Jewish World Review Oct. 17, 2006 / 25 Tishrei, 5767

Failing to stop North Korea from going nuclear may have been the last straw for the onetime guardian of world order

By Niall Ferguson

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Last week may well be remembered as the beginning of the end for the U.N. Security Council. The institution that has been so central to the post-1945 international order was already tottering under the weight of its own recent failures. But North Korea's claim to have conducted a successful nuclear test last Monday appears to have been the final straw.

For a split second, it seemed that the five permanent members of the Security Council might agree on a tough response. But no. By Thursday, Chinese and Russian spokesmen were talking as if the entire crisis were somehow the fault of the United States. By Saturday, the original U.S. draft resolution had been turned into an insecurity council irresolution. Sanctions have been imposed, but the threat of military force has been explicitly ruled out, and the Chinese say they won't help search ships going into and out of North Korea.

We have seen exactly the same pattern of behavior this year over Iran's thinly veiled nuclear arms program. The U.S., Britain and France have been pressing for action. China and Russia have qualified every phrase, watered down every demand, dragged every foot.

At first sight, this insouciance on the part of Beijing and Moscow makes no sense. The Security Council is, to be sure, an anachronism. That the council's five veto-wielding permanent members are Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — a rather uncongenial club of ex-empires and crypto-empires — is a legacy of decisions made more than 60 years ago.

The original idea was that the victors of World War II would act as the executive committee of the U.N. to prevent it from sinking into impotence like the League of Nations. Franklin Roosevelt, who greatly exaggerated the stability and strength of Chiang Kai-shek's regime, wanted China as the fourth member. Winston Churchill, fearful that the Chinese would be U.S. stooges, pressed the claim of liberated France.

Then the law of unintended consequences kicked in. Superpower relations descended into the Cold War. Britain ceased to be a great power, losing its empire and becoming Uncle Sam's Mini-me. China went communist, leaving its Security Council seat in the hands of a rump nationalist regime in Taiwan. And France proved less than grateful for its liberation from German tutelage.

Small wonder the Security Council has more often agreed to disagree over the years. Small wonder it has passed many more resolutions than it has successfully implemented. To confuse matters further, two of the permanent members of the club have subsequently changed their identities. The Chinese seat was handed over to the People's Republic in 1971, and Russia inherited the Soviet Union's seat 20 years later.

Yet in one respect the permanent members remain a true club. They are the sole legitimate nuclear powers recognized by the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. And for that reason alone, you might have expected them to make common cause against both North Korea and Iran. Their failure to do so strongly suggests that neither China nor Russia believes any longer in the principle of nonproliferation. They attach more significance to the realpolitik of regional power. China sees a politically unpredictable but economically dependant North Korea as a rogue rook on the East Asian chessboard, while Russia sees a U.S.-hating, oil-rich Iran as a potential partner in a new world order based on energy exports.

Many commentators have been prompted by this crisis to ask if the Nonproliferation Treaty has any future. But the real question is whether the Security Council has a future. It is generally a bad sign for any institution when a majority of experts agree that it needs to be reformed. Today, almost no one in the field of international relations would argue against Security Council reform.

The latest proposals come from G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, who have just published "Forging a World of Liberty Under Law," the final report of the Princeton Project on International Security. "It makes no sense, in 2006," they write, "for five countries that represent the distribution of power at the end of World War II to have individual vetoes over what constitutes legitimate action."

They endorse the 2004 proposal of the U.N. High Level Panel (that Brazil, Germany, India, Japan and two African states — presumably the most populous, Egypt and Nigeria — should be invited to join the Security Council as permanent members without a veto. They also call for the abolition of all the existing veto rights "for resolutions authorizing direct action in response to a crisis." Instead, they argue, such resolutions should require only "a supermajority vote — of perhaps three-quarters of voting members."

Hard to fault, isn't it? Such a Security Council would represent a much larger proportion of the world's population (55% as opposed to the current 29%) and would surely not engage in the kind of "prevarication and obstructionism" of which the authors rightly complain. Except that in such an expanded Security Council, it would be possible to construct a supermajority with just nine out of 11 members. And what if the outvoted minority happened to be Britain and the U.S.?

The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville observed that "the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform itself." Whenever I hear American theorists arguing for reform of the Security Council, I think of those wise words.