Tag Archives: peace

UN General Assembly to Scrutinize and Comment on Security Council

Leave a reply

It’s easy to be cynical about the UN. Take this statement directly from the UN:

Russia on Friday vetoed a Security Council resolution which described its attempts to unlawfully annex four regions of Ukraine earlier in the day with a formal ceremony in Moscow, as “a threat to international peace and security”, demanding that the decision be immediately and unconditionally reversed…

Due to Russia’s veto, following a new procedure adopted in the UN General Assembly in April, the Assembly must now meet automatically within ten days for the 193-member body to scrutinize and comment on the vote. Any use of the veto by any of the Council’s five permanent members triggers a meeting…

“The Charter is clear”, said the UN chief. “Any annexation of a State’s territory by another State resulting from the threat or use of force is a violation of the Principles of the UN Charter”.

UN News

The UN clearly has no ability to enforce violations of its own charter by “permanent” members of its own Security Council. It’s easy to point to violations of the charter by at least 3 of the 5 permanent members (Russia, China, and the United States) that have gone unpunished. Fixing the UN would have to start with fixing the Security Council, and that is difficult because these permanent members are not about to give up any fraction of the the power they hold over the rest of the world. So you can either argue that the Security Council is too powerful or that it is powerless. Either way, it prevents the UN from accomplishing its own mission.

One of the clearest visions for how to fix the UN was articulated by Mikhail Gorbachev (may he rest in peace) in his “Westminster College speech” in 1992. Let’s have a look at that.

No, the idea that certain states or groups of states could monopolize the international arena is no longer valid. What is emerging is a more complex global structure of international relations. An awareness of the need for some kind of global government is gaining ground, one in which all members of the world community would take part. Events should not be allowed to develop spontaneously. There must be an adequate response to global changes and challenges. If we are to eliminate force and prevent conflicts from developing into a worldwide conflagration, we must seek means of collective action by the world community…

Nuclear and chemical weapons. Rigid controls must be instituted to prevent their proliferation, including enforcement measures in cases of violation. An agreement must be concluded among all presently nuclear states on procedures for cutting back on such weapons and liquidating them. Finally a world convention prohibiting chemical weapons should be signed.

The peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The powers of the IAEA must be strengthened, and it is imperative that all countries working in this area be included in the IAEA system. The procedures of the IAEA should be tightened up and the work performed in a more open and aboveboard manner. Under United Nations auspices a powerful consortium should be created to finance the modernization or liquidation of high-risk nuclear power stations, and also to store spent fuel. A set of world standards for nuclear power plants should be established. Work on nuclear fusion must be expanded and intensified.

The export of conventional weapons. Governmental exports of such weapons should be ended by the year 2000, and, in regions of armed conflict, it should be stopped at once. The illegal trade in such arms must be equated with international terrorism and the drug trade. With respect to these questions the intelligence services of the states which are permanent members of the Security Council should be coordinated. And the Security Council itself must be expanded, which I will mention in a moment.

Regional conflicts. Considering the impartially examined experience obtained in the Middle East, in Africa, in Southeast Asia, Korea, Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan, a special body should be set up under the United Nations Security Council with the right to employ political, diplomatic, economic, and military means to settle and prevent such conflicts.

Human rights. The European process has officially recognized the universality of this common human value, i.e., the acceptability of international interference wherever human rights are being violated. This task is not easy even for states which signed the Paris Charter of 1990 and even less so for all states members of the United Nations. However, I believe that the new world order will not be fully realized unless the United Nations and its Security Council create structures (taking into consideration existing United Nations and regional structures) authorized to impose sanctions and to make use of other enforcement measures.

Food, population, economic assistance. It is no accident that these problems should be dealt with in this connection. Upon their solution depends the biological viability of the Earth’s population and the minimal social stability needed for a civilized existence of states and peoples. Major scientific, financial, political, and public organizations — among them, the authoritative Club of Rome — have long been occupied with these problems. However, the newly emerging type of international interaction will make possible a breakthrough in our practical approach to them. I would propose that next year a world conference be held on this subject, one similar to the forthcoming conference on the environment…

The United Nations, which emerged from the results and the lessons of the Second World War, is still marked by the period of its creation. This is true both with respect to the makeup of its subsidiary bodies and auxiliary institutions and with respect to its functioning. Nothing, for instance, other than the division into victors and vanquished, explains why such countries as Germany and Japan do not figure among the permanent members of the Security Council.

In general, I feel Article 53 on “enemy states” should be immediately deleted from the UN Charter. Also, the criterion of possession of nuclear weapons would be archaic in the new era before us. The great country of India should be represented in the Security Council. The authority and potential of the Council would also be enhanced by incorporation on a permanent basis of Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt, even if initially they do not possess the veto.

The Security Council will require better support, more effective and more numerous peace-keeping forces. Under certain circumstances it will be desirable to put certain national armed forces at the disposal of the Security Council, making them subordinate to the United Nations military command…

In a qualitatively new and different world situation the overwhelming majority of the United Nations will, I hope, be capable of organizing themselves and acting in concert on the principles of democracy, equality of rights, balance of interests, common sense, freedom of choice, and willingness to cooperate. Made wise by bitter experience, they will, I think, be capable of dispensing, when necessary, with egoistic considerations in order to arrive at the exalted goal which is man’s destiny on earth.

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1992

He also goes into climate change and limits to growth in this speech.

So how can we translate this vision to 2022? Well, it seems to need surprisingly little translation 30 years later. Maybe the United States could show real leadership on nuclear disarmament. Maybe the UN could offer civilian nuclear technology to any nation that agrees to permanently give up pursuit of nuclear weapons. This might require the IAEA to have an international security force with some real teeth. From there, it seems critical now to elevate biological weapons and pandemic preparedness to a similarly serious framework as nuclear weapons, since you can argue it represents an equally existential threat going forward.

The Security Council needs to expand, and the veto needs to go. This is obviously a really tough one. Or maybe each country’s veto needs to have a sunset date, and its renewal needs to be reviewed and approved by the General Assembly or a court of some sort based on the country’s record complying with the UN charter. What incentive could the current Security Council members be offered to accept this new arrangement? Hmm, this is a tough one that I will have to think more about. But one quick thought is that as the Security Council becomes increasingly ineffective and increasingly divorced from the UN’s mission, the prestige of being on it will continue to decrease. It seems like membership on the Security Council just means you are a militarily powerful bully able to get your way. And that is the exact opposite of what the UN is supposed to represent!

my proposal to reform the United Nations Security Council

Leave a reply

Most of this article in National Interest (which I’m not too familar with) is an opinion piece about Iran sanctions, but a little more than half way it does a good job explaining the rationale behind the UN Security Council.

The UN Security Council is the most important multilateral institution engaged in global governance and cooperative rule-setting. Created in the aftermath of two successive and catastrophic world wars, the council’s legal structure of giving veto power to the major world powers has helped maintain peace between major powers for over seventy-five years. Its decisions mark the highest level of international law.

The raison d’être of the UNSC is to prevent the unilateral use of force by countries. The council relies on consensus decision-making among the five permanent members, ensuring the world’s most powerful countries are constantly in dialogue over pressing security matters. The council’s approval is required to launch wars and the resolutions it passes are binding on all UN members.

Crucially, the veto power the UNSC affords the United States, China, Russia, the UK, and France gives these leading powers a stake in the global order. This helps obstruct zero-sum competition from taking hold among them, which could easily spiral into the kind of worldwide conflicts that reaped immense suffering in the last century.

National Interest

So, one way to state the purpose is to avoid cross-border aggression by major powers against other major powers, because such aggression by any one would automatically be opposed by the other four. No one country is so powerful that the balance of power would be in its favor.

To have a future, the Security Council clearly needs to be expanded to include today’s most powerful countries. It is unlikely it could kick off less powerful countries already there (looking at you, England and France). However, there is some limit to how many parties could be expected to reach consensus. How many? We need more than 5, and more than 10 seems like too many.

How do you define “powerful”? How about a formula? I pulled stats on GDP (at purchasing power parity) from the CIA World Factbook. GDP correlates to economic power, and potential though not necessarily military might. The top 10 look like this:

1China
2United States
3India
4Japan
5Germany
6Russia
7Indonesia
8Brazil
9United Kingdom
10France

That would include all the current members, plus add Japan, Germany (news flash: WWII is over!), India, Brazil, and Indonesia (hands down the world’s most populous and powerful nation that westerners never think about.)

Who barely misses the cut? #11-15 are Mexico, Italy, Turkey, South Korea, and Spain.

What if we decided actual military spending mattered. I pulled those numbers, gave 50% weight each to GDP and military spending, and it looks like this:

United States
China
India
Russia
Japan
Saudi Arabia
Germany
United Kingdom
Brazil
France

So this would trade Indonesia for Saudi Arabia, which seems odd. If you rate GDP 75% and 25%, you keep Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and leave out France. That seems like a non-starter.

Giving 10% weight to military spending doesn’t change the top 10 compared to straight-up GDP.

So I think my proposal is straight-up GDP. To summarize, it wouldn’t cut out any current member, and would add Germany and Japan, major developed countries and economic powers who lost a war 70 years ago, and major developing countries India, Brazil, and Indonesia. It would be harder to reach consensus with 10 than 5, but the effort of adding these important voices to the conversation would be worth it, and any hard-won consensus would have more legitimacy as representing the majority of the world’s power.

July 2019 in Review

Leave a reply
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.

June 2019 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!

Most hopeful story:

  • There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.

 

a peace race?

Leave a reply

This article in History News Network talks about proposals since World War II for general and complete disarmament. We tend to scoff at ideas like that, assuming that they are impractical and have always been considered so. But actually, it is a case of shifting baseline syndrome where ideas we take for granted to today would have been considered fairly radical in the past, and we don’t realize that because we have lost our memory of the past.

making people disappear is wrong

Leave a reply

This article in Project Syndicate is called The New Disappeared and is about dictatorships around the world that are making political opponents disappear, including Saudi Arabia. It’s certainly wrong, but it’s not only dictatorships doing it. Let’s not forget “extraordinary rendition”, where the U.S. kidnapped people off the street in friendly democratic countries, drugged them and bundled them onto airplanes, then delivered them to be tortured and murdered in secret prisons in places like Thailand and Egypt, all without any sort of due process.

7 wars

Leave a reply

The Week counts and lists the number of wars the United States is currently involved in.

we’re currently at war in (at least) seven countries across the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan…

It would be shockingly easy for the White House and Department of Defense to do whatever they wanted with no meaningful democratic oversight at all. Our wars are fought thousands of miles from American shores with an all-volunteer force drawn from a tiny percentage of the population. Meanwhile, the country has spent the astonishing sum of $250 million a day on war-making for each of the nearly 6,000 days since the 9/11 attacks 16 years ago. Instead of raising taxes to pay for it, Congress has cut taxes, insulating the American people entirely from the cost and handing the bill to future generations of Americans in the form of debt.

Other people fight, other people suffer, other people pay — it’s a recipe for political ignorance and indifference. All the American people know is that there hasn’t been another 9/11. And that one must always, no matter what, “support the troops.” Together these sentiments translate into: “We dare not say anything critical about whatever the military is doing.” That holds for members of Congress no less than for average Americans. Rather than raise questions or concerns, we’re expected to defer. And for the most part we’re all too happy to comply with this debased and degraded form of civic duty.

I have a proposal – fund these wars through a sales tax levied very clearly on everything we buy. Every time you buy a bag of groceries, your receipt would tell you how much you contributed to the war effort. This way, those of us not fighting or sending other people to fight would at least think about it every day, and maybe be willing to speak out against it or at least make the politicians clearly explain to us why it has to be this way.

the decline and fall of the U.S. empire

Leave a reply

Okay, it is not falling quite yet, but The Intercept has a review of two books that make a persuasive case we are witnessing its decline.

Wright sees the system under threat from a combination of newly emerging powers and recent American missteps. McCoy, for his part, sees the unraveling of the U.S. empire as analogous to the series of events that led to the decline of the British and French empires before it. The first step is the loss of support from local elites in territories under imperial influence, a process that McCoy says is clearly underway for the U.S. in many critical regions of the world. In recent years, America has seen its ties strained with military partners such as Turkey, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, while major U.S. allies like Germany and South Korea have increasingly come to question America’s capacity to continue leading the imperial system that it created.

It is the Arab Spring uprisings against mostly pro-U.S. dictators, however, that McCoy says marked the slow beginning of the end of American imperium. While the revolts are widely judged to have failed in bringing about liberal democracy, they did succeed in unseating longtime American allies in Tunisia and Egypt, while straining U.S. ties with Gulf Arab countries and even Iraq. As McCoy writes, “All modern empires have relied on dependable surrogates to translate their global power into local control.” He adds, “For most of them, the moment when those elites began to stir, talk back, and assert their own agendas was also the moment when you knew that imperial collapse was in the cards.” The British empire famously became a “self-liquidating concern” when local elites across the empire began demanding self-rule, as did France’s far-flung rule when it was forced to wage a grinding war of attrition to keep control over Algeria. The Arab Spring and the forces it unleashed, which have reduced U.S. influence while exhausting its resources to deal with terrorism and migration, “may well contribute, in the fullness of time, to the eclipse of American global power…”

Partly as a consequence of so many self-inflicted losses, China, Russia, and Iran have all mounted growing challenges to American hegemony in recent years, contesting the tenets of the U.S.-enforced order in the South China Sea, eastern Europe and the Middle East, respectively. Russia has successfully annexed territory and asserted its influence along its periphery, in places like Ukraine, while China has moved ahead with plans to put the economically-vital South China Sea region under its control. Instead of a world in which a hegemonic U.S. enforces the political and economic rules of engagement in these regions, its now possible to see a future in which the world is carved up into a “spheres of influence” system that gives regional powers wide latitude to set the agenda in their immediate neighborhood.

Love the republic, hate the empire. Or at least let the empire go and maybe breathe a sigh of relief to let some of the self-imposed responsibility go with it. But if we are going to do that, we need to support and strengthen international institutions that promote peace, trade, and human rights. Instead we seem to be abandoning those institutions at the same time we are abdicating responsibility.

Obama and Israel

Leave a reply

This is not a blog about Israeli-Palestinian politics. But there is some speculation that Obama could take some last-minute action, or more specifically, not taking the usual action of vetoing resolutions introduced by other Security Council members. This would obviously be a big deal,

The most likely scenarios for Obama action in the [United Nations Security Council] are variations of the following three:

● First: unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state within specified or approximate borders following the 1948 armistice lines where no Palestinian state ever existed. In virtually all world forums, this would more juridically move the status of Israel’s administrative presence in Judea and Samaria from disputed to occupation.

● Second: abstain from vetoing a pending French resolution that would impose settlement lines and/or recognize a Palestinian state within 18 months absent agreement by the parties.

● Third: impose a territorial settlement within a two-year deadline if the parties do not craft one themselves.

civilians in Mosul

Leave a reply

The United States and Iraq are planning a major offensive against ISIS in Mosul Iraq. This description in The Week about what is expected to happen to civilians is a bit shocking. If we are doing this to keep civilians from being oppressed, is it really worth it?

About 4,000 Kurdish peshmerga are fighting to retake a string of ISIS-held villages east of Mosul, with support from U.S. warplanes, artillery, and special operations commandos. The main attack is being launched from Qayyarah air base, some 40 miles south of Mosul, where 560 U.S. military advisers, 22,000 Iraqi government troops, and 6,000 mainly Sunni tribal fighters have gathered in recent months. Backed by coalition air support, liberation forces will advance along the Tigris River, clearing ISIS from towns and villages before reaching the city’s edge in early November. Experts say the main urban battle will probably last through December. Much of the battle could be fought street to street and house to house — the winding, narrow streets of Mosul’s Old City are inaccessible to tanks or artillery…

Its [ISIS’s] roughly 5,000 fighters in the city have spent months creating an elaborate network of defenses. IEDs have been hidden underneath roads and in buildings, and five bridges have been rigged with explosives. Residents told Reuters that a 6-foot-wide, 6-foot-deep moat has been dug around Mosul’s perimeter, which will be filled with oil and set on fire, creating plumes of smoke to make it difficult for warplanes to spot targets. To evade airstrikes, ISIS is funneling men and equipment through underground tunnels. Former Iraqi finance and foreign minister Hoshiyar Zebari says militants are “shaving their beards to blend in with the population and constantly moving their headquarters around.” The jihadists are desperately trying to boost their numbers: Local men who refuse to take up arms have had their ears cut off, and locals say children as young as 8 have been handed pistols and knives and ordered to spy on citizens…

Relief agencies say the battle for Mosul will trigger a mass exodus: Many of the city’s remaining residents are expected to flee at once, leaving their possessions behind. “We’re facing this enormous tsunami coming at us,” says Lise Grande, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Iraq. Coalition forces will have to screen out jihadists from the refugees, and, with some 3.3 million Iraqis already displaced by violence, overstretched aid agencies will struggle to feed and house all of Mosul’s desperate civilians. Says Matthew Nowery of U.S. relief group Samaritan’s Purse, “This is going to be a very large-scale catastrophe.”

So is it worth it? This made my think of Obama’s Nobel speech, where he argues that there is such a thing as “just war”.

And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war.  The concept of a “just war” emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met:  if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

Of course, we know that for most of history, this concept of “just war” was rarely observed.  The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.  Wars between armies gave way to wars between nations — total wars in which the distinction between combatant and civilian became blurred.  In the span of 30 years, such carnage would twice engulf this continent.  And while it’s hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, World War II was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished…

Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations.  The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states — all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos.  In today’s wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.

It also reminded me of Human Smoke, where Nicholson Baker puts forth the heretical view that the human cost of the fight against the Third Reich and the Axis powers itself may have exceeded its benefit.