UNdone

“Why the Security Council Failed” by Michael J. Glennon, in Foreign Affairs (May-June 2003), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.

The dramatic rupture of the United Nations Security Council over Iraq earlier this year made evident that the grand dream of the UN’s founders—subjecting the use of force to the rule of law—had failed. But the fault lay not with the United States or France or other member nations, argues Glennon, a professor of international law at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. Rather, it lay with underlying geopolitical forces “too strong for a legalist institution to withstand.”

Given the recent evolution of the international system, the Security Council’s failure was “largely inexorable,” Glennon says. Well before the debate over confronting Iraq, world power had shifted toward “a configuration that was simply incompatible with the way the UN was meant to function. It was the rise of American unipolarity—not the Iraq crisis—that, along with cultural clashes and different attitudes toward the use of force, gradually eroded the council’s credibility.”

In response to the emerging U.S. predominance, coalitions of competitors predictably formed. “Since the end of the Cold War,” Glennon writes, “the French, the Chinese, and the Russians have sought to return the world to a more balanced system.” As Hubert Vedrine, then France’s foreign minister, explained in 2001, “We have to keep defending our vital interests just as before; we can say no, alone, to anything that may be unacceptable.” U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld could not have said it better.

“States pursue security by pursuing power,” observes Glennon, and in doing that, they use the institutional tools available. For France, Russia, and China, the Security Council and their veto power were the tools at hand in the Iraq crisis. Had Washington been in their position, it probably would have done as they did. And, Glennon believes, had the three nations found themselves in the position of the United States during the Iraq crisis, each of them would have “used the council—or threatened to ignore it—just as the United States did.”

No rational state today would imagine that the UN Charter protects its security, says Glennon. The UN Charter permits the use of force only in self-defense and only “if an armed attack occurs.” But the provision has been flagrantly violated so often since 1945 that it has been rendered inoperative. NATO’s humanitarian intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was as blatant a violation as the recent preventive war in Iraq. “The charter has gone the way of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the 1928 treaty by which every major country that would go on to fight in World War II solemnly committed itself not to resort to war as an instrument of national policy.”

If a new international framework is to be designed in the future, Glennon warns, it must reflect “the way states actually behave and the real forces to which they respond.” If it is built again on “imaginary truths that transcend politics,” such as the notion of the sovereign equality of states, it is doomed to failure.