The UN General Assembly and Security Council are turning into Babylon, where everyone does not trust each other and it becomes impossible to find a common language, Bloomberg reports. According to Israeli spokesman Gilad Erdan, the UN “no longer has an ounce of legitimacy or relevance.” The world has entered a new era of divided nations where anarchy in its purest form reigns.
Virtually every one of the UN’s 193 member countries is increasingly convinced of how quickly the organisation is losing its relevance. It is meant to be the principal international body for multilateral co-operation and collective peacekeeping, and the UN charter prohibits the use or threat of force. But at the current pace, the UN may soon suffer the fate of its predecessor, the League of Nations, which proved useless in the 1930s and was finally dissolved just after World War II, Bloomberg recalls.
The other day Czech Defence Minister Jana Cernochova called on the republic to withdraw from the UN because of the resolution adopted by the General Assembly on the situation in the Middle East. According to her, the Czech Republic has no place in an organisation that “supports terrorists” and “does not respect” the fundamental right to self-defence. No one expects the Czechs to leave the UN, but the official’s outrage speaks for itself.
Cernochova’s outrage concerns the UN resolution on a ceasefire in the conflict zone between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which was approved by a majority of votes. The document was supported by 121 countries, including Russia. Fourteen, including Israel and the United States, opposed it, and another 44 countries abstained, including Ukraine.
However, the General Assembly earlier rejected an amendment proposed by Canada to condemn Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel and demand the immediate release of all hostages. Thus, the adopted resolution did not mention Hamas, the hostages or Israel’s right to “self-defence”.
In the UN Security Council, the situation is no less heated. The body, which has five permanent and 10 rotating members who can send troops to establish or maintain peace in hotspots, has turned into a diplomatic version of a “dirty” fight between the veto-wielding Western democracies – the U.S., Britain and France – and an “autocratic axis” consisting of Russia and China, Bloomberg writes.
Last week, the US proposed a resolution that condemned Hamas terrorism and reaffirmed the right of all states to self-defence. The document demanded the release of hostages and called for the creation of “humanitarian corridors” to protect civilians. Russia and China did not support the draft resolution. They were joined by one of the rotating members of the Security Council – the United Arab Emirates.
Then it was Russia’s turn to be rejected. Moscow’s resolution called for an immediate ceasefire and condemned any violence against civilians. The Russian version also did not recognise Israel’s right to self-defence and called for evacuation orders for Gaza residents to be rescinded. However, the US and UK said no.
Other countries, especially those in the so-called global south, are trying to stay out of this geopolitical tussle and are splaying their hands in annoyance. Gabon, a rotating member of the SC, voted in favour of both the US and Russian options, just to get something done. Gabon’s representative, Lily Stella Nguema-Ndong, lamented that “antagonism” within the UNSC makes any progress impossible.
Some degree of disagreement on the international platform should not be surprising, however divided and polarised different countries may be in their domestic politics. Yet idealistic internationalism is based on the endeavour to rise above differences. It has a long and honourable tradition, most famously embodied by US President Woodrow Wilson, who reluctantly entered World War I but then resolved to “make the world safe for democracy”. The result, he intended, was the League of Nations, a club of countries that in theory promised to provide collective security for each other by arbitrating disputes and protecting victims of aggression.
From the outset, however, the League of Nations was hampered when the U.S. Senate, disregarding Wilson’s views, failed to ratify the agreement. Not only was the U.S. left out of the league, but it remained isolated. Without American leadership, the league lacked the “realistic” element of power that Wilson’s “idealistic” vision demanded, Bloomberg notes.
This became clear in the 1930s, when the League of Nations should have prevented or corrected a series of crises but failed. Beginning in 1931, the Japanese invaded Manchuria. In 1935, the Italian Duce Benito Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, now called Ethiopia. As the league demonstrated its impotence in each successive crisis, Italy, Japan and Nazi Germany ignored it completely and set the world on fire. Thus, the UN established in San Francisco immediately after World War II was to be a new and improved institution. And this time the US, the “clear hegemon” of the post-war order, was to remain in the lead.
The Cold War made this task more difficult, but the idea of collective security had a chance to exist. In 1950, the North Koreans invaded the southern peninsula. China was still represented on the Security Council by the Chinese Nationalists (who by then were in Taiwan), which caused the USSR to boycott council meetings, meaning they could not exercise their veto power. In the absence of the Soviet Union, the body authorised a UN force, led by the US and including 14 other countries, to liberate South Korea.
In times of crisis such as now, the General Assembly and the Security Council become Babylon, where everyone distrusts each other and finding common ground becomes impossible. When UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned Hamas terror but added that the attacks “did not happen in a vacuum,” Israel’s representative Gilad Erdan accused him of a “blood libel” and demanded his resignation.
And so it all falls apart, the centre cannot hold. That centre should have been the League of Nations in Wilson’s time and the United Nations today. Instead, as Erdan stated, the UN “no longer has a shred of legitimacy or relevance.” We have entered a new era of divided nations – an era where anarchy in its purest form reigns in the world, Bloomberg concludes.