Does the United Nations Have Power

The UN as Global Police Force and Negotiation Facilitator As Mingst and Karns (2016) note, the UN has played a predominant role in setting the standard for human rights—and it did so in 1948, three years after the conclusion of WW2. However, setting the standards is not the same as enforcing the standards and so far the UN’s declaration of human rights has been fairly toothless in terms of holding nations accountable through any type of police action.

Global police action when it does occur tends to come from the U.S., which emerged as the world leader among the nations in the post-War era. Mingst and Karns (2016) state explicitly that “much of the UN’s success in defining human rights norms, monitoring respect for human rights, and promoting human rights has depended on the activities of the growing international human rights network of NGOs—the third UN” (p. 218).

UN-led partnerships have not done much to ensure human safety: “The lack of local ownership of programs, inadequate institutional accountability measures, politicization of some programs, and the need for a steady stream of financial resources” all have served to undermine any UN-led approaches to serving as the force for good in the world in the post-war era (Mingst & Karns, 2016, p. 268).

This paper will address the issue of the UN’s scope of authority, the kind of international problems it seeks to ameliorate or resolve, its methods of enforcement, and its chief limitations. The scope of the UN’s authority to act as an enforcement institution or negotiation facilitator is basically determined by the individual nations themselves. While nearly 200 countries are member states of the UN, the member states are the ones who essentially wield the power.

They can form alliances among themselves against other member states, if one group wants to sanction another. The UN is basically a forum for these negotiations to take place. It has a World Court—the International Court of Justices—and the Security Council is responsible for monitoring issues and making reports, as it did in the Middle East in the run-up to the Iraq invasion by the U.S.

The UN had reported that Iraq was not hiding weapons of mass destruction—and yet that did no good because the U.S. determined to invade anyway. The UN meanwhile can adopt resolutions that identify states as being human rights abusers. In 2016, the UN adopted a resolution identifying Israel as a violator of the human rights of Palestinians, yet, again, the U.S.

has attempted to negate that resolution by making it unlawful for individual Americans to boycott Israel and advocate on behalf of the oppressed in unison with the UN. Thus, the UN’s scope of authority is essentially determined by the individual member states and the extent to which they want to play ball with what the rest of the UN is doing.

The kinds of international problems that the UN seeks to ameliorate or resolve tend to be rooted in things it can actively address—such as poverty, health issues like the spread of AIDS in Africa, human trafficking, child enslavement, terrorism, and so on. It works in partnerships with other countries at the local level, but there is mixed levels of success in terms of the UN’s ability to meet its goals.

Though the seriousness of these problems does warrant a global rather than a regional or state response, the fact is that the globe has enough problems that it really cannot attempt to fix them at the state or regional level: it is up to the communities directly affected to get involved and to take ownership of their problems.

The concept of altruism may still exist but most countries leading the world today are not interested in altruism for its own sake: they may provide loans to countries, the way China has done to Venezuela, to help get them through tough times, but they expect to be paid back and they will take whatever was put up for collateral if loans are defaulted on—just like Russia recently did also with Venezuela when it took a shipment of gold from the struggling state (DeMarche, 2019).

Nonetheless, the best approach to solving these problems may be for nations to work together amongst themselves without relying on the bureaucracy of the UN to provide solutions or standards or resolutions that will guide the other members. As the Council on Foreign Relations (2012) has shown, the UN’s Human Rights Council is unstable and full of structural flaws, so depending on this behemoth of an organization can be quite impractical.

The war in Syria is a good example of how no one seems to know what is going on—who is gassing whom (is it Assad gassing his people, Assad gassing terrorists, the White Helmets gassing people, the White Helmets faking gassings?), or who is fighting whom (Vox, 2017). The methods and instruments of containment, enforcement and persuasion that the UN uses to get states to comply with its dictates or to at least restrain themselves are minimal at best.

As Mingst and Karns (2016) point out, “as an intergovernmental organization, the UN is the creation of its member states; it is they who decide what it is they will allow this organization to do and what resources—financial and otherwise—they will provide” (p. 2). Thus the UN has engaged in peacekeeping to prevent, contain and moderate “hostilities between or within states through the use of lightly armed multinational forces of soldiers, police and civilians” (Mingst & Karns, 2016, p. 2-3).

This peacekeeping approach was utilized because the post-War world left a vacuum in terms of regional power and authority. UN peacekeeping forces have been deployed in the Middle East, were used throughout the Cold War, and over a forty year period between 1948 and 1988, there were 13 peacekeeping missions. The UN helped to negotiate a disarmament treaty among member states so as to avoid nuclear holocaust, and it was used to promote decolonization and the emergence of new states, such as in Africa.

It gets people and states to comply with its dictates by using peacekeeping forces, holding votes at the forum, drafting resolutions and having nations sign charters. Essentially nations have to police themselves or risk being censured by the UN, as has happened with Israel in recent years. The chief limits of the UN in terms of its ability to act as a legitimate global police authority or negotiation facilitator are that it is simply not an effective organization when it comes to producing real change.

For instance, Mingst and Karns (2016) note that “climate change diplomacy under the UN, in fact, has a twenty year reputation for being dysfunctional, with procedural issues often taking precedence over substantive ones, with a problem of framing and poor management, and a pattern of last-minute—if any—breakthroughs” (p. 262). Negotiations are often ineffectively achieved and unsatisfactorily concluded. The U.S.

which is basically the leader of the UN, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (2012), often objects to other member states, like China or India, getting what it perceives to be special privileges or exemptions from whatever resolutions are adopted (Mingst & Karns, 2016). Thus, another chief limit is that among the member states themselves, the pettiness of politics can play a major part in derailing negotiations and preventing a resolution from being adopted. With the U.S.

acting as a major power in the world that feels threatened by the newly formed alliance between Russia and China, it is really no surprise that it should behave in a manner that prevents either country from gaining a foothold on the world stage—and if the UN is not a useful tool for the U.S. in terms of maintaining its hegemonic interests, it will abandon it, as the CFR implies. Therefore, the utility of the UN is really determined by the extent to which the U.S.

wants to use it for its own purposes. Other member states can block the intentions of the U.S. by allying themselves and voting against resolutions that the U.S. wants to adopt—such as the desire to invade another Middle Eastern state or to have Assad declared a butcher (when all the evidence appears to point to the White Helmets being agents of the West, using false flags and fake reporting to move the public). The UN.