The Security Council and Global Security

The belief that the United Nations Security Council should be the ultimate arbiter of international security is a mistaken one, a Fletcher professor writes in a commentary.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [01.06.05] A recent report issued by a United Nations panel recommended that nations should seek approval by the U.N. Security Council to defend themselves against non-imminent threats. But Fletcher School professor Michael Glennon says such reasoning is flawed and speaks less to securing nations than to shoring up the power of the Security Council.

“The reason the panel's remedies are contradictory is that it misdiagnoses the disease - or fails to diagnose it at all,” Glennon wrote in an opinion piece published in London’s Financial Times.

Glennon, a professor of international law who has focused on preemption in his research and writing, charges that the argument by the U.N.’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Changes is fundamentally inaccurate.

“The central problem is that the ‘global order’ posited by the panel is largely non-existent,” Glennon writes. “Notions of justice vary from one culture to another.”

Glennon summarizes the report’s argument that power must be yielded to the Security Council because allowing nations to engage in unilateral action would pose a “risk to global order,” and adherence to the just war doctrine will bolster the Council’s commitment to humanitarian efforts.

Sticking to this course, the Fletcher professor argues, would have precluded several positive actions in recent decades.

“France's invasion of the Central African Republic to end the murderous regime of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge, Tanzania's invasion of Uganda that put a halt to Idi Amin's bloodbath, NATO’s 1998 air campaign against Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo – all would have been forbidden under the panel's interpretation of the [U.N.] Charter,” Glennon writes.

The question of genocide is central to Glennon’s argument, as he recounts the panel’s assertion that “genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all” but notes the contention that military might cannot be employed to halt it unless the Security Council gives its permission.

“Cheap talk notwithstanding, states do not regard intra-state genocide as ‘a threat to all,’” Glennon writes. “If they did, Kosovo, Rwanda and Darfur would not be the tragic embarrassments to the UN that they have been.”

The panel’s findings neglect to explore several key areas of possible development and improvement, Glennon adds.

“Indeed, it makes no effort to assess the effectiveness of the Charter's rules, whether the benefits of saving them are worth the costs, whether they still command international support, or whether alternatives such as strengthened regional peacekeeping organizations might work better.”

If the panel had dug deeper, he suggests, the results might have been more rewarding toward forging a framework for the Security Council’s role in global security issues.

”A little empirical spadework, coupled with a little disinterestedness, would have gone a long way in lighting the way to a more peaceful and just world.”