DIPLOMATIC VERSION OF A MUD-WRESTLING FIGHT
Well, you may say, that’s just the General Assembly. The real action at the UN is in the Security Council, the body of five permanent and 10 rotating members that can dispatch troops to make or keep peace in trouble spots. But that forum has become the diplomatic version of a mud-wrestling fight between the Western democracies among the five veto-wielding powers – the United States, United Kingdom and France – and the autocratic axis of Russia and China.
Last week the US proposed a council resolution that condemned Hamas’ terrorism and reaffirmed the right of all states to self-defence. It demanded the release of the hostages and also called for “humanitarian pauses” to protect civilians. Nope, said Russia and China. They were joined by one of the rotating members, the United Arab Emirates.
Then it was Russia’s turn to get rejected. Its resolution called for an immediate ceasefire and condemned all violence against civilians. That’s rich coming from a nation that’s been bombing, abducting, maiming and killing Ukrainian civilians for more than 600 days. The other problem was that Russia’s version failed also to recognise Israel’s right to self-defence and even called for rescinding the evacuation orders to Gazans, though those are meant to protect civilians. So the US and UK said no.
Other countries, especially those in the so-called Global South, are trying to stay out of this geopolitical brawl and throwing up their hands in exasperation. Gabon, a rotating member of the council, voted for both the American and Russian texts, just to get something done. “We regret that antagonism within this council” makes any progress impossible, as Gabon’s representative Lily Stella Ngyema-Ndong phrased it diplomatically.
Some degree of strife in a global forum shouldn’t be surprising. As divided and polarised as we are in our domestic politics, we can hardly expect harmony when showing up at international institutions that ipso facto subsume a “clash of civilisations.”
And yet idealist internationalism rests on the aspiration of rising above our differences. It has a long and venerable tradition, embodied most famously in Woodrow Wilson, the US president who reluctantly entered World War I but then decided to “make the world safe for democracy”. The result, as conceived by him, was the League of Nations, a club of countries that promised, in theory, to provide collective security for one another, settling disputes by arbitration and defending victims of aggression.
From the start, however, the league was hobbled when the US Senate, in a snub to Wilson, failed to ratify the covenant. The US not only stayed out of the league but turned isolationist instead. Without American leadership, the league therefore lacked the “realist” element of power that Wilson’s “idealist” vision required.
That became clear in the 1930s, in a succession of crises the league was meant to prevent or redress but couldn’t. Starting in 1931, the Japanese seized Manchuria. In 1935, Italy’s Duce, Benito Mussolini, took Abyssinia, now called Ethiopia. With the league showing its impotence in each successive crisis, Italy, Japan and Nazi Germany ignored it altogether and set the world on fire.
Source: CNA
