Ever since 1947, when the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of dividing Palestine into a Jewish and Palestinian state, this organization has been facing crises in the Middle East. In recent decades, discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the UN have been characterized by the same dynamic: the United States uses its veto to block criticism of Israel in the Security Council while Arab states call on developing countries to defend the Palestinians. Debate at the UN in the weeks following Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel largely followed that pattern. The United States blocked the Security Council from calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, but at the end of October it could not prevent the General Assembly from passing a resolution demanding a "humanitarian ceasefire" by a large majority.
However, diplomats at the UN offices in New York and Geneva say this crisis is working differently - and that its effects could spread beyond Israel and the Gaza Strip and spill over into the UN itself. Their warnings are partly a reaction to the brutality of Hamas, the growing number of casualties in Gaza, and the risk of regional escalation. However, widespread pessimism about the future of the UN also reflects a loss of confidence across the organization. Skepticism about the effectiveness of an institution designed to reflect 20th-century power relations and deal with postwar problems is nothing new. Over the past year, the UN has seemed more useless than ever, unable to resolve crises ranging from violent incidents in Sudan and Nagorno-Karabakh to the coup in Nigeria.
Security Council diplomats say tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine - the subject of dozens of unsuccessful talks at the UN since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 - are undermining discussions on other issues in Africa and the Middle East. In September, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned at a session of the General Assembly that a "big crack" was looming in the global governance system.
The war between Israel and Hamas threatens to deal the final blow to the UN's crisis response credibility. Soon, national governments and UN officials will have to face the truth. They have to face the question of how the UN can contribute to peace and stability at a time when the great powers have less and less in common every day.
Since the end of the Cold War, states and civil society organizations have called on the UN to routinely deal with conflicts, whether large or small. However, that institution now appears to be facing its own geopolitical limitations.
The United Nations, in order to come to terms with the present age, will have to scale back its ambitions. When dealing with security issues, the organization should focus on a limited number of priorities and, when possible, leave crisis management to others.
Although opposing countries appear to be renouncing diplomacy, this institution remains a place where rivals can resolve their differences and find opportunities for cooperation. Instead of allowing current conflicts to collapse the institution, national governments and UN officials must work together to preserve its most important functions.
The beginning of the collapse
The crisis of confidence in the UN has been building since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the weeks that followed, diplomats feared that the crisis between the great powers would paralyze the UN. At first, it seemed as if their fears were unfounded. Russia, the United States and their European allies have engaged in heated debates over the war in Ukraine, but grumblingly continued to act in coordination on other issues. The UN Security Council, for example, managed to impose a new penal regime on gangs terrorizing Haiti and to agree on a new UN mandate to work with the Taliban government in Kabul to deliver aid to suffering Afghans. Both Russia and the West appeared ready to use the powerful body as a space for cooperation in the remaining areas.
Meanwhile, the US and its allies have garnered significant support for Ukraine in a series of General Assembly votes condemning Russian aggression. Until the first months of this year, many diplomats hoped that the UN would retain the capacity to act together even as many countries clashed over the war in Ukraine.
At the beginning of spring, that fragile balance began to break. Russia increasingly acts as a nuisance in the UN. In June, Moscow worked with the Malian government - which turned to the private military company Wagner for security assistance - to force UN peacekeepers to withdraw from Malian territory, ending the decade-long mission.
In July, Russia used its veto to renew the Security Council's mandate for UN aid agencies to deliver aid to rebel-held northwestern parts of Syria. Moscow also pulled out of the Black Sea Grain Export Agreement brokered by the UN and Turkey in July 2022, which allowed Ukraine to export agricultural products without Russian interference.
The war in the Middle East has highlighted the increasingly harsh breach of UN diplomacy. During past escalations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the outbreak of violence in Gaza in May 2021, Russia and China have refrained from criticizing the United States' involvement too loudly.
This time, China is again avoiding controversy, limiting its comments to calls for a ceasefire. However, Russia stepped forward to take advantage of the situation. After the US vetoed a resolution calling for humanitarian aid to Gaza in the Security Council in mid-October, Russian ambassador to the UN Vasiliy Nebenzya criticized the "hypocrisy and double standards of our American colleagues" and implied that Washington might be inciting war in order to steal US sales. weapons. Russia's attitude towards the conflict has annoyed the other members of the Security Council, who have been looking for a common platform based on humanitarian issues, even the Arab states that suspect Moscow of using Palestinian suffering for its own ends.
While Russia stirs up passions at the UN, the US's unreserved support for Israel has done more diplomatic damage.
The consequences are clearest in the General Assembly, where a coalition of states that previously supported Ukraine split over Gaza. On October 27, the General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for a "humanitarian truce" between Israel and Hamas, with 120 votes in favor, 14 against and 44 abstentions. The United States voted against the resolution, saying it did not condemn Hamas for crimes. European countries were divided.
The consequences were predictable. Diplomats from developing countries have hinted privately that they may reject future UN resolutions in support of Ukraine in response to the West's lack of solidarity with the Palestinians.
This new division is likely to undermine recent US efforts to improve relations with the Global South at the UN. The Biden administration has called for Security Council reforms to give powers like Brazil and India more influence in the body, and has pledged to work with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to arrange much-needed funds for indebted developing countries. Before the current conflict began, Washington made some progress with such gestures: poor countries may appreciate nice words, but they are still waiting for money. Now the Biden administration's stance toward Israel and Gaza may undo even the little progress that has been made.
Pressure on Guterres
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have not only fueled diplomatic friction between UN members. They also put enormous pressure on the UN leader, Guterres, and on the entire system of conflict management institutions. Without the unified support of the Security Council, Guterres and the UN secretariat, which has day-to-day oversight of UN peacekeeping operations, have struggled to maintain the organization's work in conflict management. In hotspots like Sudan, Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo, governments and warring parties have refused to cooperate with UN mediators or demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers, knowing they would likely face no punishment for doing so. The organization has managed to maintain its humanitarian presence in places like Afghanistan, but it is faced with increasing shortages of funds for its work as many Western donors cut aid budgets and spend significant sums of money on military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
UN officials already recognize their narrowed mandate, with Guterres in July announcing a UN "new agenda for peace" that de-emphasizes the organization's peacekeeping missions and instead calls on UN members to focus on emerging security threats, such as artificial intelligence
Guterres found himself in diplomatic crossfire due to events in the Middle East, after he said in a speech before the Security Council that the Hamas attack "did not happen in a vacuum", Israel called on Guterres to resign and reduced cooperation with UN humanitarian officials. Guterres rejected any suggestion that his words could be interpreted as justifying what he called a "terrorist act," and Israel's reaction ended up giving Guterres a boost of sorts as other countries, including the US, came to his defense. However, the way the comment led to a diplomatic incident highlighted how vulnerable UN humanitarian operations are to political dissent. That vulnerability is tragically clear on the ground: nearly 100 UN staff have been killed in Gaza since the war began.
Depending on the length and scale of the war between Israel and Hamas, the UN presence in the region may increase or decrease. If hostilities end relatively quickly, UN humanitarian agencies will play a significant role in recovery efforts. Under one post-conflict scenario reportedly floated by US and Israeli officials, the UN could be asked to administer Gaza after the Israeli military removes Hamas from the territory.
On the other hand, if the war lasts long enough to spread to the region, it could put the long-standing presence of UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights at risk. When Israel last launched an operation in southern Lebanon in 2006, the Security Council nearly shut down the UN mission there, but reversed the decision after objections from the Lebanese government.
Today, a wider war involving Hezbollah and Iran could not only prompt the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers, but also threaten the organization's humanitarian and diplomatic efforts elsewhere in the Middle East, such as Iraq and Yemen.
Diminishing ambitions
Regardless of how the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine end, trends at the UN point to problems ahead. The diplomatic disunity and operational vulnerabilities plaguing the organization now are likely to persist or worsen amid deepening global divisions. The UN is not about to return to a bad period during the Cold War. During 1959, the Security Council adopted only one resolution. Since early 2023, despite the poor state of relations among permanent members, the SC has adopted more than 30 resolutions to renew mandates for various UN peacekeeping operations and sanctions regimes. However, the UN is also far from its post-Cold War heyday, when the body regularly approved peacekeeping operations, mediation efforts and sanctions packages in response to new conflicts.
There may not be a clear path for the UN to regain its former role as a platform for dealing with international crises, but the organization can still make the most of its reduced role. UN officials already seem to recognize their reduced mandate. In July, Guterres announced the UN's "new agenda for peace," which de-emphasizes the organization's peacekeeping missions and instead calls on UN members to focus on emerging security threats, such as artificial intelligence.
Even in this area, it is unclear how much influence the UN can have: the big players in the field of artificial intelligence, especially the United States and China, may not want the organization to preside over the regulation processes for AI technologies.
However, there appears to be an appetite for the UN to retain its role in promoting global security, even if it requires a more limited operational involvement in conflicts than in the past. Instead of deploying its forces, the UN could support others in crisis management, mainly regional organizations and even individual countries. This model has already been verified. In October, for example, the Security Council allowed Kenya to lead a multinational security assistance mission in Haiti. The US is also working with several African countries on proposals for the UN to fund stabilization missions on the continent that would be led by African countries, in the hope that those forces would be more motivated than UN peacekeepers to fight militias and insurgents.
Although the US, China and Russia are now facing each other in the UN on many topics, the Security Council could still set a new balance or stability. It can serve as a place to defuse conflicts between major powers and to contain a small but significant number of crises in which those powers have an interest in cooperating - a scale of action reminiscent of the UN's function during the Cold War.
The major powers are unlikely to agree on much, but there are cases - including the March 2021 Security Council agreement that the UN aid mission in Afghanistan should remain in the country - where it is in Washington, Beijing and Moscow's interest to cooperate with the UN.
Although the Security Council is in limbo, the broader UN system can still play a significant role in international conflict management. UN humanitarian agencies have unique capacities to mitigate and contain the consequences of violence, and they continue to function despite current budget problems. UN officials are also looking for ways to work on conflict prevention that do not rely on Security Council oversight, such as using World Bank funds to support basic services in fragile states. In a period of geopolitical tension, the UN may not take the lead in solving major crises, but it can do a lot on the sidelines to protect the vulnerable.
The wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, as well as the tensions between China and the USA, both make international cooperation difficult and make it crucial. In recent weeks and months, many UN officials and diplomats have worried that the organization is in free fall. However, if they adapt their diplomatic and security roles to the new global reality, the UN can still find its foothold.
Translation: N. Bogetić
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