The End of the Rules Based World Order?

Duncan Bowie sees no future for the United Nations

The United Nations is now finished just as the League of Nations died in the late 1930’s. This is the most serious global geopolitical crisis of the last 90 years. We now have the three greatest world powers that do not believe that international law applies to them. Might is right. Of the three rule-breaking autocrats – Putin, Xi and Trump, Trump is the most dangerous as he is the most unpredictable.  We generally know what to expect from Putin and Xi, as they themselves have clear objectives and know what they are doing – and think before they take action.  In contrast, it is much more difficult to judge whether Trump is going to follow through on his rhetoric or to back down – his rhetoric is so often bluster and nonsense, that it is difficult to assess whether he himself believes what he is saying or is just mouthing off to get attention – and get attention he does as is shown by the queue to get into the hall at Davos for yet another cringe-making and meandering speech. It has taken eighteen months for European leaders to realise that flattering the egoist does not always work, and you may be a friend one day but subject to withering and gratuitous insults the next. Trump thinks this is all a big joke – a big game – but his words as well as his actions have global impacts – and they are usually negative. We are all on the edge of global economic meltdown, regional wars or even a new global conflict as the three global autocrats form a pragmatic alliance, which tempts other regional powers such as India, South Africa and Iran.

Almost completely absent from the global geopolitical crisis is the United Nations. Antonio Guterres probably has less significance than the Pope.  The Pope has no divisions – neither does the United Nations. The governance regime of the UN derives from a different era – an era when there was a wide consensus, at least among the major powers, that a further world war needed to be avoided and that an international body could act as an arbiter of international disputes and stop local or regional conflicts from widening. Yet the UN was designed to be based on collaboration of the great postwar powers – the US, the Soviet Union and China were all given veto powers on the security council, together with the UK and France, rewarded for their role in the war but also recognising their status as nuclear powers. Additionally, as a form of compensation for their loss of empire. It was not acknowledged that the three great powers would be the most significant threats to the world order and the nations that most often contend that international law did not apply to them. With Russia inheriting the Soviet Union’s veto, these three powers are now the world’s leading imperialists, with France and the UK marginalised, with the latter, especially after its self-harming decision to leave the European Union, following, to put it politely,  on the coattails of the US. Meanwhile, Macron struggles to persuade his EU colleagues to take a more independent stance – increasingly difficult as so many EU members are now run by centre-right or right-wing administrations, which share some of the autocratic approaches of the US, Russia and China.   It is not just European social democracy that is in decline, but the long-established principles of Liberal democracy.

Is it now probably too late to reconstruct the UN into being the effective international organisation it was intended to be, for example, by removing the five powers’ veto rights or widening the Security Council membership? The General Council can pass as many resolutions as it likes, but with absolutely no consequence if not supported by one of the three great powers. France and the UK tend to abstain rather than use their veto, while the other rotating security council members tend to either line up behind their favoured great power (or the great power on which they are most economically, politically or militarily dependent), or if faced with a conflict of interests, abstain. There are a few genuinely independent UN nation-states. The three great powers and their allies/dependents can ignore the UN  and, in fact, treat the UN with contempt – a talking shop of the powerless who can take the moral high ground, but do nothing about it, which is why Israel, with US support, has ignored the UN ever since 1948.

The UN was established on a different basis from the League of Nations, on the basis that it had divisions, comprising contributions from the forces of member states. However, each member state can choose whether or not to contribute its forces to a specific intervention, and moreover, as peacekeepers, UN forces are not supposed to be proactive and to only use force when themselves under attack – a practice generally adopted after the disaster of the UN military intervention in the Congo in the early 1960’s.  UN military interventions tend to be under the military leadership of a single state, so, for example, the intervention in Korea in the early 1950’s was under US military leadership. Subsequent interventions in Africa, for example, tend to be led by regional powers, such as Nigeria.  Neutral powers such as the Irish Republic or Sweden often take a leading role, but the weakness of UN forces is shown in examples such as that of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995. Subsequent military interventions in Serbia/Kosovo or Libya have been under the auspices of NATO, or under “coalitions of the willing”, where certain NATO members or EU members have decided to opt out. These initiatives bypass international law and intentionally sideline the UN. The UN may express its disapproval of means without formally objecting to specific military action by a member state or group of member states – the non-response to the US military intervention in Venezuela is the most recent example, but similarly the UN has been quiescent in relation to Trump’s proposed land grab in Greenland, as it has been in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s threats to Taiwan. It is difficult to find a positive example of the UN’s diplomatic or military intervention in the last few decades. Its interventions are generally humanitarian, but how effective can a humanitarian intervention be in the middle of a military attack of one country on another or in the case of a civil war? The UN’s protest that its own humanitarians are killed by soldiers of a UN member state, as in Palestine, is wasted tears.

The League of Nations was widely criticised for its ineffectiveness. This was partly because of its reluctance to use military sanctions – the 1920’s and early 1930’s were an era when most international diplomats were opposed to any international body having enforcement powers. Until the late 1930’s, most European social democrats as well as liberal democrats were opposed to the use of force – most were pacifists – preferring peaceful means of settling disputes, if not absolute pacifists.  Yet when compared with the United Nations, the League of Nations, at least in its early years, was actually quite successful in resolving both national disputes and intra-national disputes. Examples include Danzig, Memel, the Saar, Schleswig and Upper Silesia. The League also had a significant role in managing the governance of former  German and Japanese colonies while seeking to protect the interests of native communities, through the mandates system, with a framework for monitoring the activities of the mandatory powers and promoting self-government. States which did not wish to abide by international rules could, of course, leave the League, as did Germany, Japan and Italy after its occupation of Abyssinia.

Now, of course, aggressor states such as the US, Russia and China, not only retain their UN membership, but actually have veto powers on all UN decisions. It is therefore not surprising that the whole postwar edifice of international law and respect for national sovereignty has collapsed. Instead we have returned to the concept of regional or hemispheric dominance by the three great powers – so Trump gets the whole Western Hemisphere – from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego;  Putin gets all the former Soviet states from Estonia, via Ukraine to central Asia as well as South Asia, while China gets the Far East and South East  Asia, and all three fight over the fifty-four states of Africa and the Pacific islands. Meanwhile, the states of West and East Europe try to patch together some form of united foreign policy, with the UK left on the margins, along with Australia and New Zealand.  That is the current geopolitical reality, and it is about time we all recognised it.