interests just as the United States did regarding its own interests and those of Israel.
In both conflicts, the credibility of the U.N. structure is being called into question. Very broadly speaking, the United States and its allies see and respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an imperialist attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty. Many members from the Global South look on Israel’s invasion of Gaza as an act of settler colonialist aggression. The U.N. peace apparatus has, for the most part, been incapable of reaching a just solution to either conflict because the interests of two P-5 Security Council members with absolute veto power are involved.
A brief look at the history of vetoes by the permanent members is instructive. For the first 25 years of its existence, all but five of the 85 vetoes cast by the five permanent members came from the then-Soviet Union.
Throughout the entire history of the United Nations, the People’s Republic of China has cast 19 vetoes; the United Kingdom, 29; France, 16. Many of the Chinese vetoes were cast with Russia; most of the British and French vetoes, through 23 December 1989, were cast with the United States. The rest of the vetoes were cast by the U.S.S.R./Russian Federation (128) and the United States (86).
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the United States has cast 18 vetoes, 16 of which dealt with Israel and Palestine. No other P-5 member joined the United States in these vetoes. Russia has in the same period cast 36 vetoes, often with China. Neither France nor the United Kingdom has cast a veto since the year 2000.
The present challenge facing the United Nations is a foundational one. The challenge is not whether the United Nations and its Security Council can solve the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. The challenge is whether the United Nations and its Security Council can solve any conflict where the interests of any member of its five permanent members collide.
One wonders: Has the United Nations forgotten the horrors of war once so palpable to the framers of its charter in 1945?
1. The six “organs;” the U.N. General Assembly (U.N.G.A.), the U.N. Secretariat (U.N.G.S.), the International Court of Justice (I.C.C.J.), the U.N. Security Council (U.N.S.C.), the U.N. Economic and Social Council (E.C.O.S.O.C.), and the U.N. Trusteeship Council.
by Fr. Elias D. Mallon, S.A., Ph.D.
Originally published on CNEWA, August 8, 2024