US-UN Relations
Divisive Past, Divided Future?
Lauren E. Young
EDGE
June 2, 2005
The history of the US’s relationship with the UN is complex, seeming to vacillate between warm cooperation and abject disdain as the national interests of the US and the rest of the world, and the short- and long-term interests of the US itself, align or oppose each other. The UN was originally the vision of US president Franklin Roosevelt and the product of US State Department planning and diplomacy. It was designed to forward the national interests of its strongest members, the P-5, to reflect and channel the geopolitical power structure rather than twist it into an unnatural and unsustainable hierarchy of weak nations trying to dominate strong. Because the Charter is based in a realist view of the world, during the Cold War, when the national interests of the two world powers diverged, the UN was paralyzed to deal with any of the world’s conflicts. When the Cold War ended it gave rise to the first war that should have been authorized by the Security Council—the Persian Gulf War from later 1990 to early 1991. Many hoped for a “new world order” after the success of the Gulf War, but the interests of the US and the rest of the world, primarily the rest of the members of the Security Council, soon divided again. Today, the world is still struggling to cope with the blow dealt to the UN by the US’s use of force in Iraq, including the US, which has not even begun to feel the long-term negative effects of its unilateralism. However, the war in Iraq could have been less detrimental to the UN and the US in particular, and by extension to the rest of the world, if the US had argued that it was acting to uphold resolution 1441 under the authorization of the Security Council. Regardless, the war in Iraq in 2003 has spawned a massive reform movement, a fight for the UN’s survival. One of the major areas of reform must be the Security Council, which has deviated from reflecting the real state of the world and therefore is no longer effectively responsible for the peace and security of the world. Unless the UN can reform in this and other ways outlined by SG Kofi Annan, it will never achieve the lofty goals envisioned by the framers of its Charter, the US will finally forsake it because it will be unable to work in the US’s national interest, and it will sink into the obscurity of history.
American Support for a Realist Charter
The US has powered the UN since its beginnings in the wake of WWII. It began as US President Roosevelt’s vision for “Four Policemen”—the US, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China—to maintain peace in the postwar world.[1] The UN, as Roosevelt saw it, was to unite and channel the strength of these countries. Based on Roosevelt’s vision, the UN was also first laid out in the plans of American diplomats during WWII, and the negotiations over the Charter took place at two American locations.
The Americans put diplomatic power behind their plans during the two conferences that hashed out the terms of the treaty framing the UN: the first at Dumbarton Oaks from August to October, 1944, and the second in San Francisco from April to June, 1945. At Dumbarton Oaks, only the most important players—Russia, China, the US, and Great Britain—hashed out the most important parts of the Charter, but they brought fifty governments to San Francisco to finalize and ratify it.[2] The Big Three excluded China from the first phase of the negotiations for the new organization, then the US and Great Britain presented their agreements to the Chinese delegation in the second.[3]
The UN was “built on a foundation of realism,” in that its power was supposed to originate from its strongest members rather than moral or legal strength.[4] The “Four Policemen” were supposed to be the strongest powers with the might to maintain international peace and security by keeping other states in line. According to Stanley Meisler, “the policemen would operate out of a station house run by an international organization, but it would be the strength and unity of the policemen that gave that organization its vitality”[5] On the day the Dumbarton Oaks conference was announced, Roosevelt explained his vision for the UN by saying that if an aggressive state “started to run amok and seeks to grab territory or invade its neighbors,” the UN would “stop them before they got started.”[6] Roosevelt passed this vision on to Churchill and Stalin at Dumbarton Oaks during the first phase of the negotiations, realist in its exclusion of all but the Big Three who were to become the real force behind the UN. China, included only because Roosevelt hoped it would replace Japan as the strongest power in postwar Asia, was shut out of the first and most important phase of the negotiations, exemplifying the way the UN internalized the international power structure from its beginning. Although Churchill wanted France to be included so that it would regain its strength and help Britain balance Western against Eastern Europe, Roosevelt disliked Charles de Gaulle enough to veto France’s participation at this stage, although he eventually accepted the “Fifth Policeman.”[7]
In the first phase of the negotiations, there was surprisingly little dissent among the Big Three. The first American proposal was for five permanent members wielding vetoes and a few rotating members to make up a Security Council with authority over the maintenance of international peace and security. The crux of the American plan was that the Security Council would have the power to use “all means necessary,” even force, to stop an aggressive state.[8] The representatives of the three states went on to agree on a General Assembly of all the member-states that would serve as a forum for debate and approve budgets but have no ability to enforce its decisions, a secretariat to run the organization, and an international court of justice.[9] There were two issues, however, that almost brought the organization to a standstill before its Charter was even framed. As the Allied victory faded from the delegates’ memories, suspicions began to grow on both sides of an Anglo-American and Soviet divide. To balance against feared Anglo-American domination of the UN with their control over Britain’s dominions and the US’s Latin American allies, the Soviet Union proposed that all 16 of its republics have seats in the General Assembly.[10] The second point of contention was the veto. Although the Big Three all agreed that the veto was necessary because “there could be no peace in the postwar world if the United States and the Soviet Union did not agree,” their opinions diverged over how powerful the veto would be. At first, it seemed the Soviets and the Americans both supported the idea of a veto that could not only prevent the Security Council passing a resolution but could prevent an issue from even being brought to the table, while the British dissented. However, over the course of the Dumbarton Oaks conference, the Americans decided that the veto should not have the power to stop an issue from even being raised, and the British began to agree with the Soviets. Furthermore, the British and then the Americans wanted to revoke the veto for any of the Security Council members involved in the dispute.[11] When Dumbarton Oaks closed in October 1944, it looked as though the world’s best attempt yet to create international peace and security would perish before being born.
The stalemate was broken in the third, unofficial conference of the UN’s founding at Yalta in January 1945. The Americans, with the support of the British, presented a new proposal that would give each of the Big Five the right to veto on anything except procedural issues, and if a member of the Security Council was a party to a peaceful dispute, it would abstain from voting. The Soviet delegate accepted this formula and proposed a compromise on the other deadlocked issue that the Soviet Union would get four votes in the General Assembly rather than the 16 it had originally demanded. Roosevelt countered with a proposal that the USSR would have three votes—one for Soviet Union, Ukraine, and White Russia—but the US would have three as well (the US soon dropped this requirement because it seemed so contrived back in Washington).[12] The fight over the USSR’s representation ended there, but the veto continued to cause dissent among the smaller powers now rather than the Big Three. At San Francisco, after
Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, August 21, 1944.
Conference at Yalta, including USSR Premier Stalin, US President Roosevelt, and UK Prime Minister Churchill, Yalta, USSR, February 12, 1945.[13]
the smaller states were included to bring the number of member-states to 50, Australia led a push to limit the use of the veto, but eventually the compromise arrived at in Yalta prevailed after the US made it clear that the UN would not exist unless the powerful states could wield an equally powerful veto.[14]
The weight of the veto throughout the negotiations is also a testament to the realist origins of the UN. The veto was designed to institutionalize the power of the Security Council members, proven by their ability to intimidate the smaller nations into submission by threatening to forsake the UN altogether if they couldn’t have veto power. Some commentators at the time argued that the insistence on the veto meant that security against war could not be reached by “constitutional means” if it was not established “by political means,” meaning that simply drafting a Charter that did not reflect the geo-political realities of the time was useless because the stronger nations would use their “social and military power to defy a decision which has not been reached with its consent.”[15] The UN as a whole was the product of long negotiations between “the two great centers of power,” and despite its imperfections (like the compromises that had to be made over the USSR’s representation in the General Assembly and the veto), it is the best reflection of the realities of the international power structure of the postwar world.[16]
The Security Council was mandated to police the new set of international laws outlined in the rest of the Charter, which adopted the prohibition against the use of force as its founding principle in article 2(4).[17] All member-states of the UN are required to refrain from the “use or threat of force” against any other state and to compel non-member states to do so as well.[18] Through primarily Chapter VII of the Charter, the Security Council has the power to use force to stop conflict after it identifies a threat to international peace and security.[19] Articles 39-42 make the Security Council responsible for naming an act of aggression and give it the power to “restore international peace and security” by using the “air, sea or land forces of Members of the United Nations.”[20]
Paralysis during the Cold War
Despite the intentions of the framers to use the UN to channel the power of the P-5 towards unified action, the Cold War delayed the execution of the UN’s primary purpose for the next forty years. During the Cold War, 279 vetoes were cast in the Security Council, paralyzing the UN in matters of international peace and security.[21] The Security Council authorized the Korean War, but only because the Soviet delegates could not veto because they were boycotting the Security Council to protect the fact that the People’s Republic of China was not represented on it. During this time period, the Truman Doctrine, the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, the Carter Doctrine, the Reagan Doctrine, and general unilateralism were all premised on the idea that collective security had failed.[22] Overall, until the end of the Cold War in 1989, the conflicting national interests of the two great powers in a bipolar world prevented the UN from stopping aggression and preserving international peace and security, evidenced by the more than 100 major conflicts with 20 million casualties around the world during this period.[23]
A New World Order?
The Persian Gulf War seemed to herald a new age of humanitarian intervention through the Security Council. Though President Bush’s first inclination was to invoke article 51 to justify the use of force against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Secretary of State James Baker convinced him it would be cheaper to go through the Security Council. Despite this pragmatic beginning, the Persian Gulf War, along with the end of the Cold War, was necessary to “activate the UN’s collective security system.”[24] Between August 2 and November 29, 1990, and beginning the day of the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, the Security Council passed twelve resolutions about Iraq. Most were Chapter VII, which gave the Security Council the right to impose economic or even military sanctions in the future. The November 29th resolution authorized the “member states cooperating with the government of Kuwait… to use all necessary means to uphold and implement” the August 2nd resolution demanding the withdrawal of the Iraqi troops. Hussein was given seven weeks to comply.[25] Under-Secretary General Brian Urquhart called the war “the first exercise in the unanimous collective security that we’ve been talking about since the days of Woodrow Wilson.”[26] Desert Storm was predominantly a US operation, but President Bush assembled a coalition of Saudi Arabia, Britain, France, Egypt, and Spain.[27] On January 17, 1991, Operation Desert Storm began, and within the first three hours, more than 400 combat aircraft, 160 tankers and command planes attacked, targeting centers of command, communications buildings, ministries of the government, early warning radar posts, equipment for air defense, Scud missile launchers, oil refineries, and air bases. After five weeks of bombing, which Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney called “the most successful air campaign in the world,” the ground war began on February 24, 1991, and ended only 100 hours later.[28] After the US victory, the US pushed through what it called “the mother of all resolutions,” in an ironic twist of Hussein’s own language (Hussein had announced at the start of the Gulf War that the “mother of all battles” was underway).[29] The resolution demanded that, in order to lift the sanctions imposed on it, Iraq would have to completely stop all its programs for the development and production of nuclear, chemical, and biological WMDs, and acquiesce to the UN monitoring system under the IAEA.[30]
Although the American forces were not allowed to fly the UN flag in Operation Desert Storm, the use of force was authorized by thirteen Security Council resolutions and powered by the American air force and navy.[31] President Bush, as well as other US and Soviet representatives, talked of a “new world order” in which the UN would guarantee states’ security through collective action.[32] Though Meisler was correct to predict that “an American-led coalition of nations might not find it so easy to squelch a tyrant in the future,”[33] the success of the Persian Gulf War fostered hope in the 1990s that the intent of the Charters’ framers would finally be carried out.
American Exceptionalism and the War in Iraq
Some consider the war in Iraq a disaster for the future of the UN. If the UN cannot prove that it is still relevant in today’s world, then the US will continue to ignore it, and without the support of the US it will become impotent and obsolete. In the words of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the US’s lack of support for the UN would “strip the Council of the pretense of legality and seriousness and remove it as an obstacle to genuine collective security.”[34] Senator Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) commented that, “in terms of the United Nations being a legitimate vehicle for restraining tyrants with weapons of mass destruction, for restraining aggressors, I think they have done themselves grievous damage” by failing to pass a resolution authorizing the war.[35]
It is certainly true that there was strong opposition to the use of force in Iraq throughout the Security Council. Resolution 1441 passed as a Chapter VII resolution because the French saw it as a way of prolonging the inspections as long as possible. When 1441 was passed, the Americans believed that France would pass a second resolution once it realized inspections had failed, but the US realized soon after that French opposition to the use of force in Iraq was so strong that it would veto any second resolution. With this in mind, the US still hoped to win the support of Russia, or at least convince it not to veto. The Americans assumed that if Russia didn’t veto, China wouldn’t either, and that it had a good chance of wresting votes from five of the six rotating members of the Security Council, which were Pakistan, Chile, Mexico, Cameroon, Guinea and Angola at the time. However, Russia ultimately sided with the French because of their longstanding economic relationship, including an $8 billion debt owed by Iraq to Russia. Although Pakistan agreed to vote with the US if it were the ninth and final vote needed, visits to the three African countries seemed unsuccessful, Mexico was unresponsive due to past immigration issues, and Chile demanded better concessions from Washington.[36]