UN Charter approach fails, too many structural issues and disagreements

Notwithstanding these advantages, the UN has obvious handicaps. First, it often seems built for frustration, not least for its most powerful member. Although U.S. negotiators in the World War II–era administration of president Franklin D. Roosevelt spearheaded the drafting of the UN Charter, the blueprint they created virtually guarantees occasional outcomes that are less than ideal from a U.S. perspective.22 The veto provision lets other permanent Security Council members, notably China and Russia, thwart U.S. preferences. In the case of Ukraine, Moscow has blocked universal sanctions and other Chapter 7 enforcement actions against itself. From an ethical perspective, this is outrageous. “Where is this security that the Security Council needs to guarantee?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky demanded in April 2022. “It’s not there.”23 Likewise, the General Assembly’s one-state, one-vote format allows ideological coalitions and regional blocs to engage in theater rather than exercise real responsibility. Finally, the UN’s budgetary processes and labyrinthine reporting structures, which empower the UNGA and ECOSOC rather than major donor states, is a constant aggravation to Washington. These are facts of life that U.S. administrations and diplomats can ameliorate but never eliminate. Second, the UN and its agencies do not spring magically to life, even in crises, nor are they immune from geopolitics.There is a natural temptation to blame UN organs like the WHO for failures in international cooperation like the haphazard and uncoordinated response to COVID-19. In reality, the performance of multilateral institutions tends to mirror the preferences of their main members. It is unrealistic to expect UN multilateralism to deliver when—as during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic—the world’s major powers treat it as a geopolitical football or abandon the field altogether. It was the decisions by China and the United States to prioritize strategic rivalry over practical problem-solving, above all else, that guaranteed the UN’s pandemic failures.24 If a fully-fledged Sino-U.S. cold war erupts in the future, one should anticipate an enduring collapse of Security Council cooperation, akin to the period from 1947 to 1989 when it was marginal to many major security issues. Already, geopolitics has paralyzed much of the council’s work. We risk moving toward a world, as Guterres warned in September 2022, of “no cooperation, no dialogue, no collective problem solving.”25 Third, holding the UN accountable to member states and (ultimately) taxpayers remains difficult. All formal multilateral organizations create what academics call “principal-agent dilemmas,” because they require governments (in this case, the principals) to delegate authority to international secretariats (the agents) that may pursue their own agendas rather than respond to the principals’ desires. Compounding this oversight dilemma, member states typically pool their authority within the governing boards of UN agencies. Even when voting is weighted to account for relative financial contributions (as in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund), national influence is diluted. The dynamics of delegation and pooling mean that global bodies can easily go off track—and that the White House and U.S. Congress must remain vigilant to this possibility.26 Finally, Security Council reform is both imperative and unlikely. In a perfect world, its composition would adjust automatically to power shifts, such as India’s emergence as a major strategic player and imminently the world’s most-populous nation—much like football (soccer) clubs rise to and fall from the English Premier League. A Security Council whose permanent membership continues to overweight Europe while ignoring the developing world is courting a legitimacy crisis. In a nod to this reality, Biden, in his September 2022 UNGA address, not only reconfirmed U.S. support for expanding the council to include new permanent and elected members but also for the first time endorsed new permanent seats for Africa and Latin America.27 While his audience was receptive, the odds of realizing such a reform are long. Absent a global catastrophe, it is unclear what can break the long-standing, three-way diplomatic logjam that pits the chief aspirants to permanent membership, their main regional competitors, and a united African bloc with ambitious demands of its own.28